Bubbles, #$%*ing Bubbles!

So BMar decided to torture us with this tutorial on creating bubbles in Illustrator. I was really hating it at first, because it is so involved--many, MANY shapes, fills, blends and opacity adjustments. (I guess that's the point, though, isn't it?) I was stymied at first, because the tutorial specified using a black to white gradient on some of the reflective shapes, which when changed to Screen blend mode simply turned white (no gradient!) Through experimentation, I finally figured out that using the black to FADE gradient yielded the white to transparent effect shown. Once the main bubble was finally complete, it was actually kind of fun to create the rest of the illustration simply by copying, pasting, and scaling; then creating and adding the star glares, a couple of psuedo-iridescent color areas on the main bubble and the background color effects using the Gradient Mesh tool. (Also used on some areas of the bubble). I'm really happy with how it turned out, although it is pretty much an exact copy of the tutorial, so not too creative on my part!