Tag: Adobe Illustrator

Library Windows

Library logo attempt
window

I’m designing a logo for the Friends of our local library, and Arts and Crafts style Carnegie Free Library and I’m struggling to get the precision I need for a simple graphic that can be reproduced at various sizes, including on a letterhead.

I’ve been learning all I can about Procreate and it should be simple to design it in the program but, as so often, my shaky hands are letting me down. For some projects I would welcome the wobble as it gives can make an intimidating facade look more friendly – and this is for a ‘Friends’ group after all -but I’ve decided to go for a program that enables even me to easily produce precise geometric shapes and I’ve gone to Adobe Illustrator.

But I might come back to Procreate for the finishing touches.

Summer

Summer eBook

The last day of meteorological summer and I’m gathering my sketchbook drawings from the last three months together for an eBook.

Summer cover

I’m experimenting with the eBook option in Adobe InDesign, going for an iPad format. This gives me a more control over the way words and images are presented than I get with my regular blog.

Lettering

Rather than use a regular typeface, I decided to use the carved lettering on one of the tombstones in Brodsworth Church as my starting point for a title logo.

Lettering: 'SUMMER'

In true Roman fashion the stone mason used the chiselled ‘V’ that you’d find on a Roman inscription to represent an upper case ‘U’, so I patched one together from the lower half of an ‘O’ and two different capital ‘I’s, keeping the slant he’d used one to fit it into the word ‘AETATIS’ (‘age’).

Colour lettering 'SUMMER'

I imported my title logo into Adobe Illustrator and converted it into three tones using Image Trace, then took that back into Photoshop and replaced the three tones with colours derived from my cover image.

Every Sofa will be Famous for Fifteen Minutes

I used the ‘Image Trace’ function in Adobe Illustrator on my iMac to convert my pen and ink drawing of a sofa into a vectorised image. On a layer below I used the pen tool and – my new favourite – the blob brush to add a few areas of solid colour.

You can then re-colour the image either by changing colours individually or selecting the whole image and going for an alternative scheme from a colour theme library. Here I’ve used ‘Pop Art’, ‘Prehistoric’ and ‘Ice Cream’ (the one in chocolate and pistachio).

A Shed in the Snow

shed in the snow

I converted this sketch of our shed in the snow in Illustrator for iPad. Instead of ‘Image Trace’ there’s a very similar vectorise function, which can convert it into something nearer to a woodcut or lino-cut.

Junction Box

junction box

I drew this trackside junction box from a photograph in Adobe Illustrator. There’s a lot more planning involved in the process and mapping out shapes with the pen tool seems more like cutting shapes for a collage than drawing.

cruet

So far manipulating anchor points on the outlines of shapes seems rather random to me. I find it easy to inadvertently delete an anchor point and lose a section of the shape. Converting between an anchor that results in a straight line and one that results in a curve seems equally obscure.

The only way that I’ll learn is to keep practising.

Woodcut

nature studies, woodcut effect in Illustrator

These are my sketches from the weekend given the Image Trace treatment in the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator as I was after a lino-cut or woodcut effect. It gives my pen and watercolour natural form a graphic chunkiness.

grapevine

So how about the grapevine I drew yesterday? Would lend itself to the sort of woodcut-inspired design that you see on a wine label? No, it doesn’t have the graphic presence of the bluebell stem, I’d need to draw it again with the context of the design in mind and make it a bit bolder.

feather

This wood pigeon feather works better as it’s a simpler form. I could imagine using it for a logo.

Tracing in Adobe Illustrator

bike

bike sketch
Original sketch

I love the printmaking effect that I can get by converting one of my sketches into a vector graphic in Adobe Illustrator CC 2018. I’ve reproduced this image at almost its full screen size (the original sketch is much smaller) because I didn’t want to soften it by reducing it too much.

I’ve downloaded the program this morning as part of my year’s subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud and I’ve been going through the beginner’s tutorials as it’s so many years since I last used Illustrator.

I’d never come across the option to automatically trace a scan or a photograph of a drawing and turn it into crisp black and white vector artwork. I immediately started thinking of how I might use that in my work.

The Pinder of Wakefield
George-a-Green, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, before and after vectorisation.

For instance, I’m currently working on a historical article for the Dalesman magazine and I feel that vector graphics could give the effect of a woodcut. Even after a lot of practice, I’m more used to drawing with a pen than an Apple Pencil, so this might be an effective way of combining the freedom of drawing with the graphics effects available on the computer.

In both of the examples above I went for the ‘Shades of Grey’ preset in the Trace Image dialogue.

Link

Adobe Illustrator CC

 

Pecking Order

THE FIRST birds to find our new fat (with mealworms) feeder were the Starlings but this morning a female Great Spotted Woodpecker was feeding on it. We’ve rarely had woodpeckers feeding so near the house.

Adobe Illustrator

In my attempt to learn all about my new computer and all the new programs that I have on it, I’m going through the tutorials for Adobe Illustrator.

Even following the step-by-steps on how to construct a figure, I’m having the greatest difficulty achieving anything that looks remotely like an illustration. I think this is because my normal drawing process is so different from the layers and objects approach of this vector graphics program.

The calligraphy brush which I used for the mug brings me nearer to the kind of drawing that I’m comfortable with.