Portraits

Here are my latest completed projects in Adobe Illustrator. These are two portraits based on the same photograph.

The first portrait is done with calligraphy brushes and I got to use a stylus and tablet instead of a mouse (which was SO much easier and made the project go really fast). After getting a BA in art, I can't help feeling incredibly guilty drawing right on top of a photo template! That also made the project pretty easy, but I'm still pleased with the effect: calligraphy scribbling that all adds up to a very faithful portrait.

The second portrait was incredibly time consuming, but I'm pleased with the outcome. It is a typography portrait, meaning that it only uses letters to create the portrait. I imposed on myself the further restrictions of not rotating any of my letters on an angle (they are all mostly sitting normally, though I turned a very few by 90 degrees and some letters were reflected), and only using the letters from the word "beard". 

I built these in InDesign. I like this alternative to the traditional, boxy calendars I see everywhere.

get your hero on.

This is a 'privacy protected' version of a birthday party invitation I did for my sister this past summer. Unfortunately, the red border got cropped unevenly in the final printing of it, but I had a lot of fun designing it.

Vormator Project

Ever since I was teaching Art for Kids and had them all making these great cityscapes, I've been wanting to do one of my own. When the assignment came up to 'make something with these shapes', I was determined to get a cityscape out of it. These were the rules: use every shape at least once, keep all of the proportions of the shapes, only make changes that can be done with Illustrator's pathfinder tool, and no gradients. I created it in grayscale first so I could focus on the composition, then went through a series of color variations, but this is the one I submitted. I was going for a poster-art feel, with strong contrast and sense of pattern. This is my first assignment in my class on Illustrator. (I've just been fighting with Pages to make my designs until now.)

My teacher borrowed this project, so if you want to learn more about the concept behind it or the shapes I had to use, take a look.