Week 14: Day 3–Playing with Color again

Since my Bleh! day, I have had my daughter graduate from 5th grade...I think the only times I graduated were from high school and from college. I can't believe my baby is growing up so much.  Next year I will have one in high school and one in middle school, a teen and a tween.  Boy, the hormones are raging around here. I never know if what I say will make someone laugh or cry. It's always an adventure!

But, back to blogging...the other day I tried an abstract image with the colors. I didn't like the result, so I decided to try again.  It took a few tries, but I finally ended up with any image that I liked.

The Result:

The Process:
I started in Adobe Illustrator and drew a shape of curly squiggles.  I then cropped the image but didn't like it, so I started over.

To try something different I started with the image size and drew squiggles within the box.  Then I cropped the image and used the pathfinder tool to create individual shapes.

I stared with light colored lines, and then used the darker colors as the fill for the shapes.  I tired a couple of different variations:

With this variation I thought, maybe....

So I tried turning it to see if it worked each way....

But I still wasn't quite feeling it.  So I tried more variations, changing the outline and fill colors to see what I could come up with. 

So still not feeling it, I looked back at what I had already done, and guess what, I thought the first was what I was looking for, but it wasn't quite right so I made a few alterations to the outline colors and weights to come up with the final image:

So I darkened the line up, made the lines thinner and made the frame color the same as the outline color, and voila, I have an abstract image using the dark color palette. 

Week 14: Day 2–Playing with Color

My word for today is bleh!  I woke up in a funky mood this morning and haven't found a way out of it.  Despite that, I have actually made myself work on the blog.

Step 1
In Illustrator, I have used the pencil tool and drew a curvy and overlapping line.  Then I put a box around it and then used Pathefinder tool to divide into different shapes.

Step 2
I used the color palette to color each of the shapes in the image...bleh!

Bleh!

Double Bleh!

Step 3
After playing with the lighter colors, I found a very abstract image and re-colored the image accordingly.....what do you see?  And no, bleh! is not the answer!

Week 13: Days 6 - Freebie Card

It's Freebie Card day!

The Result:
Based on my sketches of Sand Dollars, I created this card.

Link to download your card!

The Process:

The first step of the card today was taking my scanned image into Illustrator (top), then using the Live Trace tool, I created a vector image (bottom).  After creating the vector image, I copied and pasted it into Photoshop.  

From a sketch to a vector image.

Once in Photoshop, I added color, duplicated and manipulated the layers, applied transparencies and effects, to achieve the final image:

The final image.

Enjoy!  Next week: Graphic Interpretations.

Week 12, Day 4 More Patterns

So continuing with patterns, I went with a hexagon today in Illustrator.

I found a tutorial on how to make this cool retro/honeycomb pattern from Veerle's Blog.  So I created this shape and made it into a symbol, then I duplicated it.

After matching it up, I duplicated again and again, to fill my page

Now it is time to crop and fill the page with the background image/pattern.

Next, I found a cool tool in the symbol palette that allows you to change the colors around with the press of a button.  Here are some of the different variations.  

Isn't it interesting to see the difference a little color can make, and how the different colors react with each other?

Week 12, Day 3 Circle Patterns

Using my color palette, I created some circle patterns in Illustrator today.

The first pattern I created was using a halftone screen effect .  I started with a simple gradient.  Then I rasterized the image, and through the effects, I created pixels.  I had to try several times to get the right size for what I wanted.  Then I copied the layers in different color, flipping some of the layers 180°.

The second pattern utilized my color palette and then I created this circle pattern, intersected the circles and filled them accordingly.  As I am describing these, I am realizing that showing you the steps would probably make more sense, so tomorrow, I will try to do that!

This pattern is also overlapping circles when I then intersected so I could have each piece separate.  Originally I wanted to use all the color but as I started filling in the shapes with color this one just worked, so I stopped.

Week 6, Day 6: Freebie Friday Card

This week's final card image:

The Download Link

My Process:

Since I didn't do a Graphic Day this week – part of my process – I had a longer process for the card. And my final image does not look anything close to my starting image.

Working in Adobe Illustrator, I had decided to use one of my sketches as inspiration for my card design. 

Then I added color.  I tried a complementary color palette, and, trying to go out of my comfort zone, it's not a palette that I would normally pick.

It's looking a little flat.  So I added a drop shadow to add depth.  I still wasn't satisfied so I also added some texture too.

And although the colors are not that bad, I just wasn't feeling it (my theme for the week).  So I changed the colors.

Still not happy, I started all over and changed everything, including programs. So I went into photoshop and started with a textured background, and added layers of lines at different opacity, and with different effects and ended up with this:

TShirt Status

I am still working on the t-shirt.  We are finding out that it's not as simple as it seemed.  

We were doing good with S's shirt until we got to the screening part.  I expected a thicker paint (yellow), and it just soaked right into the shirt (red).  So we are letting it dry , then we will re-screen with a white base coat, and then try the yellow over it.  Hopefully that will help!  If anyone has experience with screening, let me know what kind of ink is best!

Week 4, Day 7: It's A Wrap

This has been a crazy week!  It's been like a roller coaster ride for me.  I've had to finish up several freelance projects, start and finish a few other projects, send out proposals, sick kids, sick me, unscheduled doctors appointments, schedule doctors appointments and, of course, my creative journey.  I did manage to finish all my challenges this week although I didn't get to make my tap-tap model.  A project for another day!

Day 1 - Inspiration Sunday:  My week started off with photo inspiration from my friend Jess.  She is a nurse and goes with a group, HaitiMedicalMission.org, to Haiti every year to perform surgeries free of charge for the Haitian people. I believe she's been going for about 4-5 years, but the group has been going for about 10 years.  When looking at Jess's photo's from her trip, I was inspired by the bright and crazy images of the tap-taps.

Day 2 - It's a Little Sketchy Monday












Day 3 - Creative Tuesday, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Day 4 & 5 - Colorful Wednesday and Graphic Thursday

Day 6 - Freebie Friday

Next week: Adventures in Typography

Week 4, Day 6: Freebie Friday, Part 2

It's Freebie Friday Saturday and I have to say I really enjoyed creating this art today.  I used Adobe Illustrator and found some tools that I had never used, and tried them out.  I learned so many new tricks and processes...see, you can teach an old dog new tricks!

This week I made 2 cards.  One card has "HaitiMedicalMission.org" as part of the art. I would love if you use this one to send to friends.  Let's spread the word about the wonderful work that they do for the Haitian people. If you are interested in learning more about them,to see photos of their trips, the surgeries they perform visit their website.

Haiti Tap-tap inspired card art for
HaitiMedicalMission.org

Click to go to the download link for this card.

The other card is all art, with the Haiti Medical Mission.org information on the back of the card.

Haiti Tap-tap inspired card art

Click to go to the download link for this file.

I hope you enjoy!