GMD 371 Advanced Illustration
This is my DeVry University GMD 371 course work page. On this page I will be uploading weekly lab work for inspection and review, as well as keeping an archive of past assignments.
Week 7 iLab
This week’s iLab tasked us with redesigning an existing logo through the use of Adobe Illustrator’s 3D functionality. I approached this iLab with a little bit of caution. I have had experience redesigning logos in the past and more often than not what happens is a student tries to improve upon an existing logo and just ends up making it worse, which is really to be expected, many of these logos are well designed and have lasted for a long time because they were designed by professionals.
With this in mind my best hope was to not “redesign” a logo as much as to reinterpret the logo knowing what I know about the company. I decided to reinterpret DevianArt.com’s logo for this iLab assignment. I am a big fan of DeviantArt, and I really like their low-key logo design, its quite iconic and has been pretty much the same for the past half a decade or so. What I felt was needed for my reinterpretation was to make the logo a bit more flashy (since I had to incorporate 3D regardless) while retaining a lot of what makes the logo iconic. I felt that what needed to stay was the traditional DA symbol, basically a very stylish looking “D” and “A” linked together. This symbol is as old as the website itself and needed to be in my logo. I also felt that the thin border around the logo was a key element. It helped to frame the logo and did a lot to carry the secondary color through from the main symbol.
With my key elements settled I set about creating my logo. I kept the same form factor for the logo because the rounded square was just perfect. I vector-traced the DA symbol so that I could manipulate it using 3D, and started playing around with color combinations. It isn’t uncommon for DeviantArt to play with their color scheme during holidays so I decided to go with a Halloween theme orange and black combination. This actually turned out to be a smart pick because these colors have similar tonal values to the original colors. With my color scheme down I set about setting up my 3D object. I initially had the symbol with an aggressive angle on it, and a lot of depth, but it ended up obscuring a lot of the space in the middle and made the symbol difficult to recognize. Instead I made the angles shallower, and cut the extrusion down from 50 points to 10. I also tweaked the rotation variable to give me a clockwise tilt. To add more “flash” to the piece I added a modest gradient to the center square, and created a reflection-esque effect off of the main symbol to make it look more modern and advanced. My final tweaks involved resizing the symbol and its reflection to make them smaller, and to tweak the size of the border, making it thinner, which seems more modern.
With this in mind my best hope was to not “redesign” a logo as much as to reinterpret the logo knowing what I know about the company. I decided to reinterpret DevianArt.com’s logo for this iLab assignment. I am a big fan of DeviantArt, and I really like their low-key logo design, its quite iconic and has been pretty much the same for the past half a decade or so. What I felt was needed for my reinterpretation was to make the logo a bit more flashy (since I had to incorporate 3D regardless) while retaining a lot of what makes the logo iconic. I felt that what needed to stay was the traditional DA symbol, basically a very stylish looking “D” and “A” linked together. This symbol is as old as the website itself and needed to be in my logo. I also felt that the thin border around the logo was a key element. It helped to frame the logo and did a lot to carry the secondary color through from the main symbol.
With my key elements settled I set about creating my logo. I kept the same form factor for the logo because the rounded square was just perfect. I vector-traced the DA symbol so that I could manipulate it using 3D, and started playing around with color combinations. It isn’t uncommon for DeviantArt to play with their color scheme during holidays so I decided to go with a Halloween theme orange and black combination. This actually turned out to be a smart pick because these colors have similar tonal values to the original colors. With my color scheme down I set about setting up my 3D object. I initially had the symbol with an aggressive angle on it, and a lot of depth, but it ended up obscuring a lot of the space in the middle and made the symbol difficult to recognize. Instead I made the angles shallower, and cut the extrusion down from 50 points to 10. I also tweaked the rotation variable to give me a clockwise tilt. To add more “flash” to the piece I added a modest gradient to the center square, and created a reflection-esque effect off of the main symbol to make it look more modern and advanced. My final tweaks involved resizing the symbol and its reflection to make them smaller, and to tweak the size of the border, making it thinner, which seems more modern.
Week 6 iLab
This week’s assignment tasked us with creating a diagram that showed a process utilizing symbols and brushes in Adobe Illustrator. For this assignment I decided to do a diagram of something that I am quite familiar with, the inner workings of personal watercraft, in this case a Sea-Doo wave runner.
I started my diagram by creating a vector representation of a wave runner by vector-tracing an existing image to get the shape and major components down. I then created another vector piece that represented the hidden interior of the craft, containing the engine, the prop shaft, the intake, and impeller. Once I had all of the components laid out I did a color pass on everything in order to give it a good amount of contrast and make each piece stand out. I overlaid the interior shot over the exterior image of the wave runner, tweaking the opacity on some objects to give the user the impression that what he or she was looking at resides inside the main image.
For my symbols I created three, but only ended up using two. I created a background symbol, a very basic trio of waves that combined together to form a neat wave pattern. I also created a trio of blue arrows to show the process that the water takes through the wave runner’s propulsion system, and finally a set of bubbles that were supposed to be coming out of the rear of the craft. I applied the background wave symbol through a series of long horizontal strokes that created a neat background pattern. I ended up tweaking the background opacity to keep the background from being too commanding. I attempted to use my bubble symbol at the rear of the wave runner to show the water output, however it never looked like I wanted it too, and I found that re-using my water arrows provided for a more compelling image.
I started my diagram by creating a vector representation of a wave runner by vector-tracing an existing image to get the shape and major components down. I then created another vector piece that represented the hidden interior of the craft, containing the engine, the prop shaft, the intake, and impeller. Once I had all of the components laid out I did a color pass on everything in order to give it a good amount of contrast and make each piece stand out. I overlaid the interior shot over the exterior image of the wave runner, tweaking the opacity on some objects to give the user the impression that what he or she was looking at resides inside the main image.
For my symbols I created three, but only ended up using two. I created a background symbol, a very basic trio of waves that combined together to form a neat wave pattern. I also created a trio of blue arrows to show the process that the water takes through the wave runner’s propulsion system, and finally a set of bubbles that were supposed to be coming out of the rear of the craft. I applied the background wave symbol through a series of long horizontal strokes that created a neat background pattern. I ended up tweaking the background opacity to keep the background from being too commanding. I attempted to use my bubble symbol at the rear of the wave runner to show the water output, however it never looked like I wanted it too, and I found that re-using my water arrows provided for a more compelling image.
Week 5 iLab
This week’s assignment tasked us with taking a bitmap image and performing a live trace on it to give it more of an abstract look and then add additional elements to the image to create a theme. This was quite an assignment, I don’t think I have ever done something like this before, I have created live traces, but those were for the purpose of creating some quick outlines on simple shapes. I started my assignment this week by selecting an image, in this case I found a picture of a life-sized statue of my favorite character from Activision Blizzard’s StarCraft series, Sarah Kerrigan. The picture was oozing (pun) with detail and I felt that it would make for a compelling live trace.
I immediately ran into problems in that the picture is pretty dark, and a lot of the detail that I loved so much was difficult for the live trace to detect. In order to get the detail that I wanted into the piece I had to manually tweak not only the mode options, but also the threshold and pixel radius to get ever last bit of detail I could into the picture. Once I had a live trace result that looked pretty decent I started tweaking the color. The original image contains a lot of purples, some brows, and some muted greens. I instead opted for a dark red / brown color configuration that would focus the viewer attention on the intricate detail in the picture, and not distract them with bombastic color. One thing I did want to preserve was the shading, so I made sure to keep my highlights and shadows intact.
After I had the color work done I went about solidifying my theme. The piece already had a serious case of the creepy-crawlies with the carapace and H.R. Giger-esque appeal. I went about adding some overlay objects and then twirling them to create an additional sense of twisting and writhing to the piece. I added patterns to these to add to the sense of length, and then finally created some simple loops that matched the background. These loops again added to the creepy crawly theme and helped to bring the background forward a bit by chopping up the main composition. Lastly I added a dark red stroke around the piece to tie in the red some more and called it a day.
I immediately ran into problems in that the picture is pretty dark, and a lot of the detail that I loved so much was difficult for the live trace to detect. In order to get the detail that I wanted into the piece I had to manually tweak not only the mode options, but also the threshold and pixel radius to get ever last bit of detail I could into the picture. Once I had a live trace result that looked pretty decent I started tweaking the color. The original image contains a lot of purples, some brows, and some muted greens. I instead opted for a dark red / brown color configuration that would focus the viewer attention on the intricate detail in the picture, and not distract them with bombastic color. One thing I did want to preserve was the shading, so I made sure to keep my highlights and shadows intact.
After I had the color work done I went about solidifying my theme. The piece already had a serious case of the creepy-crawlies with the carapace and H.R. Giger-esque appeal. I went about adding some overlay objects and then twirling them to create an additional sense of twisting and writhing to the piece. I added patterns to these to add to the sense of length, and then finally created some simple loops that matched the background. These loops again added to the creepy crawly theme and helped to bring the background forward a bit by chopping up the main composition. Lastly I added a dark red stroke around the piece to tie in the red some more and called it a day.
Week 4 iLab
This assignment was a challenge. I was well outside of my comfort zone on this one, I can safely say that I have never before been asked to create pages for a children’s book. It took me a long time, and a lot of searching to find a book that I felt that I could work with in terms of content, existing style, and description. What I finally settled on was a west African folk tale that had been adapted into a children’s book about a hunterman who interacts with a number of animals and learns important lessons along the way.
What really struck me about the book was its art style, it was so different from anything else I had looked at for this project and it immediately caught my attention. My first priority was to find two pages to work with, and a passage with enough visual content to work off of. I found this on pages 10-11 in which the hunterman decides to help the stranded crocodiles by tying them together and carrying them on his head, quite the image. In the normal children’s book this is a square 1-page illustration. I had to blow it out to cover two pages, so I took this to my advantage and made essentially a widescreen adaptation of the original image. I went a step further and turned the orientation of the image so that we could see the hunterman’s face, and a more oblique shot of the crocodiles. When I started construction the first thing I made was a crocodile, and it took awhile, I have never made one, or drawn one, let alone in a vector program. Once I had one croc I replicated it and tweaked the sizes to create my croc stack. Next came the rope, I was considering working with a different color, but in the end the yellow on black contrast was just too good, I added some detail to give the rope a sense of texture and movement and started working on the rest of the image.
My symbol was a double triangle that I had intended to make into a straight line border pattern, however the symbol spray tool is about as accurate and precise as a shotgun. Instead I laid down a more random, jagged pattern, and implemented a dark green fill behind it to contrast with the orange background. My last few additions and tweaks were adding the greenery, and the smiling sun, the greenery was pretty simple, the sun however was a multi-step Boolean operation that took some doing.
What really struck me about the book was its art style, it was so different from anything else I had looked at for this project and it immediately caught my attention. My first priority was to find two pages to work with, and a passage with enough visual content to work off of. I found this on pages 10-11 in which the hunterman decides to help the stranded crocodiles by tying them together and carrying them on his head, quite the image. In the normal children’s book this is a square 1-page illustration. I had to blow it out to cover two pages, so I took this to my advantage and made essentially a widescreen adaptation of the original image. I went a step further and turned the orientation of the image so that we could see the hunterman’s face, and a more oblique shot of the crocodiles. When I started construction the first thing I made was a crocodile, and it took awhile, I have never made one, or drawn one, let alone in a vector program. Once I had one croc I replicated it and tweaked the sizes to create my croc stack. Next came the rope, I was considering working with a different color, but in the end the yellow on black contrast was just too good, I added some detail to give the rope a sense of texture and movement and started working on the rest of the image.
My symbol was a double triangle that I had intended to make into a straight line border pattern, however the symbol spray tool is about as accurate and precise as a shotgun. Instead I laid down a more random, jagged pattern, and implemented a dark green fill behind it to contrast with the orange background. My last few additions and tweaks were adding the greenery, and the smiling sun, the greenery was pretty simple, the sun however was a multi-step Boolean operation that took some doing.
Week 3 iLab
For this week’s iLab we were tasked with creating a package design with a strong logo and all of the correct elements associated with that package. I decided early on to create a cd case because I have a little experience with creating cd cases in the past, and I figured that it left a lot of room for creativity.
The first thing I set about doing was laying down the cd case in correct proportions as a foundation layer that I could then build up from. After I had the cd case, along with a cd laid down I did some brainstorming and decided upon creating a fictional D&B / Trance band named “Mistral”. I created a quick front-side mockup of the cd case to plan colors and logo placement and then went to work.
I hunted through my font library for a pair of interesting, futuristic fonts, one to serve as a title and logo font, the other to serve as a track listing font. With my fonts chosen I pounded out a quick logo using a capital letter “M” from my title font. I blew the “M” up to around 400 points in size and used it as a clipping mask to fill it with content sourced from an ancient desktop background I found back in 2005. I used this same image to fill a couple of other shapes within the project to create an interesting, yet consistent look. With my logo in place I added some gradients and patterns to add interest to the background of the cd case, and the cd itself, and then placed some shapes, added text, tweaked some colors and called it a day.
The first thing I set about doing was laying down the cd case in correct proportions as a foundation layer that I could then build up from. After I had the cd case, along with a cd laid down I did some brainstorming and decided upon creating a fictional D&B / Trance band named “Mistral”. I created a quick front-side mockup of the cd case to plan colors and logo placement and then went to work.
I hunted through my font library for a pair of interesting, futuristic fonts, one to serve as a title and logo font, the other to serve as a track listing font. With my fonts chosen I pounded out a quick logo using a capital letter “M” from my title font. I blew the “M” up to around 400 points in size and used it as a clipping mask to fill it with content sourced from an ancient desktop background I found back in 2005. I used this same image to fill a couple of other shapes within the project to create an interesting, yet consistent look. With my logo in place I added some gradients and patterns to add interest to the background of the cd case, and the cd itself, and then placed some shapes, added text, tweaked some colors and called it a day.
Week 2 iLab
For this weeks iLab we were tasked with creating a 1 or 2 point perspective image of a form of architecture. We could either replicate a building from real life, or create one of our own. Our building had to be constructed with a horizon line, with a strong use of patterns, and a pseudo-3D final look.
I really enjoyed this iLab again due to how open ended it was. My first order of business was to lay down some quick pencil sketches of the kind of building I wanted to create, there was no way I was going to just copy a pre-existing building. What I finally decided on was an interesting idea of having a multi-tiered house essentially that had slanted roof lines, and a strong vertical presence. When I switched over to working in adobe illustrator I first laid down my horizon line, about 60% of the way down the image so that my final building would have a nice sweeping look to it from bottom to top. I then blocked out my building in rough polygonal shapes to make sure that I had it centered and that the height was working out alright. After that I added the very difficult curved roof lines and made some edits to my shapes to make sure that everything was lining up correctly. After a few hours the shape of the building and its exterior profile were set.
I started my final polish pass by adding windows, complete with their own 3d look, tweaked some of the roof lines, added a chimney, and put in my background sky and grass. I then went through and added shading after determining that my light source was going to be back and to the right out of frame. I added patterns to the three roof tiers, the sky, the grass, and the building’s foundation and called it a day.
I really enjoyed this iLab again due to how open ended it was. My first order of business was to lay down some quick pencil sketches of the kind of building I wanted to create, there was no way I was going to just copy a pre-existing building. What I finally decided on was an interesting idea of having a multi-tiered house essentially that had slanted roof lines, and a strong vertical presence. When I switched over to working in adobe illustrator I first laid down my horizon line, about 60% of the way down the image so that my final building would have a nice sweeping look to it from bottom to top. I then blocked out my building in rough polygonal shapes to make sure that I had it centered and that the height was working out alright. After that I added the very difficult curved roof lines and made some edits to my shapes to make sure that everything was lining up correctly. After a few hours the shape of the building and its exterior profile were set.
I started my final polish pass by adding windows, complete with their own 3d look, tweaked some of the roof lines, added a chimney, and put in my background sky and grass. I then went through and added shading after determining that my light source was going to be back and to the right out of frame. I added patterns to the three roof tiers, the sky, the grass, and the building’s foundation and called it a day.
Week 1 iLab
For this week’s iLab we were tasked with creating a figurative design in adobe illustrator, a design that implemented the use of clipping masks, various image manipulation tools, such as bloating and twirling, as well as pattern creation and implementation.
I had a lot of fun with this iLab due to how open-ended it was, and how much creative freedom we were given. The first thing I set about doing was coming up some kind of cohesive theme for my iLab, deciding on what kind of colors I wanted to use, and what kind of style I would aim for. After poking around in my sizable pile of sketches I came across an old drawing that had something interesting in it, a really wacky looking voodoo mask, I knew I just had to use it. I imported the sketch into adobe illustrator and went about creating a vector on top of the sketch, making sure to get the basic shape blocked out and the various components pieced together so that I could color them later. Once I had the line work on the mask done I did some quick flat color and then went in and did a shading pass, mostly taking the base color, darkening it by about 10-15% and then creating new shapes where shadows made sense for my imaginary light source.
Once I had my voodoo mask finished up I set about actually getting some of the iLab steps completed, namely shape manipulation, pattern creation, and pattern implementation. At this point I had decided that I was going to do something tropical with my piece so I created a quick fruit-themed pattern, sort of like what you might see on a typical Hawaiian shirt, and then applied that pattern across a flat horizontal bar. In order to give this piece some added interest I created the pattern with a 50% transparent background, and inserted into the back of the shape a blue to dark blue gradient which gave it a bit more “pop”.
This was working well, but my piece still needed some more elements to really tie it together and give it a more cohesive look, and I still needed to implement a clipping mask. I set about creating a clipping mask in the outline of a small sandy pacific island, sort of a one hut, one tree kind of deal, and applied a large yellow / orange background gradient for the clipping mask to cut through. Once all of that was in place I added some nice bold text, threw a gradient on that as well to keep with the style of everything else in the piece and called it a day.
I had a lot of fun with this iLab due to how open-ended it was, and how much creative freedom we were given. The first thing I set about doing was coming up some kind of cohesive theme for my iLab, deciding on what kind of colors I wanted to use, and what kind of style I would aim for. After poking around in my sizable pile of sketches I came across an old drawing that had something interesting in it, a really wacky looking voodoo mask, I knew I just had to use it. I imported the sketch into adobe illustrator and went about creating a vector on top of the sketch, making sure to get the basic shape blocked out and the various components pieced together so that I could color them later. Once I had the line work on the mask done I did some quick flat color and then went in and did a shading pass, mostly taking the base color, darkening it by about 10-15% and then creating new shapes where shadows made sense for my imaginary light source.
Once I had my voodoo mask finished up I set about actually getting some of the iLab steps completed, namely shape manipulation, pattern creation, and pattern implementation. At this point I had decided that I was going to do something tropical with my piece so I created a quick fruit-themed pattern, sort of like what you might see on a typical Hawaiian shirt, and then applied that pattern across a flat horizontal bar. In order to give this piece some added interest I created the pattern with a 50% transparent background, and inserted into the back of the shape a blue to dark blue gradient which gave it a bit more “pop”.
This was working well, but my piece still needed some more elements to really tie it together and give it a more cohesive look, and I still needed to implement a clipping mask. I set about creating a clipping mask in the outline of a small sandy pacific island, sort of a one hut, one tree kind of deal, and applied a large yellow / orange background gradient for the clipping mask to cut through. Once all of that was in place I added some nice bold text, threw a gradient on that as well to keep with the style of everything else in the piece and called it a day.