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Art/Life Updates - 9/17/12


Aanchir

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Back from a brief hiatus as I transitioned to life at my new college! I am currently at Wentworth Institute of Technology studying Industrial Design.

 

The first part of my life and art updates is best summed up with this post from the Official My Little Pony topic:

 

One of the course materials for one of my new classes was Adobe Illustrator CS6. I look forward to learning the ins and outs of the program so I can attempt to make quality pony vector art.

 

In the meantime, to practice some of the features I traced some of my old pictures into vector-based images. One of these was my MLP/BIONICLE crossover image Swarm of the Century (do not post; topic is dead) which won third prize in GAC #18 Battlescapes here on BZPower and was on display in physical form at Brickfair. Surprisingly, one of the image trace filters actually made the resulting image look more like how I had intended it than the original art did-- as in, cleaner colors, less scratchiness, and a more dynamic background.

 

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/259/5/1/swarm_of_the_century_edit_by_skybard-d5exsh9.png

Do not post images larger than 500 kB. -B6

 

Thought some of the folks in this topic might appreciate this, since I know MLP fans probably made up a good number of the people who voted for this image in the Battlescapes contest.

 

Also, since I'm in a big city for college for the first time, I'll be attending my first brony meetup next weekend! I'm really looking forward to it!

 

Now, my next challenge on Illustrator was to see if I could vectorize and color some existing lineart of mine. The only piece I was able to successfully color with the tools I have now was my picture of Kai and his family from LEGO Ninjago which I posted in a previous entry. The result, in flat colors for now because I don't know the tools necessary to shade it to my satisfaction, can be seen here:

 

kai_and_family_rough_color_by_skybard-d5ex1h8.png

 

Over time, whether inside or outside of class, I anticipate learning more tools with Adobe Illustrator so I can do more of the things I've been looking forward to doing, such as designing custom minifigure decorations.

 

My classes so far are going smoothly, and I look forward to all the things I will learn in them. Each day brings me closer to my goal of becoming a product designer for The LEGO Group!

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And I offered to teach you a bit about illustrator once but noooo. haha Also, there's a simple tool to automatically vectorize line art. Call me or something and I'll quickly explain. ;)

 

I miss ya bro! Come home! ;-;

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And I offered to teach you a bit about illustrator once but noooo. haha Also, there's a simple tool to automatically vectorize line art. Call me or something and I'll quickly explain. ;)

 

I miss ya brown! Come home! ;-;

Why would I have wanted to learn Illustrator for you before I needed it or would ever have a chance to use it? :P And I know there's a simple tool to automatically vectorize line art. I've been using it, or something like it. The problem is just that a lot of my line art is inked very badly, so it doesn't come out well (gaps in some places, and other parts filled in when they're not supposed to be).

 

Also, is my name brown now? :???:

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Live tracing always looks cheap and terrible. I highly recommend you actually learn how vector art is created instead of relying on those kinds of filters. If I were you I'd try Vector Basic by Von R. Glitschka, to get the whole secret behind making smooth vector shapes and paths. In addition, if you do become proficient in using illustrator I highly recommend checking out Astute Graphic's plugins for the program. Drawscribe and Pathscribe are nearly invaluable to anyone working in it full time and allow the program to actually work in a way that makes sense as opposed to the patchwork nonsense that adobe initially threw to us.

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Live tracing always looks cheap and terrible. I highly recommend you actually learn how vector art is created instead of relying on those kinds of filters. If I were you I'd try Vector Basic by Von R. Glitschka, to get the whole secret behind making smooth vector shapes and paths. In addition, if you do become proficient in using illustrator I highly recommend checking out Astute Graphic's plugins for the program. Drawscribe and Pathscribe are nearly invaluable to anyone working in it full time and allow the program to actually work in a way that makes sense as opposed to the patchwork nonsense that adobe initially threw to us.

Believe me, I intend to learn more advanced techniques (live trace has proven useless for making vectors of hand-drawn lineart unless the original lineart was impeccably clean and low on detail), but for now all I was doing was experimenting. There's a reason I only considered two of the outcomes of those experiments worth sharing.

 

Also since I'm in a graphic design class I fully expect to learn some more techniques for creating vectors over the course of the semester. But thanks for the recommendations. Once I know enough about Adobe Illustrator to actually put some forethought into non-class-related stuff, I'll look into them.

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