The premise of the project was to take a noun, a verb, and an adjective and compose the words into some form of an illustration. The words I was given were "Slimy", "Shred", and "Wire".
WIP sketches are below. The female personification was my first initial sketch before I came to my last one.
The project had no real limits on what we could do, only that the illustration was supposed to be done in Adobe Illustrator. We were each given three words, and we were to use what we learned in Illustrator through the class to create an illustration of our choice. We could be as imaginative as we desire.
At the beginning of the project, I really had no idea what I was going to accomplish with the words slimy, wire, and shred. They were all so different and out of the loop, I believe I did not have a solid idea for days. I ranted to friends about it. Then suddenly one night, and I cannot remember my thought process as to how I came to this idea, but "pollution" suddenly came to mind. Maybe it was the word slimy, and I associated it with sludge. Gross. And my mind went from there. It would not be the first time I have done something regarding pollution or nature in my art projects (twice, in Printmaking) or in my own personal works. When I started sketching, I ended up creating a female personification of "Nature". Mother nature, possibly. It didn't really turn out how I wanted, at all, so I went on to the next page. Then I realized, I've drawn females the entire semester with my projects. But never a male. So, my personification of nature ended up becoming a male and very elf-like. My initial idea is nature, something that we all claim to love and support, but at the same time we pollute its waters and earth because; either recycling of resources seems too expensive or too much of a hassle, or we actually mean to ignore the danger and put earth in harms way specifically to gain money and advancement.
Starting with sketches, I draw almost exactly what I want from the image before putting the photo into Adobe Illustrator and redrawing from a different layer over the image. I tend to put lineart of different subjects on different layers, and then place a multitude of color layers beneath those lineart layers to keep the lines visible. I also place specific elements above the lineart layers. I do this for easy access. If I need or want to change specific colors, or get rid of something altogether and alter the design, I can do so without having to worry too much about scrapping my whole idea or starting from scratch. Once all of this is finished, I use the Pathfinder option to crop out any information outside the dimensions of the illustrator file.
One thing I learned, thankfully, was the "White lines" issue I have encountered in many of my other projects. When I save my file as a PNG or JPEG, white lines and gradients usually come up. I found out I needed to set my anti-alias setting to Art Optimized. Needless to say, I'm very happy. Other than this, I found out about the Blend Tool (W). It was pretty useful, and I used it in several portions of my illustration. It became troublesome in some places, though, and I couldn't use it as much as I would've liked to. But it did help with a lot of my shading problems in the flowers, some of the skin/grass, and the skies.
