For this project, our professor prompted us to make a geometric self-portrait. She showed us some examples and went over tools and short cuts in Adobe Illustrator to help us get started. She let us choose what type of style we wanted to illustrate our photo in. 

To start, I chose a photo of myself that had been taken for a stylized shoot by a local photographer. I opened my photo in Illustrator and used the pen tool to start mapping out highlights and shadows.I decided to leave space between each shape to give it a mosaic appearance. I made my paths purple so they were easy to see against the photo. Once I had all of my shapes made, I then used the selection and the eyedropper tool to fill each shape with color. 

I used a gradient fill for the back ground and then used the pen tool to trace my face and give it a different background color. I took away from some of the large shapes on my shoulder to keep the focus on my face and flower crown and to give the illustration a more balanced look. 

Through this project, I learned how to work on different layers in Illustrator. Surprisingly, I had always worked on the same layer for different projects. I found out how much easier doing so makes the process go. I also learned how to quickly fill shapes with color using keyboard short cuts and the eyedropper tool. I'm bad at using keyboard shortcuts, but now I'll never forget them!