Kind of ironic that a lot of the people that do Illustration Friday are illustrators for children’s books.
Project
Do a two-page spread of a children’s book. 6″ height x 16″ width, use guides. The text will be a story of the student’s own or a nursery rhyme. The art will be any and all of the following: scratchboard effect, scribble effect, compound, text wrap, brushes, perspective (free transform tool).
(click for larger image)
(click for a larger image)
Project
Come up with an illustration for “Alone” for Illustration Friday. I wanted to use the tablet more and try a different program like Paint or Photoshop.
Mechanics
I used Photoshop 7 with my tablet. I tried the free Paint that came with it but I just didn’t get it. So, maybe next project.
As usual, I had ideas but they were tossed aside. Most of them were so depressing like an older woman at a grave (alone for the first time in 40 years), two people in bed not talking (“being” alone), and an animal in a cage at the SPCA (“left” alone). But being alone can be good. I love my alone moments, but I decided finally on how alone a person can be in a group of people.
My second week at doing Illustration Friday! This is quite fun.
click for larger image
Project
Come up with an illustration for “Travel” for Illustration Friday .
Mechanics
Illustrator 9.0 with an amazingly wonderful recent gift — brand spanking new Wacom Intuos3 9×12 tablet! Raar! Anyway… wanted to use Illustrator CS’s scribble effect but did this over the weekend so no access to CS at school. (Makes me want to update…)
Project
Come up with an illustration for “Crowded” for Illustration Friday. I have been looking at the site for a while and kept putting off doing anything because everything there is so amazing. But. One gets better with practice, right?
Mechanics
Illustrator CS. I reused the fish from another project. I drew in the people with a pencil and filled in with black. Why pencil and not pen? Maybe because my last Illustration project was with pencil. I made the fish really big because goldfish grow to the size of their container, but this one grew bigger. I put a crowd of people in front for… well, another crowd!
And then…
I want to turn the fish so he’s looking at the crowd. Like “Hi, I’m watching you too…” but maybe next time. Heh.
Project
Use the pen tool to trace an image and then redo the illustration four times with different color schemes. Examples of color schemes: warm, cool, monocromatic, analogous, complementary.
Mechanics
Holy cow! The pen tool is an… interesting thing to use. But it can be powerful. She stressed that when you click down to drag even if a little bit because the handlebars are easier to use when they’re there and hard to put in later. After spending what seemed an age and a half on the cat, I was at a loss for a background. She suggested a branch. Then I drew a fish and she said an aquarium. So there we have it.
I grouped the different ‘pieces’ and ungrouped to do color changes. I, of course, named the different layers and groups to help with organization. In the end, I had 4 folders in this Illustrator file for the different color schemes.
And then..
I was disappointed in the printing process. The cat is black and yet I couldn’t get the pieces to have enough contrast to print well and still be black. It looked fine on my monitor and then would print out all one big black piece. I missed the critique on this one since I was with flu but I did get to see a few of the other students’ pieces and was quite impressed! I wish I could post them.
Neat thing about vector is that I can make this as big as I want…
