This is my attempt at making the Lilly pads as shown in the tutorial.
I started with gradient mesh and had to put different shades of blue to make it give the illusion of distance.
then I made the lily pads and it was pretty easy. Now for the part that gave me the most difficulty was making the flowers on the lily pads, I just could not get the pen tool to work.in the end of course i got the pen tool to work but was still really hard. After that i made the ripples in the water and then made the ovels with the eclips tool and put it to 20 percent