Tayonna Thomas Portfolio
Balloon Festival Poster
For our second assignment we were asked to recreate a poster for a festival by following the steps from the book. Our job was to learn about other tools available. Like how to use the pen tool. The pen tool (to some) is the most tedious tool in illustrator. It exists to make clean curves, lines, and shapes. Having blazed through computer graphics I expected to not have much trouble with it. Which was for the most part true, but I found I’m not as good with it when it comes to using a mouse. However with a bit of practice I got the hang of it. It seems I had the most trouble when it came to pressing the alt key. After doing the line art I was re-introduced to gradients. Gradients were probably the most fun to work with as I remembered liking them in computer graphics as well. Instead of using an airbrush to create gradients you use the gradients tab to pick which colors you want to use and apply them to the object. I also learned how to change the angle of the gradient which I hadn’t realized was there before.
The biggest thing I learned was the recolor tool. (and probably for the most part the only thing so far.) By selecting an object you can simply select the colors you used and recolor them. I’ve no idea to why that blew my mind. I imagine it’s definitely an art thief's greatest weapon. Overall I quite enjoyed this project. It was fun and easy to create.
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This is the performance portion of our project. Our goal was to create six objects related to a popular event. The event I chose was a nature convention. Where people do outdoor activities, explore nature, garden, etc. The first object I chose was a rock and a tree, because they are definitely something you’d see in nature. I also drew some fruits to show that there would be healthy snacks there, however I’m not too proud of them. I spent over a third of class time just trying to get all the slices even on the orange and another chunk of time went to trying to get the colors right on the kiwi. I drew a swan and a cardinal to show that there would be wildlife there to observe. Then I drew a potted plant and a rake to show that there would be gardening involved in the convention.
Finally I drew a paintbrush and a rose to show that there would be art created and sold there, since art is pretty much always being sold to people at conventions. I spent forever trying to get the gradients correct on the paintbrush, but above all I’d say the rose was the most tedious portion of the project, not because of the complexity of lines, but it wouldn’t let me fill it in even with the shape builder tool. (I assume because the lines did not overlap) so I improvised and used the draw behind function to color it in. However because of the multiple paths I was unable to add gradients to it.