After it rained one day, I was taking a walk and saw these leaves that had fallen and then been covered in droplets of water. I decided to make this the inspiration for a project to practice my Adobe Illustrator skills.

I traced the large and small leaf in Illustrator using the curvature tool and combined all of the lines of each leaf into its own group. I was planning to add the water droplets and create a 3D effect, but as I was looking at the line drawings of the large and small leaf next to each other, I thought they could be copied, rotated, and turned into a snowflake instead.

I then made multiple snowflakes of different sizes (and adjusted the line weight on each so that the smaller the snowflake was, the smaller the line weight) and put them on a background with a radial gradient of cool colors (blue and grey) that looked cold and chilly. I decided to arrange the snowflakes in a “random” pattern, asymmetrical, diagonal pattern and came up with a design that could be used as wrapping paper or the background of a poster.

I then felt that I wanted to focus in on one snowflake instead. It looked too boring all alone, so I played with some of the “Photoshop Effects” and used the radial blur on a snowflake in a layer underneath the main one. I liked how it gave this feeling of motion to an otherwise very static, symmetrical, centered design.

While the line weights are equal within each individual snowflake, the line weights are larger in the larger “leaves” and smaller in the smaller ones. The repetition of shapes spreading from the center creates the signature snowflake form (as does the white color of the lines), but the lines are curvy and organic, in contrast to a snowflake’s angular crystals, so it looks like this could be a line drawing of a poinsettia instead.

The image itself is a square, the shape is circular, and the alignment is centered to make this image feel steady and grounded, but the blurred lines of the background give some contrast by adding a feeling of motion or unsteadiness.

I wanted to keep a high contrast in the value as well with a crisp white for the snowflake and a dark blue for the background – almost like a snowflake set against a dark sky at sunset. The snowflake takes up most of the space of the image because I wanted to focus on its form, not make it a part of a larger “scene” like I did in the draft above.