I was particularly feeling fixated on puns and ecstatic about the irony of restaurants’ priciness for good food, so I combined my feelings and worked towards an arduous-to-realize concept, strangely.

In this project, I learned a crucial point of making the text more visible through decreasing the opacity of the backgrounds of the icons.

The least-arduous aspect of this assignment was acquiring a proper selection of images. In my case, I used them for reference and as backgrounds for the various icons. Unsplash has an outstanding selection of creative commons images, and I think the photographers and artists are worthy of such praise.

For me, deciding how I wanted to design the spot illustrations was painstaking. There were many possibilities and opportunities, and I took way too much time accounting for the work we put into labs, learning the many concepts we needed to know to explore for the project. In short, I should’ve acted far sooner than I did.

With more time and patience, I could improve this piece by listing menu items for the tavern. I’m better off designing, but planning is one of my pet peeves.

Perhaps it’s my missing the preparatory classes that defined how I visualized the concept, but it might also be the lack of art style examples shown on the assignment document that held me back. I appreciate references to other students’ works, but it gives an unseemly idea of what the professor is looking for out of a finished piece.

I’ll consider many of the elements I learned in this piece when I’m completing my fourth project in this course. Spot illustrations are minimal yet entertaining, and I have much more to learn from the potential I can achieve with them.

Ryan Gelder’s project, at https://ryangelderdma.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/project-3/, gave me much-needed inspiration when I was finishing this project. It taught me the ideals of spot illustration that have a range yet a boundary towards what artists should discover for their works.

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.

I decided to grab a picture of Mark Fischbach (Markiplier) for Project 1. Creating it took a while, but it was worth the effort.

For Image Tracing, I learned that I needed to choose the Extend option to show the paths of the traced image and use the Re-Color option for the custom palette. (There’s nothing particularly interesting about how I used it, but I know there were some difficulties about using it in the last lab.)

I found it easy to use the filters and image editing techniques that we learned from the first two labs. Although some of the work took time, it’s intriguing discovering the outcome.

The most challenging part was deciding the variety of content to use for the image. I didn’t have much content to begin my illustrating with, after all.
Next time, I think I should spend more time finding a celebrity who has more Creative Commons usage to their name. Markiplier, fortunately, has much content available to the public, although I couldn’t access most of it in picture form.

The selection of inspirational art was impressive and informative, but I’d still like to see examples that relate closer to the project we’re currently doing than various, unrelated artists.

With the time I’ve spent on the project, I think it was worth the redundancy in visual effects and decision-making that I now have an idea of promotional illustration and development. I don’t have any doubts that many people go through the process of creating multiple works in short amounts of time, and I think this project was a highlighting point of what I might be in for if I go into graphic design. \

The “EXPLAINING HOW I CREATE NEW DIGITAL ART” video was a great source of inspiration since my idea of making digital abstractions wasn’t too strong when I began. With the idea that I could still use something so precise and definitive to make something wacky, I felt empowered.

Here, I decided to grab a picture of Sean McGloughlin (Jacksepticeye) for Lab 1. I had a great time making these, even if they were a bit extensive.

I learned more about the Mixer Brush tool than I thought I ever would, mostly because I don’t deal with much digital art that requires it. However, I found that it’s a fantastic tool for different jobs and that it’s malleable for many settings.

In my opinion, making the sketch and trying out different filters were simple and engaging activities in the lab. I already love messing around with filters in other programs, but I just found it fun to do all over again.

Planning out and designing the brush and smudge image was the most arduous activity in the bunch, giving me the idea of covering an entire image as a time-consuming task.

I suppose, to ease the burden on myself, I should have chosen a smaller image to go through the activity. That way, I can come up with the same quality in a shorter amount of time.

Perhaps next time, the assignment could also call for fewer filters for us to try out, expand the limit of brush size for the “brush and smudge paint,” or remove the “Connect the Dots” activity for the sake of time conservation.

I see myself using these features in future assignments for designing large-scale backgrounds or textures in video games or rendered productions where detail isn’t highly-regarded but needs a slight touch-up for presentation and aesthetic.

Regarding my previous line art inspired me to work harder to accomplish the arrangement of details in the sketch version of the picture, as I could understand the importance of features and the leniency of sketches in their own right.