Final

For my final I wanted to make fully finished characters on Adobe Illustrator. By doing this i will learn the skills needed to make a vector based image. I did some research to find out how you would go about  making outlined characters in Adobe Illustrator. (here are some links of some useful sites)

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/2d__and__photoshop/creating_vector_characters_in_illustrator

http://www.adobepress.com/articles/article.asp?p=1153024

http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/illustration/how-to-create-a-fantasy-character-in-illustrator/

To make characters in Illustrator i obviously have to know how to work the programme. To do this i went through a bunch of tutorials Dave Green gave me. It was boring as hell but was a great help. Im almost at the level of skill that im having fun with the programme!…almost.

I began my process in photoshop, sketching out characters using a wacom tablet and then placing my favourite pictures into illustrator to fill and outline. Here are some of my sketches…

I used a downloaded plug-in brush called ‘stumpy pencil’. it gives the pictures a very natural pencil look. very fun.

I grabbed some of these sketches from the massive canvas that these above images were  all taken from and tidied them up in another window. (like the one below)

from here I ‘placed’ the sketch into illustrator to fill and colour.

My plan was to make several Images of a character in different shots. If I had time I would do another series of shots of another character. My firstshot of the fully finished image of my first character took a LONG time but as I made more I became quicker. The bunch of shots for my second character (robot) only took a day and a half, so I am getting faster  (though it was harder to make the human because I had to be a lot more accurate with human proportions than the science fiction robot).

Presenting the characters

For this elective I really wanted to learn Illustrator, I had learnt from my last Project that it was obvious I would be needing to use Illustrator in the future. The Project was themed; mixing digital and analog together. Using techniques from both areas to create a work. So I had to think about how i was going to present my digital drawings in an analog fashion. Printing them is an obvious way of turning digital into analog, but it didnt show one good element that is unique to just analog art. something that is impossible to have in digital. Sculpture came to mind, sculptures create an interactive space for the viewer. it can turn the audience into more than just a viewer, a toucher or a smeller etc. I began thinking of showing my images on a shape of some kind. My first thoughts were printing my images on cubes, but that would mean one image would be shown on the top of the cube and would be flat like a piece of paper ontop of a box. Also it would need the audience to look straight down on it to look at it front on.  A cube wasn’t the best fit.. A quadrilateral triangle (for some reason) seemed to fit the idea much better. I created a template of a Quadrilateral triangle in illustrator and made some proto-types. I started experimenting with a whole lot of the folded up templates, joining them together to make different shapes but came to no conclusion with this idea. So for my final i stuck with the quadrilateral triangle.

I made the sides of my triange and fit them together with hot clue. It was a very technical process that needed a lot of working out, a bit of..Trigonometry?… I had to angle the edges of each triangle and make the framing (if only you could look inside my boxes to see the intricate skeleton work! (all angled edges and the braces that have been calculated to sit horizontally parallel to the bottom face of the triangle)). Hardout.

I wanted to present the triangles ( with the characters printed on the sides) by hanging them. Once again it is because of space. The audiene can move round the objects. The Objects actually exist in a space and the audience can interact with them by spinning them etc.

End Result

Something that made my hanging triangles quite interesting was the way the two characters interacted with each other, as they slowing spun round the viewer got to see different pictures, and if you connected the two images you see from both triangles it played out a (very vage) narration. (Originally I thought of these two characters as being the batman and robin kind of  team…More like  the chewie and Han kind probably.. Yet sometimes it looked like the robot was pointing at the man whilst he ran away. other times the man was shooting at the robot. Very cool.

From here I want to keep working on the skills learnt in this elective. I need to work on the programmes needed and on simply drawing figures.

Paint Brushes in Photoshop/Illustrator

A really important setting when your drawing freehand in photoshop/illustrator is the type of brush your using with the brush tool. It really makes a difference. so i am on a mish to find wicked brush presets on the net. I found one called ‘stumpy pencil’ and it is totally wicked. Ill try to keep a list of all the web addresses that have given me good brush presets.

For a look like this….

go to this….

http://stumpypencil.blogspot.com/2006/03/stumpy-pencil-photoshop-brush.html

this one has some goodies…

http://photoshop.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=34412

COPY PASTE INTO THE PROGRAMME’S (adobe or illustratr) FOLDER CALLED TOOLS. in photoshop this is found in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Tools. you’d think you paste them into the folder ‘brushes’ but you dont…well for me it doesnt work in that folder…

The Beach Animals

Theo Jansen’s Beach animals are amazing. What amazed me more than the concept and the created forms was that fact he had so many different types and had expanded on his ideas so much, the fact that he made a device to pin the animal down into the sand when the wind came up was impressive and also equally impressive the 1.3 tone one made out of metal.

EA Elective.

OK so far i’ve been looking at Ted.com and watching some really interesting videos.  I have no idea yet as to what i am going to be working on in this elective. But at the mo I am trying to focus on videos that discuss technology and science so i can further my research on science fiction. Watching talks on ted.com was a great place to start. I found one on the main page called:

Carolyn Porco: Could a Saturn moon harbor life?

It was really interesting to here about this kind of stuff. It gets you excited to think that one day we coould be rocking it on another planet. Are we going to actually achieve the technology to immigrating to another planet? If we could, then it makes you think, our technology is going to the savior of our existance. We’re going to get so technologically advanced that we could live forever…maybe.

From this video i began exploring Videos related to technology and science and found a lot of different views and ideas about what future technology will be like for humans.

Freeman Dyson

I looked at some videos of a physicist called Freeman Dyson, in his 60 plus years in the game he has become a renowned and best selling author. His most recent book, A Many-Coloured Glass , tackles nothing less than biotechnology, religion and the role of life in the universe. He revealed some really interesting ideas to me; The Theory that we could design animals to live on other planets in the outer solar system where it is obviously too cold for any animal to live.

Also in this elective I have been trying to get hang on the Adobe software Illustrator. Watching tutorials etc.  Hopefully my project can use Illustrator as well as the material i bring into the digital realm. Illustrator seems big and daunting but i can already see the advantages over Adobe Photoshop when it comes to my specific line of work.