After personal consideration, I chose the Celeste: Farewell album over The Three Caballeros movie poster for simplicity’s sake. Designing and re-designing the aves raras was a lot less appealing to me: someone who has a soft spot for gradients.

In this project, I learned that there’s a condition for “merging” objects in Illustrator so that they share an effect, such as drop shadow, instead of laying Effects over each other. Grouping is the only solution I’ve figured out so far, but it works for me.

Live Paint Bucket saves the day again, giving me hope and a clear-cut, quick way of flat coloring in Illustrator. I find it easy to use in time-constrained situations, and it provides a unique level of satisfaction in a vector-based program.

Okay, scratch what I said about how much I love gradients – I love gradients, but everywhere but Illustrator. Designing a new gradient is an adventure I don’t think I’ll ever get over, and neither is applying a gradient to an object that already uses another gradient since the gradient tool recognizes the old gradient as that which you want to use when it isn’t.

Creating inventive backgrounds is something I struggle with for all facets of art, and I’m slightly ashamed of how quickly I overlooked that for this project. I also know not to beat myself up over it, but I know it’s still important that I get it done, rather than not.

I find it hard to make decisions in personalized settings, and the personality of creating a chosen movie poster or album cover is the indecisive’s nightmare. If it comes to be such an issue that I don’t know what to start with, I’d like to see more examples than just a movie that pokes fun at sharks.

This project got me to test my Pen Tool skills, and it let me understand more about the tools and how they work to create lines and curves – especially in a setting where I had to work quickly to achieve a finished product.

I found Becky’s Project 2 (https://razzchan.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/project-2-5/) a great source of inspiration with the consistency of used effects and their fields of application, especially in separating the foreground and the background.