Simple globe with a blend-made grid texture (.AI).

From my DeviantART page.

This is a follow-up on my Drawing ribbon spheres in Illustrator tutorial – I assume that you've already read it and know how to create spheres in Adobe Illustrator with the 3D Revolve effect. If you don't please reviewed it now – it's concise and contains only the essential info.

Note: as in my other Illustrator guides all examples below have attached .AI files that you can open with Adobe Illustrator CS2 and above.

Let's start off with the example you see above. As usual, we begin with drawing half of a circle and applying Effects → 3D Revolve to it. In the example I've set background color to #752B82 and foreground – to none. This results in the following plain globe that yet has no net or other texture attached (actually, we can tell that it's not just a circle thanks to the surface shading that 3D Revolve provides).

Now let's create the texture. There are at least 3 ways of doing this:

1. Straightforward – use Line Tool or even Pen Tool to draw a grid; this is most flexible but most tiresome way.
2. Clever – use Object Blending: draw 2 vertical and 2 horizontal lines or draw a rectangle (using Rectangle Tool) and pick those lines from it; then select Blend Tool (under the Eyedropper on the Tools panel) and click accurately on all 4 lines in turn. What you'll see depends on the previous blend options used – normally you'd select an object that's part of a blend and double-click the Blend Tool icon to open up Blend Options (if Preview checkbox is inactive it means the object isn't a part of any blend group), select Specified Distance and enter something like 8 px.
3. Quick – use Rectangular Grid Tool (hid under the Line Tool button) to create a 6×6 matrix (can't be customized except for foreground and background colors), multiplying it if you need.

Regardless of the method used you'll get a grid (net) that we will then create a symbol from. An example of what I have got (using the Blend Tool) is shown on the left.

Now all you need to do is to go to 3D Revolve's settings → Map Art and select your new symbol.

A net ornament

Ornament texture (.AI).

Using the same approach you can create as complex forms as you like. On the right you can see a texture and a sphere it results in when mapped onto. There's only one tricky part there that might need explanation: that «fence-like» line you can see under the thick red line on top of the texture.

It's created by combining Object Blending and a clipping mask. Here's how:

As you can see, there are 2 triangles that blend from white to orange from left to right. When clipping mask (a rectangle covering the thick blue line under triangle's heads) is enabled their ends are hidden so the line appears jagged.

I think that's it, thanks for reading! Also, make sure to check my other Illustrator guides and drop a few words below :)