FIrst Project, Initial Write Up

Our first class project of the semester: create a diorama, using either procured images or illustrations, edited in either photoshop or illustrator. The first idea that my mind immediately latched onto was the idea of scale. I wanted to show a man, on the road for a quest or somesuch, and juxtapose him against large mountains in the distance- his destination. I liked the idea and ran with it.

To the left we see the man himself. Just a quick sketch here, I liked the design, and decided to move forward with the idea. Since I would be illustrating my piece, I decided to naturally use Illustrator, since vectors are crisp no matter how much you zoom in.

My decision was not without frustration, however. I haven't really used the program in a while and was immediately reminded why. You see Illustrator's brush tool has an auto-correct feature that curves your lines out, removing all "imperfections." It sucks. It completely messes with your drawing style and rounds out every corner. It's almost impossible to draw a square with the tool. It's nuts.

So naturally I tried out the pencil, the only other drawing tool. Thankfully, this did everything I wanted it to. However, the tool has one innate flaw- the line it makes is one weight, the entire time. This leads to very to drawings with no line depth, so I had to go back to the drawing board, pun most certainly intended.

Eventually, what i ended up doing was editing the above sketch in photoshop, imported it into illustrator, used the LiveTrace tool to get a rough vector, and then added another layer on top where i whited out all the imperfections. I colored him, sent him back into photoshop, and applied a sepia filter to him (I'd decided that in order to create unity in the piece I would do this with each object.) I then repeated the process for the hills, mountains, and clouds.

All in all, I like what I've done. But I probably will have to return to the pictures after looking at them all in one place. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to see the finished product once we've been taught how to go about making it.