Learning by imitation

Well, here's my finished dragon, next to Harry Campbell's original that I tracked down from the WSJ's website. (low res image)

Lesson of the day: I hate scales.

In all seriousness, though, this was a lot of fun to work on. I got to play a lot with the pen tool andget more comfortable with it; in addition, I had to work with finding a solution for the giant mess that was the dragon's scales. I'm still not satisfied with the result, and as I slowly learned what I was doing as I progressed, I feel like I should go back and do the early parts all over again. 

But alas, time constrains me and I have other work to do. The point of the exercise was largely to give a sense of where we are in our level of comfort with Illustrator, and I think I've given it a fair shot. 

Build

The final product.

I spent a lot of time agonizing over the simplicity of this piece, feeling guilty for I not putting more detail into it. When it came down to it, though, I realized that the reason I couldn't come up with a better way to go about this piece was because this is what build is to me at this point. A precarious structure, something that has taken a lot of effort, but something I feel is unstable, ready to fall at any time. When I think of build, I think of how I want the structure to be stable. I want to feel calm, safe, like I can trust what I've built up. I've been going through an incredible amount of anxiety lately, mostly for no obvious reason, to the point where my body is constantly in pain from the stress. Everything in me is crying out for some serenity. I guess that's more or less what this piece was for me.

Highest form of flattery?

So our latest assignment is to recreate an editorial illustration from the Wall Street Journal. Mine is a dragon from Saturday/Sunday, October 26-27, 2013, for the "China's Coming Slowdown" article. The original image was done by Harry Campbell (website: harrycampbell.net). I am not worthy of such awesomeness.

Thus far, I have been freehanding a sketch with the newspaper clipping next to me. Drawing is haaaaard and the one thing I want to do with my life, so this is good practice. Once I am satisfied with the sketch, I will import the image into Illustrator and start vectoring away. Yay pen tool!

Wordplay

So my word is BUILD.

Sketches:

The planning stage of this project was really difficult for me. I wasn't crazy about the word I drew because every image it gave me was depressingly geometric, architectural, and stiff. I spent a lot of time experimenting with other words and halfheartedly putting together letter blocks. . . 

Luckily, I found an alternative image that really caught my eye. This pile of stones was a fountain, but I followed up my discovery by looking up a lot of cairns. Rocks just have a much more pleasing form that I got excited about. At first I was going to make a pile of rocks and have the word "build" show up in the shading. . . but this proved to look really weird when I tried it out.

So I switched over to spelling out the word "build" with the rocks of my cairn, but with a twist--the rock pile is upside-down as far as the word is concerned, defamiliarizing it and adding some visual interest to the piece. Instead, the cairn's shadow formed the actual word. Then I started shading. Remember that glowy mushroom tutorial? I've been putting it to practice a LOT.

I made the mistake of shading my cairn without the background visible, which gave it some incorrect shading. That has since been corrected. Also, I was a little nervous about how faint the word "build" was so I sharpened and darkened it a bit. . . 

I really like gradients. Have you noticed?