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.
Michael's Great College Adventure 