Mini-blog #3 — Improving the illustration skills

The third assignment was following the same instructions as the second one. This time however the goal was to take an outdoor picture of something organic, import it to Illustrator and focus on improving the skills already gained. I decided to take the quality over quantity approach on this: instead of attempting to vectorize as much as possible from the image (which I sort of tried with the first Illustrator assignment) I decided to focus single element and replicate it as good as I possibly could at this point.

I chose to take the above picture of a branch and focus on one of the leaves, as I figured it would be challenging enough, yet relatively easy to get done within the timeframe provided. Below is the final work created.

The image still contains various things than could have been illustrated to improve the content, but the smallest details would not have made the difference in the end. The idea in the end was to prove the understanding of using the Illustrator as a tool and to show you can work with organic shapes. In my case the use of layers turned out to be an important factor as well.

With this piece of work I was able to work and understand the various layers and how to work with them. I started with outlining the full leaf (leaf 1) which was the most time consuming part. I later on understood that you should always start with the biggest element and then move towards the smaller ones.

The second part was to draw the branch. This is where it got creative: Instead of tracing the whole branch, it turned out to be easier to draw a full square area that cover the full branch, choose a color for it, and then just place it underneath the “leaf 1” layer. This way only the visible parts which were already left out by the previous tracing were just visible. Pretty clever!

After this, I just moved on tracing the remaining individual parts one by one. I tried pick the most crucial ones to the eye, but didn’t want to go too much into details. pointing those white dots one by one… maybe next time!