Let there be colour!

I coloured this in using a lot of gradients, live selection, and live painting. One of the main issues I had was that I didn't know how to use the gradient tool, and it took alot of getting used to. Once I had mastered the gradient tool, I found another awesome tool, the Live Selection tool. This allowed me to just click in the center of a closed path and it would be selected, ready for a gradient. This made putting the gradients in very fast. Another problem I ran into was the scales on the fish. As the paths were closed, the live selection would only select outside of them, and not inside. This meant that each little scale had its own start and end point of the gradient. To counter this, I selected a solid colour, and filled each scale manually. This was a little time consuming, as I had to get the colour as close to the outside as possible. Doing this had an advantage though, as the final result of blocked colours over the gradient brings a sense of texture and sort of makes the image "pop" I believe, which makes the image better. 

After playing with adding texture, I decided not to. For one, My skills in Illustrator aren't fantastic, and by trying to add texture I nearly destroyed the image, several times (I was using non destructive editing, so it would have been okay anyway). When I eventually did get a feeling of texture, It just didn't look right. Using the colours and gradient styles I did, a texture didn't blend well, and as I said before, I would have to texture the Facebook "F" aswell as all the text also. As of this, I have decided to leave my image untextured. This gives it a very modern feel, whilst still representing propaganda posters of the past.