The Practice of Recreation
After taking several computer-based design classes, I’ve come to expect at least one assignment per course to be some sort of variation of recreating an image as accurately as possible using the tools and techniques taught in class. We did this twice in Illustrator and I’m amazed at how much progress is visible between my first recreation project and my last one. The first attempt was much harder and looks much worse, BUT it was part of the learning process. I struggled to get Illustrator to recognize specific objects as selections. I struggled to get colors to work. It was a pain and I hated how it looked! HOWEVER, that assignment made me much more grateful for everything I learned later.
Early in the course, we were to recreate an image from a list of themes (being a bookseller, I chose the literary theme.) Here it is in all its glory:
original image (L), my frustrating attempt at recreating it (R)
The end of our course culminated in a three-part final project, part of which was to recreate a wine label as accurately as possible. I have to say, everyone in my class improved so much. It was awesome. We had to get each of our three illustrations printed and mounted to present on the final day of class and some of the work was simply breathtaking. I went to (risd)prints by concept link in Providence because they work with the RISD community. I had my wine label printed on a huge piece of archival paper that would normally cost about $75, but as a student, cost closer to $25. I recommend them, although they can get really backed up at the end of a school semester; I was lucky and was able to get all of my stuff done within about two hours.
original wine label (L), my recreation of the label (R)
The vast majority of the time spent on the wine label project was spent using the pen tool to create all of the shapes. The text for “Orangedale Sunflower Brand” was also created using the pen tool, but I typed in the smaller pieces of text with fonts from my computer that matched closest to the original poster fonts.
To create the shapes, I placed the original image on its own layer and lowered the opacity to somewhere around 50%. Then, I put on some good music and settled in with the pen tool.
original image with lowered opacity and the beginnings of the shape tracing
near the end of the tracing period w/ the original image turned off
larger image of my recreated wine label
The trickiest part to recreate was the center of the flower. It’d be nearly impossible to trace because it is simply too detailed and busy. My teacher asked me how I planned on doing the center of the flower, and I said I was thinking of using the symbol tool to spray a bunch of custom symbols inside of a circle shape. She told me one of my classmates was having a huge issue with his file size after using the spray tool for a similar issue (in his case, he was trying to recreate plants in a field).
I told her I’d try using a pattern instead. She suggested creating a few circle shapes on different layers with transparent backgrounds. That would create a more random detailed effect. I think it was a time-saving tip that worked pretty well. Now I have nice print that I’m going to frame and put somewhere in our new apartment.
