Friday, September 11, 2015

Week 3 Outside the Classroom

For homework we were assigned three videos to watch and were required to create 5-10 sketches and take 5-10 staging photos for our calendar. The three videos were, "Using the Layers Panel," Applying Multiple Strokes," and "Tracing Artwork With the Pen Tool."

The first video, "Using the Layers Panel," talks about how important the layers panel really is. The layers panel has a menu layer which has all the options for the different attributes you can change. One of the nice things about this menu is that if you delete a layer via the menu instead of dragging the layer to the trashcan, it gives you a confirmation message.

The second video, "Applying Multiple Strokes," talks about how to apply multiple strokes to your artwork. In order to add more than one layer, you go to the appearance layer and choose the part of your artwork you want to add more strokes to. Make sure to isolate it if it is in a group. After that go to strokes and in the bottom left corner of the panel is the option to add a new stroke. When you do this, the new stroke is place in the same area as the original stroke. In order to move this stroke, go to the stroke menu and you will see the option to move your new stroke. This make it a lot easier to create some interesting artwork without having to go through the trouble of creating multiple different shapes and layering them just right.

The final video, "Tracing Artwork With the Pen Tool," shows how to trace artwork in Illustrator. In order to do this, create a new layer over whatever artwork you are trying to recreate, then take the pen tool and trace along the different shapes. The nice thing about tracing is that as you are tracing each shape, guide lines will appear and help you out. Just make sure you take your time as you trace the image you are recreating.

All of these videos will help us when it comes time to create our calendars on Illustrator.

So far I have five sketched ideas for my calendar but I would like to come up with a few more. Here are the ones I have so far:


My favorite one so far is the top right, I believe it is strong even with its asymmetrical layout.

Since most of my ideas involve smores, I took photos of smores ingredients. I also wanted to take pictures of an actual bonfire but because of all the rain, the wood I was going to use was too moist to use for a fire so I create a mini one using matches and paper. I at least am able to get the general shape of a bonfire from these photos so I think they will be useful for this project, as soon as I can though I will get some photos of an actual bonfire. Here are the photos I have so far:











No comments:

Post a Comment