'Twas the Nightmare Before Christmas...

My Recreation

Original

#6 POSTER: Recreate a poster inspired by the examples shown in class and your own research using the automatic tracing tools. 

I cannot even begin to explain how happy I am with how this came out. The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorite movies of all time and Jack Skellington is one of my favorite characters of all time. Naturally, upon being told to recreate a work of art or movie poster, I looked up The Nightmare Before Christmas (also Harry Potter...). This project was done basically in the same way that the strawberry was. I outlined everything over the original picture and then filled in the colors except this time, I did a dumb.
Rather than outlining the trees and filling them in, I outlined the "white space" of the sky and the background. Because of this boo-boo there are small errors here and there that, if you could see my recreation blown up to full scale, you would definitely be able to see. Over all, I am super proud of this though. I love the way the letters came out, I love the bats, and I love the jack o' lanterns. They are actually my favorite part of the whole thing.
If/when I have more time and experience using illustrator, I would like to go back and fix my errors on this project, and actually put the effect on it that made it so fuzzy and grainy. Without that effect, it doesn't look quite right, but close enough for the boo-boos that I made on it. This one is definitely going up on my wall.

Strawberry Fields Forever

#5 GRADIENT MESH: Get a picture of a three-dimensional fruit and then convert this object into vector shapes using gradient meshes.


Which one is the real strawberry? Are you having trouble figuring it out? I'll give you a hint... it's not the one that looks like a cartoon...
This project, to recreate a fruit in Illustator, was not hard, but it was time consuming. It was mainly the seeds that gave me trouble, but there is much more than that going on. If you notice, there are multiple different shades of red in the strawberry that I created. First, there was just the plain gradient of kinda dark red to kinda light red, and then there was the highlights, and of course, the lowlights. I never noticed how much dimension there is to a piece of fruit until now.
The easiest part of all of it was the leaves. They were actually the most fun too because it was really cool to get to see them coming out basically as the originals did, at least by color. The actual easiest but most boring was the seeds... I traced one then just kept copying and pasting it and changing the size, color, and orientation. Not a hard thing to do, but very boring and when there are that many, you just wanna quit and call it a day before you fall asleep and drool on your keyboard.
Overall, this was a really, really cool project. I did not expect my strawberry to look anything like it does and I am super proud of it. If I had more time and more texture packs, I would add in more details to the leaves and even the fruit itself, but I have another project that's even cooler to finish, so I'll be spending my time on that one.