'Illustrator'

The antennae lights were created using the Blend tool and setting the transparency to “Screen” with a white outer glow (Fig.44). The Glow effect is located in Effects > Stylised > Outer glow.

To create the retractable cable arm, I made a segment and then dragged and dropped it onto the Brushes window. I set the New Brush option to “New Pattern Brush” and set the Colouration to “None” (Fig.45). I tried to apply the “Cable” brush to the curve (Fig.46). Since I created the cable brush, it was ready for the retractable saucer cable arm (Fig.47). I applied the cable brush to the outline. For the saucer’s “arm hole”, I used a normal gradient fill (Fig.48).

Preparing the cow, I removed the outline and prepared the colour palette (Fig.49). Again, the gradient mesh used my preset colour palette. The gradient mesh was effective because I knew exactly where to place the highlights and shadows in my cow illustration (Fig.50).

The light beam was created using the Blend tool (Fig.51). After I created the additional outer beam shape, I pressed “W” to call the Blend tool. I then selected 30 for the Specified Steps.  Finally, I added an outer glow in white. I wanted the cow to have a blue silhouette, so I used the blue gradient colour fill, as shown (Fig.52).