Vectors Imitate Life with Gradient Mesh

When an artist is given a choice about creating a photo-realistic image on the computer, their first instinct would be to turn to any of the raster-based image editors, such as Photoshop. However, what if they were told that they needed to create this photo-realistic image in a vector-based image editor? Amazingly enough, with the advent of the "gradient mesh" feature, the creation of a photo-realistic image is completely doable in Adobe Illustrator.