My first experience with digital art — Baugasm
I started doing digital art in the fall of 2019. I decided I would sign up for a SkillShare course (by Vasjen Katro) because I needed some new personal hobbies that could keep me growing and that I could maybe use in the future as a form of freelance work.
Baugasm™ Series #1 — Create Experimental Gradients and Posters | Vasjen Katro | Skillshare
I really had no experience with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator in the past, but I do remember in middle school (which, this makes me laugh out of nostalgia) using Adobe Fireworks before that product was absolutely abandoned by the company. However, with that software I was able to learn how to use tools like the magic wand, filters, and more. But enough reminiscing on my childhood; how did my first experience go? At the time, I was living with my roommate in both of ours first dorm on campus. I found some free time and started the course. I found it sort of challenging at first but just watching the videos closely and over and over again really made it pretty straightforward.
Creating the Color Grid
First I open Adobe Illustrator and draw a rectangle, next are use a grid tool which lets me draw grid points on a plane, such as my rectangle. Next while holding Shift+A, I am able to select those grade points and assign them a color with the stars, is it lets me generate automatically a gradient from the cartridge selected to the color of its surroundings. I do this several times, generating a color for each point that I specified, creating a mosaic of gradients all over my plane. Once I have this mosaic, it's time to generate the shape and flow of the piece. What I mean by this is, we're going to take the rectangle and turn it into an amorphous blob, taking the sharp evenly spaced color regions and turning them into large expenses of color, and rivers of pinks and reds, and creating the pieces you see below. To do this, simply select one of your points and drag it somewhere else. The colors that surround it should follow, and your plane will suddenly be much more kinetic. You can drag points off of the rectangle for a better effect.
Final Result
Once I have the shape down, I move over to Adobe Photoshop, where I add filters and adjust the colors and saturations and the contrast as needed in order to get to the complete and final piece. I add a background sometimes an image, sometimes a copy and paste my shape into the background and blur it for an interesting contrast effect, and sometimes I just make it a single color. My goal is to create something interesting, colorful, and abstract. In Photoshop, I incorporate typography, giving each of my pieces a name and specifying collection it belongs to. These are the final results!
Check it out on Behance: Jorge Aquino on Behance
