Even after using Illustrator in Intro to Digital Media, I could not have been more unprepared to work with the pen tool, but luckily the directions were available on the template itself.

I found it easy to keep up with the directions and successfully draw the shapes I needed to. I’m happy I could understand so that I wouldn’t waste much time trying to figure out the controls.

The only real trouble that I had with the pen tool was that it would sometimes not give me the expected results, even if I had tried every curvature mode that I could think of. I also found it hard to memorize these tricks, so I’ll have to come back to the document and brush up.

I’m not looking forward to using the pen tool in the future, but I know I’ll definitely need to. In those cases, I expect that it’s to carefully dissect an image to grab some elements out of it and use them elsewhere, and I suppose that goes for many images from nature, which is not very geometric by default.

I think that the Lab 5 screencast helped me through this the best. I think it’s interesting that I was so lost before using screencasts that they help me a lot more when I end up watching them.

After using Blender haphazardly about a year ago, it was fun to come back and learn new skills in making 3D objects in the program, such as extending the cylinder that I was using and scaling its components.

I thought it was easy to recognize the 3D view controls, in addition to repositioning the camera. I’ve used similar programs to Blender that have many familiar controls.

I knew I’d try and modify individual points of the shapes to provide some added style, but I found that it was more pointlessly time-consuming, so I decided to leave that for another time when I didn’t have a deadline.

I look forward to using this kind of 3D modeling to create models of my own for various programs that I develop. Most likely, I’d be creating this kind of model for chess games, but I suppose it would be nice to see fancy chess pieces strewn among collections of knick-knacks.

The Exercise 6 video was a great help. I’m thankful to know that we can still receive instruction like this in such a difficult time.