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Post
Elvis portrait - progress
This deadline was a great opportunity to work on my 3rd assignment for my pikaland course. We had to use a piece from a museum as inspiration. I chose this, from the Denver Art Museum:
I am in love with the colors, and how something about it is so modern even though it was made in the late 1800’s. So I decided to take the color scheme and use it for Elvis.
Step 1 was to draw a basic sketch, using various pictures of The King I found through google image search.
Here is where I am so far. I’m pretty happy with it…I think the face is coming along pretty well, and the hair is sufficiently shiny. Tomorrow I’ll work on his shirt, which will have similar colors to the guy above. And I might add some of that awesome graphic detail into the background, like that black triangle. What do you think?
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Tina Fey - process
I started my Tina Fey portrait Saturday without much idea what I’d be doing. I’ve been feeling very easygoing about Photoshop lately, and much more interested in experimenting with it than I have been in the past, so I was excited to try my hand at more digital painting. Here is where I was after Saturday’s work session:
There was a 5-10 minute period in which the shading on her face looked amazing. I was so happy for myself! Then I overworked it of course, so I wasn’t happy with where I left it. So, Sunday, I added a layer over her face layer, and tried to be a bit looser:
Much better, no? Definitely a reasonable likeness.
Next I went in to her hair, starting with the shadows and highlights and working in as much detail as I could get without it looking too absurd.
I added the shirt just so I’d have some sense of the rest of her body. I’m pretty happy with the hair - it’s not perfect by any means, but it works. If I have time before my due date Wednesday, I hope to do something with her shirt and maybe even add a background…maybe Liz Lemon’s office on 30 Rock? What do you think?
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kyle chandler - process
I had a little image in my head of how this one should come out, so I jumped right into my sketch.
Next, I colored everything in. I think the Kyle Chandler likeness was helped by the floppy hair, little eyes, and Panthers jacket. It’s not a perfect likeness, but I think it’ll do.
The flat colors were not working for me. I wanted it to look much more gritty. I tried doing some shading:
Yuck. Well, the face shading = yuck. The look is almost interesting, but because I’m just not excelling at fake painting in Photoshop, yuck. I do like the jacket texture however. I got rid of that layer, and added some simple shading to the face. Simple but a bit more gritty. I also added the text in the background, skewing it to make it look like it’s laying on the field.
I’m not finished, but I’m pretty happy with it. I can’t decide if I want to add details to the football players…I’m kind of liking them blobby, but am I just trying to avoid more work? That wouldn’t be any good…
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How to Make a Pattern Repeat in Illustrator
1. Make all the little things you want in your pattern - objects, shapes, background, etc. In this case, I made lots of little gears to use as a pattern in my robot cheater quilt.
2. Create a background rectangle in the size you want the repeat to be. This rectangle shouldn’t be any old size - make the length and width easy numbers to work with. A good way to select this size is to make it a bit smaller in size than the space you’d need to easily fit in all of your shapes. My rectangle is 3” tall and 5” wide. 
3. Arrange the pieces of your pattern on top of the rectangle (I like to put the rectangle in a lower level from the shapes, and lock it, so I don’t accidentally move the rectangle while I arrange the shapes.)
4. Make sure some of your shapes go off the edges of your rectangle. If you don’t, your pattern will look silly, because you’ll see horizontal and vertical strips of blank space where the original rectangle’s edges were located. You wouldn’t want that, would you?
5. Ok, let’s make those shapes that go off the edge of one side of the rectangle come into the rectangle from the other side. (Oh prepositions, don’t fail me now!!!) Select all the shapes that go over the top edge of the rectangle by drawing a box around them with the select arrow (V).
6. Press CTRL-C (substitute Command for CTRL when you’re using a Mac) to copy those shapes, and CTRL-F to paste the copy directly on top of the originals.
7. Now, we’re gonna move these copies down so they come up into the bottom of the rectangle. Without clicking off of the shapes, and with the select arrow (V), type ENTER. This opens up a box that lets you describe where you want your copies to move. Fill in the distance as the height of the rectangle and the degrees as -90. My distance was 3”, and my angle was -90. See the next step for an explanation as to how to choose that angle. The ‘position’ data doesn’t matter.
8. Once the move happened, you can click off your shapes and admire your fancy footwork. Now you need to repeat this step for shapes hanging off the left, right, or bottom of your rectangle. Use this diagram, or your understanding of the Unit Circle, to determine what angle you need to move shapes in a particular direction.
Voila! Everything is copied perfectly. Notice that in addition to copying gears down to the bottom of the rectangle, I had to copy one gear from the bottom of the rectangle to the top.
9. Once everything is copied, and anything that is going off one side of the background rectangle is coming into the rectangle on the opposite side, unlock your rectangle layer. Copy and paste the rectangle using CTRL-F, so once again there are two shapes directly on top of one another. Then in your layers toolbar, select only the bottom rectangle. Set this bottom rectangle to have no fill and no border. This rectangle is what Illustrator uses as the bounds of the repeat, and it needs to be at the very bottom and have no fill/border. In the picture below, you can see the first two Paths in Layer 2 look like the same rectangle. One’s just below the other. Here, I’ve highlighted the rectangle on the bottom so I can set its fill and border to nothing.
11. Phew! Ok! We are ready to go! Draw a selection box around all the elements of your repeat, and drag the whole shebang into the swatch toolbar.
12. Tada! Your repeat is created. Want to see it? Somewhere else on your workspace, draw a rectangle, and select your pattern swatch to fill it with your repeat. Now you can check the composition - is it pretty? Are there empty areas that need to be filled, or shapes you need to separate more? Make changes to the original shapes as necessary. Just make sure that if you’re moving a shape that goes off the edge of the rectangle, you choose its copy too and move them together.
I ended up being pretty happy with this composition - there are spaces, but none of them are jarring. When I put all the patterns I made together for the robot quilt, though, I realized that I don’t like these colors too much, so that’s something I may change.
13. Brag to your friends about how awesome your pattern is. Surely they have never seen anything so fine? Surely!
Photo
working on my latest deadline…basic shapes are in, now I just have to look at size/shape/composition, and add texture.
Post
working on amy poehler/leslie knope
First step - basic shapes laid in over drawing in Illustrator.
Next step - more details, face, and making small changes to make it look more accurate. Pointier chin,changed hair swoop, etc.
Not too shabby! Also, I’m not too clear what my next steps should be here. I want to work on texture/details, and adding in more hand-drawn elements to balance the vector-ness. Hmm. What do you think?
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editorial - process
1. I had a clear picture in my head of what I wanted this illustration to look like, so after a few thumbnails, I completed and scanned a finished drawing. Cleaning it up a bit in photoshop led to this:
2. Next, I colored in all the shapes. I wanted to try out using some brushes for texture. I like the effect in some areas (the computer looks a bit like I used watercolor) but not others (the table looks a bit silly).
3. I wasn’t really happy with how the illustration was looking, and spent some time working on photoshop to see if I could come out with something I liked.
4. Nope. I just didn’t like it! I like the sketch, and the idea, but the basic coloring job is not working for me. So, I brought the sketch into Illustrator so I could start the coloring from scratch.
5. Here’s where I am now. The basic shapes have all been created in Illustrator, and I’m currently editing the line drawing, whittling it down to just the lines that need to be there. Next, I’ll go back into Illustrator to play with the colors a bit more. Come back later for the final piece!
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