The beauty of Illustrator | Indoors and outdoors
This week in my Digital Media Design Solutions 1 class we were tasked with recreating elements of an interior and exterior location using Adobe Illustrator.
Interior
My obsession with origami cranes started at the age of eight when I read the book Sadako and a thousand paper cranes.
The story sets place in Japan, portraying the after math of the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. Sadaku is a real life heroine who is diagnosed with leukemia at the age of eleven, but she is a fighter, she doesn’t give in just like that. Recalling a Japanese legend that holds “if a sick person folds one thousand cranes, the gods will grant her wish and make her healthy again”, she sets out to fight her disease by folding a thousand paper cranes. More than anything else I was fascinated by the act of giving life to a paper and then putting your hopes on it.
As you can probably tell by now it’s a very intense book to read at such a young age. To the 8 year old me, paper cranes were alive and they belonged to their paper world. Tying Sadaku and her cranes back to my illustrator assignment, I set out to fold a crane, snap a picture of it, trace it in AI and create its paper world.
I traced the crane using the pen tool and kept the coloring simple, by just using basic gradients to depict the folds and lighting.
Next I decided to give life to my childhood imaginations by creating a short animation piece of the crane’s world in Adobe after effect.
Here is how the final version turned out:
Exterior
For this assignment we were tasked with tracing an exterior object that was meaningful to us. I grabbed my camera and went for a walk in Stratford. The city hall building attracted my attention the most. I remembered keep looking at it through GoogleStreets before I move to Stratford. And now it was there right in front of me. So I decided to trace City hall for my pen tool assignment.
Firstly, I picked out my color pallet using the eyedropper tool.
Next I started tracing the building details one by one and after a few hours of tracing here is the final result.
