Stylistic Self-Portrait: Art Nouveau

In this assignment, our illustration firm happens to be creating a promotional booklet highlighting each of the illustrator on staff. And the Art Director asked each illustrator to create their own self-portrait in a style from art history.

So I chose the 'Art Nouveau' style for my self-portrait. Mainly because I am a fan of using florals and swirls on my art pieces and art nouveau focus a lot on using repeated patterns, florals, and swirls as its style. I did a lot of research for this art style so I can better portray it in my self-portrait. And most art nouveau style focused on a female figures with long flowing dresses who are usually symbolizing something the artist wants to portray. The style mostly has a nude faded color to it so that the focus is on the female figure.

Since each female in the style seems have an element that represents them, I decided to use butterfly in my self-portrait in which representing the transitions and growing I had to go through just like a butterfly's metamorphosis. For the portrait, I used the similar theme of art nouveau by having me in a flowing dress either sitting or coming out of the big patterned circle. As for the detailed patterns, I decided to use simple basic shapes such as circles and lines to create a more consistent base for the whole picture. I also used nude brownish color and reddish purple to give a bit of a contrast to the picture. I did not focus too much on details for my body because I did not want to stray away from the art nouvea style and have me look too realistic.

I could improve the illustration more by working more on the patterns, and the colors of the portrait. But overall, I did enjoyed working on it despite the time it consumes.

Photorealistic Illustration

As for this assignment, we were told our illustration studio was hired by an ad agency to illustrate photorealistic vectors of the Proctor and Gamble products so that they look like a high quality studio photograph. Since these illustration will be used at a Proctor and Gamble sales convention, they are going to be made into very large sizes, allowing for no mistakes.

So I had to buy a product from Proctor and Gamble, take a photograph of the product and use the photograph as a reference and template. This is probably the most challenging and difficult assignments I had to do since I know little about gradient mesh and blend tool.

Since the rest of my classmates are using comestics or body products, I decided to do mine photorealistic illustration on a needed feminine care product: Always. Using the photograph as the template, I did a lot of pen tracing, and used a lot of eyedropper tool. I had a difficult time trying to use gradient mesh to give indepth looks to different parts of the product. But I think the product looks presentable as a whole but I could have worked more on the details of the shading to give it a more realistic look to the product. But this was my first photorealistic illustration so I think I did a pretty neat job. :-)

Twitter Bird

As the instruction for this assignment goes, I am a freelance illustrator with my own portfolio blog site. And I want for my clients and fellow illustrators to follow me on twitter, so I needed to create a twitter bird icon for the web to make sure they notice me.

This was a fun project to work on. What I have posted above is the finalized twitter bird that I turned in for class. The original twitter bird icon has a classic presentable style but I wanted mine to look playful and bubbly looking twitter bird. So I made my bird in a round shape with a big glossy eye. I played around with the gradient color to make the whole bird have a glossy looking.

Road Signs

In this second assignment, similar to the first, we were asked to make 'Road Signs' that will graphically depict the subject indicated for each of the given road signs. We were given just one solid background to work with but we were allowed to use black fill for the images. But for this assignment, we were ask to use our creative imagination to depict each road sign. The sky was the limit.

I wanted each sign to look unique on their own without too much details. At first, I had a difficult time thinking of what to portray in each sign. So I drew what ever came to my mind at the moment for each road sign.I could have worked alittle bit more on some of the signs like nuclear power plant. But I believe it worked as whole unit.

This following 'Tornado Warning' road sign was part of the assignment as well. We were asked to create our own road sign separately. So I decided to do on tornado warning since it's pretty easy to be recognizable.

Zoo Icons

As the first assignment of the class, we were told that our design firm was asked to create a series of graphic animal icons for signs that will be placed around a new zoo. Given just a solid square background to work with, our zoo icons must be highly recognizable and generic to the species so that it will be understandable to a wide range of public visitors.

This is my first assignment to be working with a pen tool to create iconic shapes in Illustrator. My goal for this assignment was to have a unified theme for all the zoo icons so that they are easy to recognize and presentable. Which is why, I focused on details for each zoo animals so that they look as realistic as possible. I had photo reference for the animals to get the details for the zoo icons.

Overall, I enjoyed creating zoo animals and had fun with using pen tool although it was a bit tired-some.