This assignment was a lot easier after getting the hang of using Illustrator. While I like me some digital art every once and a while, I never really had any experience using Photoshop or any program of the sort. So initially, this was a bit daunting. But once again, after some fiddling with the program, most was made clear.
It did not occur to me to screenshot my process as I went about my work, but I will briefly discuss the process I went through to create my 2D drawing. The PDF below is the scan I started out with (I’m not sure if you can view it, but there it is). At first, I attempted to use the method shown in class. I don’t remember the process exactly, but it resulted int the creation of paths all along the main shapes. This was useful later on as I traced, but ultimately rather confusing for me. In the end, I opted to free hand and synthesize the shapes manually with circles and rectangles. The giant “door” was fairly straight forward with one large rectangle and a large circle that were merged with the shape merging tool. The two large circles on the bottom are just circles. The other shapes were drawn out using the pen tool. I deleted some anchors created by that path creating method I used earlier and used the direct selection tool to smooth some of the curves and straighten some of the lines. The biggest obstacle I faced was figuring out what to do about the gear. As you can see in the original PDF, the teeth are rather complex. So instead, I opted to use this radial technique where I created one long rounded rectangle, and made copies of it rotating 15 degrees until I created the full gear. I made a large circle in the middle, united the paths, and completed the gear. I used smaller circles to create the “holes” in each of the shapes.
As I worked, I used multiple layers which were labeled depending on what was one each. I felt like this was an easy way to organize my work and prevented me of messing up another shape while I was messing with another. Changing the opaque-ness of the layer I was working on to see the original picture below was especially helpful when I was tracing shapes with the pen tool.
Overall, it was fun. While I would probably still need some help with the different tricks and shortcuts, I can say that I know the basics of using Illustrator.
