Journals - Advanced
Studio Art II Something or Other
For: Professor Bruce Allen
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Adv. Studio II – Entry 01
The week, sadly to say, got off to a fairly slow start. I could not figure out, and to a certain extent still cannot figure out, what I would be doing for the semester. So far I would say that I cannot accurately state what it is I am going to be doing for the class, but as of so far, I am going to stick with working on the same type of things that I did last semester, that is to say basic vector design. Basic may not be the exact word I should use, because I would at least like the work to be more complicated than it was last semester.
As for improvements I have made since then, I would say my pathfinding skills and ability to illustrate have improved. Both of these skills are coming in handy quite often. The ability to pathfind is not always a necessary one, but it does do a couple of things that are at least nice. The first one would be the organization and tidiness of a document. Having all the different paths made into shapes keeps things much simpler to work with and it saves me from having to use groups that would just end up hurting me in the end. Not only that, but the other thing it does is if you are going to send something to print, especially if it is going to be made into vinyl, than it helps that person out quite a bit as well. The only reason I know this is because I know someone who does this for a living and they hate it when they get vectors that have to be cut into individual pieces (like vinyl has to be).
With these things being said, I tried to push myself a little harder for this first week exercise. I stuck with a similar style that I have been using since the first semester and made it a little bit more interesting by free-handing it instead of tracing it. The piece was originally a sketch in my notebook and I redrew it in Illustrator by looking at it, instead of the usual scanning it in and then tracing it. This is a bit harder for me since this is something I rarely do, and mostly I just wanted to see if I could do it and still have it look like the original. Not only did I draw it into Illustrator by hand, but to do it I did it all with the pathfinder. I would draw in the blocky shapes and then go back in and cut out the pieces so that the final project would be a solid piece of line-art.
This is a skill I would certainly like to get better at, and I am glad I did this exercise to test that. I have known people that would start simply with an Illustrator document and then begin to draw. I am not quite at that point, but I would like to try it a little later on in the semester. I think this was a good place to start. I began with a personally hand-drawn sketch and then I took it just by looking at it and recreated it into a vector. As of right now, the illustration route is where I am going to stay for a while; I am going to take drawn pieces of work and then bring them into a vector design.
As for this piece, I feel that it is successful. I drew the robot during class one day, I don’t know what class, but it has a personal feel to it. I like the design of it and I like the way it turned out in Illustrator. It took me quite a while to get it finished but, here it is, in it’s glory, so enjoy it please.