Project Four — Skills

These were a series of sketching/Adobe Illustrator exercises for the Communication Design Fundamentals course at CMU.

I. Sketching Exercises

As a brief introduction to sketching, we were challenged to draw many different types of lines, closed spaces, and textures in 30 seconds. We then experimented with sketching rudimentary people with varying styles and emotions/actions (sad, scared, running, happy). It was interesting to see how adding arms or adjusting the body shape would affect the overall sketch. Finally, we experimented with using different colors to enhance or change the meaning of each sketch.

II. AI Pathfinder Exercise

The goal of this exercise was to use the pathfinder tool in Adobe Illustrator to recreate a given robot figure from different geometric shapes. Overall, this was a pretty fun exercise that exposed me to the Pathfinder tool.

(left) Original robot (right) My robot

The most challenging part was recreating the precise positioning of each element of the original robot.

After merging every shape together into a whole robot

(left) Prior to using the “Trim” pathfinder tool (right) Creating a half ear using the pathfinder overlap