Project 1 Brandon Jacobs

For my project one I experimented with using the Live Trace tool on many of my photographs. These four examples are the ones that turned out best:

James Dean: This is a photo of a statue of James Dean's head. The live trace gave it a nice painted look, if I were to work on this more I would try to delete and fill in certain areas to make it look more like a painting.

Beach: I liked how this image turned out, these are the settings I used:
1. Live Trace Using "Color 6" preset and changing max colors to 7
2. Convert to Live Paint
3. Effect > Cross Hatch and adjusted

Japanese Garden: I also liked how this image turned out, especially after I applied the filter. The contrast between the statue and the leaves is great.
1. Live Trace Using "Color 6" preset and changing max colors to 5
2. Effect > Palette Knife and adjusted

Tree House: This image is impressive because all the intricate vines are all vectors; there is so much detail it slowed down my quad-core desktop trying to process it. I made a really high resolution image of this one, click it to see it. I may work with this more on my home desktop, couldn't do much at the school. I also need to edit out my little brothers fist in the lower right corner :)
1. Live Trace Using "Color 6" preset and changing max colors to 9
2. Not enough RAM on the school computer to do any changes :(

10 Minute Exercise: The Mesh Tool

This is my first time using the mesh tool. It is really cool, and I can see it's potential. Mine is very basic and boring, I just moved the points around and changed the colors. I would like to actually make something with this in the future.

10 Minute Exercise: A Spotted Animal

This is supposed to be a furry creature with spots, but I ran out of time for the spots. Originally it was going to be a face, but I was stumped for a while. For this I used the shape tool, the crystalize tool, and some brushes.

10 Minute Exercise: Something That Flies

This exercise was similar to the first, nothing too complicated as I don't know many tools in Illustrator yet. This is just a Da Vinci-esque flying machine concept.

10 Minute Exercise: Something Sci Fi

This is my first illustration made in Illustrator. It is a weird, cube-like creature with large eyeballs. If I had more time I would probably add some limbs or something. I simply used the shape tool and paint brush to make it.

eye

I like doing portraits and figure drawing, so I thought I'd try my hand at doing an eye to see how I could do. I used a lot of tools, like the blob brush, shape tool, and the warp tool.

Lion

This is my sketch of a lion I did and I put through live trace.

Kratos

This was an original sketch of Kratos from god of war. I put though live trace and this was the best i could come up with for now.

Self

I did a black and white livetrace of a digital self-portrait. I lowered the threshold to about 70 to achieve preserve some of the details while getting a very inked look. After that it was took a lot of polishing to cover up stray marks and smooth out certain areas. After everything looked clean, the image was still missing something so I went back and shaded using an extra shade of gray. Lastly I slapped on a gradient in the background to follow the light source,

Red and Black

For this one I solely used the Blob Brush tool. I love painting portraits so just wanted to paint a face. :)

Black Bird

When I think of flying things I automatically thought of a bird. Using the gradient tool that we learned in class that day, I made the transitional shadows between the mountain and water. I spent the most time just tweaking with that so the bird didn't get much attention I'm afraid. I added some highlights on him to make him pop and show the light's direction.

Technologic

My first attempt at making something on Illustrator. Since I'm not entirely familiar or comfortable with the theme or program, I fumbled around quite a bit and started over a few times. In the end I used the line tool to create digital grids and filled in the blank space with a circular gradient. I then created a smaller circle shape and filled it with a texture to enhance the whole Sci-Fi feel.