i heart art: spring break #2

In my last art post, I posted an image showing my progress on a trace. After another hour or two, I finally finished it!

START:

FINISH:

The longest part was the fluff of hair on the glasses, as in the original graphic they were strands of hair. I instead opted to just make it a solid piece, which worked out pretty well. The hair overall is a bit different, but I don’t think it turned out awful. The gradient was another tricky part. Originally was just going to make it a solid fill, but decided to take a chance on getting the gradient and make it a bit closer to the original.

Doing a vector trace on an image takes fucking a while. There I said it. I just finished working on another one, which was easily harder than the last one for a few reasons:

• A lot more stuff to trace (all them armor pieces = UGH)
• Color matching was also annoying, just made some changes instead
• The pattern on the mask (NOPE.png)

I did the pattern on the mask by copying a animal texture within Illustrator, then editing the hell out of it to suit my needs. It took a minute because the first time I tried to edit I attempted too much at once and Illustrator flat out crashed on me. Thankfully, I saved right before I tried it, so it wasn’t a loss, just meant I would have to take it REALLY slow in comparison to how fast I wanted to go. You can see the color differences below. Also decided to omit the shadow on his right shoulder-plate and just use his skin color instead.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

It is really good practice in Illustrator doing this, not just with the Pen tool, but problem solving with colors and overlaying graphics. I ran into issues with my layer order quite a bit once I got to the lower end, but some tricks I picked up by watching them Lynda tutorials helped out. Also two for two with Lynda videos, next up is Dreamweaver possibly, or AfterEffects, haven’t decided quite yet.

i heart art: spring break #1

I’m a few days into my Spring Break, and I’m feeling sort of accomplished currently. Current list of done deeds:

• Finished a Lynda course on InDesign
• Started and got half-way in a Lynda course on Illustrator
• Fixed up my Flickr, Tumblr, and portfolio website (shameless link here).
• Finished a bulk of pictures I scanned into two parts and had to put back together for my brother’s new arcade stick design.
• Submitted some works for an art competition
• Studied more of Aaron Siskind’s works and essays
• Mapped out possible darkroom setups

For two days in, that ain’t too shabby, actually a bit further on the Lynda stuff than expected. The reason for that is because I have a bit less film left than expected (4 rolls!) so I decided to not go out to shoot today and do more Lynda instead. With two rolls every day, Tuesday and Wednesday should be covered, and I get my film Thursday. Today’s weather was awful to say the least, so shooting would have been un-fun. Tomorrow will be much better.

Now I work on some minimalist wallpapers, since by tinkering around with it, I know how to use the damn Pen tool properly in Illustrator so I don’t make 20 million anchor points with a single shape. Looks so much smoother than previous works I did. I did forget how time consuming it can be though.

Also I am digging my “new” desk, its lovely to work at, mixed in with this studio light that has been just sitting in plain sight for years, I finally have a little area that I can work on stuff comfortably. I say “new” because we have owned this thing for easily 20 years, and my brother took it once we moved about six years ago. I looked into buying a new desk when he decided to just to give me the desk he had instead, if I cleaned it off for him. Was worth it.

Break time over! Back to working on this image until I feel sleepy. The only wrong thing I’ve done so far this break is ruin my sleep schedule even further. Gahhhhhh.