Final Notepad Design

After much delay and work on my notepad, it has finally been finished. I learned how to make my own custom “color” out of a stock pattern from Illustrator (light blue background and dark blue dots from an originally black and white pattern), which, as it turns out, is actually very difficult. I designed the little shark logo myself from my mind’s eye, and I came up with the phrase “I like my tea with a little bite” by myself as well. Admittedly, I used live trace and the live paint tool to create the pink object behind the lines, but I’m very happy with the way it turned out, despite my sort of “cheating” by using it. On this project, I also used the clipping mask tool to cut the shape for the front of the notepad. Overall, it was a lot of work cutting out and hand gluing each sheet of paper even after digitally designing my notepad, but I think that it was worth it in the end.

Cereal Box: Steal Its Look

Here was can observe all six panels of the Fantastic Cereal in all their glory. To steal its look, you need:
-cat ears: $1

-surgically implanted whiskers: $3,000

-plastic surgery to attach a tail: $7,000

-cosmetic surgery to gain the perfect cat button nose: $5,000

-maze and other stuff: $3.14159 million

-fierce attitude and style: priceless

She’s beauty and she’s grace, she’s Miss Kitty Crunchies.

Pen Tool

At last, the opportunity to get acquainted with the pen tool has arrived! Although I’ll be making other progress in experimenting with it soon, all I have to show you for now is an advancement of my pen tool practice with different shapes. I suppose I could improve upon smoothing out some of the shapes I made on this template, but I was rather busy at the time, and doing so seemed rather unnecessary for an exercise meant only for practice with the pen tool. I promise: my shapes shall be better in the future! 🙂

 

Apple Logo

Time for my second project! For this occasion, we had to recreate the black and rainbow designs of the classic Apple logo, depicted below.

At this point in my newly budding digital arts career, I was still unfamiliar with the pen tool, so everything was once again created using the pencil tool. I admit that I did use the smoothing tool a little as well, but most of the near-perfect arcs in my final design came from me meticulously editing small sections of my original (and slightly flawed) apple outline. Because of advice from my digital arts teacher, I began with the black apple logo and then moved on to the rainbow one. I actually used the outline from the black logo for the template of the rainbow logo, but as you can see, I went on to refine the rainbow outline (by using the pencil tool and smoothing tool) far more than I had with the original black Apple logo. Also with the rainbow apple, I learned how to form a clipping mask of several colored rectangles in order to form the rainbow pattern. Once again, I used the dropper tool to extract the exact colors. Here is the completed pair of Apple logos:

Not too bad, huh? The rainbow apple looks pretty darn close to the real thing, if I do say so myself. And without the use of the pen tool! Amazing.

However, stopping to take a break from patting myself on the back, you can look closely and see the rather rough edges of the black Apple logo to see how I improved in smoothing out the outline and making it much more beautiful. I did that on purpose! I’m observing progress already; how wonderful.

Animal Shape

For my first project in Digital Art and Design, I had to recreate one of the following animals.

I decided to experiment with the flamingo for this assignment, because I figured its more complex shape would give me more experience with the tools of Illustrator rather than playing around with basic circles. Using layering and embedding the image, I simply used the pencil tool to trace out my own flamingo,  then used the dropper tool to color with the exact hues as the original picture. The final product can be seen below.

In hindsight, I reckon this graphic is not too bad for a first project, what with the basic shapes and all, but I think it could be improved with a slightly different colored beak (so as to better its visibility)  and the smoothing tool. Also, although I wasn’t familiar with the pen tool at this time, I believe that it would have helped to create better and smoother arcs for the head, neck, and beak. Considering that I was instructed to directly trace over the image, however, I hope that future projects shall improve in quality so that familiarity with tools comes naturally and I can devote more time to creating original artwork.

 

Digital Art Terms to Know

1. Anchor point: A point on a path that indicates a change of direction

2. Resolution: Resolution is the detail an image holds; higher resolution means more pixels (individual, minute areas of illumination on a display screen) in the image, in which more image detail can be achieved; most images are typically 72 dpi (dots per inch)

3. Artboard: Printable portion of the work area, where illustrations can be finalized

4. Clipping mask: An object whose shape masks other artwork so that only areas that lie within the shape are visible—in effect, clipping the artwork to the shape of the mask (the clipping mask and the objects that are masked are called a clipping set)

5. Pen tool: A non-selection tool used in the creation of smooth-edged selections; it creates vector paths that can be converted into selections that in turn can be used to extract or mask groups of pixels

6. Layers: Individual levels in the stacking order of available drawing space that can hold any number of objects

7. Links: A linked image is an image that is linked to an external file, like a shortcut on a computer

Random helpful layering website: http://designmodo.com/transform-duplicate-objects-illustrator/

What is your favorite color?

My favorite color is a so-called “mint green” which appears to be distinctly indigenous to the 50s. Think of Flo from “Cars,” or the tinted color of vintage Coke bottles. I love this color and a short spectrum of its hues because it’s distinctly unique, calming, and it matches with nearly anything. I also like how it’s sort of a blast to the past, since I’ve always been fascinated by antiques, history, and life during the 50s–the age of sci-fi, cute rinky dink  diners, and perfect little families with simple lives and mothers that can always cook up the best casseroles.

Here we can  observe a beautiful 50s era green guitar calmly resting in its natural habitat.