For this first assignment, and the first time really using Illustrator in years- I stuck to basics mostly because it was all I really knew and was comfortable with. Normally I'd be more adventurous but I felt like I was building a delicate house of cards and one reckless act would leave me having to start all over. So essentially I stuck to the Pen Tool, Eyedropper, Paint Bucket, Shapes tool and the Pencil. I used the pencil most out of all of these tools because it was the only one I was really getting any results with.
My original image was so heavily detailed and complicated (not to mention done in a painterly fashion, so it was definitely not clean or tidy) that trying to go about recreating it with clean, smooth details and a capricious Pen tool was nearly impossible. There was the added issue that I probably should have started with the largest shapes first and worked my way down, but I obliviously started from the other direction, so I had trouble making things fit together as well as I had hoped.
All in all I can't lie, I found it very frustrating- but I suppose it's still 10 times better than how I did with Illustrator in my previous digital media class I took before I transferred out here, and I suppose that's actually a very positive thing.
(it should also be worth noting the original image I used- or rather a small chunk of it, did not meet the 1000X1000 pixel size, I realized that much too late and I apologize)
I really enjoy how you elaborated your light from your original piece to your illustrator piece. Your use of lighting as a whole was done very well and I think that you did a great job transferring your lighting to the second piece.
ReplyDeleteI think you did a really good job here. The change in style still really works for this piece, and you still got the source of light down really well. I think you could even have elaborated on that light source a bit more by using some lighter opacities when layering those bright spots.
ReplyDeletei think the change in style was a good idea for this piece. i think if you had went with the way of the original things my have gotten pretty hard to read. though i think that maybe you do a little bit more with light source, and with the opacity to to get those phantom limbs in there!
ReplyDeleteIt looks solid dude. The Illustrator version of the piece does seem to lack the fluidity and energy though, which I think could have responded with strength of construction that naturally comes with program. It does have an excellent sense of lighting to it though!
ReplyDeleteI like your reimagining of the light from the original piece and I think you did a pretty good job at simplifying your piece down to a few shapes. If you ever attempted to use this picture again for a similar assignment, I would like to see your attempt at varied opacity with the rays of light.
ReplyDeleteI love the detail in the original but I can understand avoiding that in the first assignment, but I think it would have been good to still add a few things under this creatures tusks.
ReplyDeleteInteresting original piece. I'm surprised you decided to take on such a large portion of your drawing: it truly seems daunting to attempt to take such a large scaled, detailed chunk of painting into Illustrator! The comic style in the re-done piece makes the monster guy look kind of cute.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, I think the result might have been a bit more successful if you had limited yourself in our first project. The change of style does not affect either one from succeeding in their own way, but there are a lot of shades and gradients in color that are very simplified in the Illustrator version, and I almost wish we could see all of that detail you put so much time into the original.
Try layering many shapes of color on top of each other and test out some experimenting with opacities to achieve that lovely painted quality.
Even though the change in the quality from painterly to graphic is stark, I really think it works for this piece. The lighting and the way the eye is cast in each piece feels indicative of two completely different moods. The redraw is particularly successful in it's use of color I think, especially since you're seeing colors you don't necessarily notice in the original piece, but it still feels like it's the same scene.
ReplyDeleteHey thanks for talking about your process! I agree that it's really interesting to see the difference between techniques - it's totally a hard piece to take on for this project because it's definitely a very soft image because of the way you've used the original media! I think that if you were to try to enhance the AI version, you could use opacity to help soften the color transitions. I think it's a realy great base and I think you'd probably enjoy using that transparency / opacity because it might mimic the kind of way you would apply color in photoshop (at least how the color blends together). The other thing that I think you could do is look at putting a couple more translucent rays of light to break up the sunburst look of the piece - the original one has this really nice soft light that you could do using a translucent layer… and even (though we haven't done this yet in class) Effect>Blur>gaussian blur --- that would soften the edge and make it look a lot more smooth!
ReplyDeleteEven though you met the piece with some difficulty, the simplified graphic version is pretty stellar in its own right. You lost the painterly quality of your original, but the differences give the new piece it's own agency. There are some blips in rendering, but you did a solid job to me.
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