Inspiring Vector drawings.

Here are four examples of some Illustrator Vector Art that I have found.

I really like these four pieces of work because they hold a lot of detail yet have this beautifully simplistic character to them. Its like each artist has made (what I know from working on my Marilyn Monroe piece) a very time consuming session very worth while by creating a final design which looks effortless, which I think is amazing and very inspirational.

Adobe Illustrator tutorial.

In our second tutorial, or introduction session, we were looking at the Adobe Illustrator software. My personal aim for this week was to try and understand some of the basic tricks of using Illustrator and I had never used it before.

As I was new to Illustrator it took me quite a while to get used to the Pen tool without getting too frustrated by it.

To create my illustration of Marilyn Monroe using the Pen tool, I started by drawing an outline of her face, using a photograph, to create a Vector.

Every time I created a Vector of a different feature, i.e. her face, hair, neck, eyes, lashes, nose, mouth etc... I made sure they were all separate layers.

Once I got all my initial layers there, with all the important detail in place, I wanted to make my Monroe look more realistic, if you like. I think by adding the shadows under her chin and in her hair helped me achieve the more realistic look I was going for and defines the character a lot.

This session was mainly based on creating an understanding on how to create Vectors using the Pen tool. I think that my Monroe face was very successful as it was the first experience I have had using Adobe Illustrator.

Narrative Workshop.

Earlier I mentioned that every Thursday we attend a different tutorial/introduction session on the Adobe software. Technically this isn't entirely true; as our studio sessions alternate each week, every three weeks we spend our afternoons in the studio creating work away from the computers.

As a group we were told that we needed to bring two newspapers to this weeks workshop. The aim of our time in this session was to find some random articles in the newspapers that we thought we could write a short creative piece of writing based on them.

Above is an image of the four newspaper articles which I found Interesting/odd.

I'm hoping that after reading through these again, I will be able to write a  rather odd short story based on maybe only a couple of them.

Adobe Photoshop tutorial.

Every Thursday afternoon we are going to be doing tutorials and introductions into different adobe software.

In our first tutorial/introduction session we were using Photoshop. I had some previous knowledge about this software as I had used it a lot before I stared University.

I started off with three different images and the aim of this tutorial was to blend them all together to create one smooth, clean image of a lightbulb with a tree growing inside of it.

Firstly, I cleaned up the original image of the lightbulb, getting rid of all the mechanism from inside the bulb using different tools from the pallet, I also managed to clear any reflections on the glass from the original image.

Secondly, I overlapped the copper bottom of the bulb (which was the second image we had to work with) on top of my edited lightbulb. I wanted to make sure that I got rid of any of the lightbulb which may have been showing underneath or round the edges to make it match and look as realistic as possible.

The next thing was placing the trunk of the tree inside the bulb. I found this quite challenging as I had to select just the tree trunk out of our final image we had to work with first and delete the background making sure that I didn't erase any of the trunk itself. Then I blended the bottom of the trunk into the shadowed are of the copper bottom of the bulb, also to create a realistic look. 

After I felt comfortable about the way this looked, I then continued to place to "tree" part of the tree back on top of the trunk, possibly changing the size of it to make it fit inside the bulb. I had a mess around with the hue and saturation of the original colour of the tree to make it that bit more abstract and out of the ordinary (as if it wasn't already!) 

Finally, the last thing I did, to give my image its finishing touch, was the reflections. I copied and pasted the top of my tree and reflected these images, then warped them around the shape of the bulb, also changing their opacity, I think that this effect gave my final image a little more of a realistic edge with the image bouncing off the glass.

Although I thought I was in the know, if you like, when it came to Photoshop (I'm not saying I thought I knew EVERYTHING), I really enjoyed this tutorial and found it really helpful as I found myself re-capping on things about the software that I had forgotten how to do, or learning completely new things.

                                    

I feel that this tutorial was very useful and looking at my final outcome, I am very impressed with that I have done and I think I will definitely be using some of these techniques again. 

                                             

I have put these two videos on my blog because they are "The making of" videos for two quite famous pieces of work that I find really interesting. Hopefully I will be able to work to the same standard of the final outcomes of these pieces one day. I would also love to explore some of the techniques that are used in these videos in my own work. This is why I find the videos really inspirational.

Inspirational Working Progress

Inspirational Working Progress