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.
The Tilde Technique in Illustrator
This was one of my first "exercises" in Illustrator class. I can't even recall the specific instructions. I think we were supposed to use basic shape/line tools, some color, a little text, and stick to only a few specific themes (I remember choosing the "spring" theme). My teacher showed us this fun little technique using the tilde key (it's that sideways looking "S" to the left of your 1 key). If you hold the tilde key down with a shape tool selected, Illustrator will rapidly repeat the shape as you move your mouse. It can create some complex looking designs in a matter of seconds. I'm probably going to be saying this over and over again, but I love Illustrator. It's amazing. So in the spirit of this entire blog, I am posting some of my "training-wheel" pieces.
It's amazing to look back at the exercises and assignments I did at the beginning of the course and remember how I struggled to get things to look the way I wanted them too, simply because I wasn't familiar enough with Illustrator to know how to do them better/easier.
On this one, I was testing out the tilde technique, the gradient window, the pathfinder window, and text on a path.
Chicago Olympic 2016 poster
This is the poster that I chose to base my event poster off of:
Original World's Fair Chicago Poster (1933)
I love the colors, the type, and the general sense of organized chaos. Here is the event poster I created for class:
Chicago Olympics 2016 poster
Certainly there are things I want to change and work on, but I'm very happy with it overall given the amount of time I had to work on it. I'm proud of myself for trying some techniques that I'm new to and learned some new things along the way. I deem this a success.
The main pieces I want to work on are all of the pieces of text. The tracking and spacing of the paragraphs at the bottom are truly awful, but I just didn't have enough time to fix that. I also need to get rid of that dead space above the Olympic logo. The list of venues on the right isn't tight and seems to draw too much focus to itself, so I'd work on that as well.
I like the buildings and the colors used on them. I like the backgrounds of the left and right columns. I kept on creating a pattern swatch using the splatter brush, but it kept looking terrible when I applied the pattern to the background. Finally, I just used the symbol sprayer and it created the random look I was aiming for. I like that the background looks like stars and that it contains faint hints of the building color scheme.
I struggled with Live Paint on some spots, but managed to work around those problems well enough.
Now let's hope Chicago can add another star to the Chicago flag in 2016.
Illustrator class poster idea
I'm about half-way into my Illustrator class at RISD and I'm so glad I'm taking it. It's not terribly difficult to teach yourself Photoshop or Illustrator, but they are both massive programs with a lot of sophisticated features and it's hard to know where to begin. This class has really helped speed up my learning curve. One of my blessings and curses is that I'm comfortable with Photoshop and the two programs are similar in significant ways and yet very different in others. When things are different, it makes it more confusing and frustrating when something doesn't work the way I expect it to (i.e.- I'm addicted to creating layers in Photoshop and have really had to change that instinct for Illustrator because it is simply designed to be used differently. I'm getting there!)
Most of our projects have been short exercises in using specific tools and techniques. They are starting to become a little bit more complex now, which is a lot more fun because we're actually designing fun pieces like posters. Our last assignment was to create an 11x17 vertical event poster meeting these requirements:
- a customized headline or title treatment
- sub-headlines
- three-threaded paragraphs of type
- drawn, traced, placed and/or blend-mode images
- patterns (if applicable)
My first plan was to make up a fake band and a fake concert event. I spent a week creating one and liked what I made well enough to bring the work-in-progress to class for a critique, but I also thought it was a boring concept and I couldn't stop thinking of other event ideas, which is a good sign that my heart isn't into it and I'm not going to create something I actually like.
My hometown of Chicago has come up a lot lately and at one point it occurred to me that I should do a Chicago event poster...maybe a blues or jazz fest? It eventually occurred to me that Chicago is a candidate for the 2016 Olympics, and I had that "Yes! That's it!" moment. I scrapped my fake band for my former city. It felt somewhat ambitious for my skill level, but screw it, I didn't sign up for classes to avoid challenges. I'm supposed to be making mistakes and learning.