■My Adobe Illustrator Art

Adobe Illustrator's name can be misleading to those who aren't familiar with it. It's not necessarily a drawing program, and definitely not like using MS Paint or Photoshop's brushes. Illustrator deals with vectors. It's more like constructing an image. Here's more about vectors.

	■22. Perseverance Date: 7/27/08 Ramblings: Ah, it's been a while. With this piece I felt like drawing some sort of struggle. The woman is trying to reach the crystal, but her foes will not let her.	■21. Cruiser Date: 8/10/07 Ramblings: I suppose I was thinking of Halo. I felt like drawing something 3D-ish with heavy gradient usage.
	■20. All-seeing Eye Date: 6/4/07 Ramblings: I was just bored and wanted to mess around with Illustrator's quirky 3D features.	■19. Heaven & Hell Date: 3/30/07 Ramblings: Fun with Illustrator's auto trace feature. I wasn't thinking about anything in particular. I just wanted to draw something interesting. I was going to draw clouds but the bubbles looked cooler.
	■18. Caught Date: 3/27/07 Ramblings: These are two mean people who live to bring misery to my friends. The light bulb symbolizes that they've been caught in their evil act and their true grotesque selves are shown to all.	■17. Monsters Date: 3/20/06 Ramblings: I felt like drawing some random monsters.
	■16. Plastic Date: 2/24/06 Ramblings: Somewhat inspired by a dream.	■15. Wings Date: 2/22/06 Ramblings: I was thinking of freedom and the sky.
	■14. Awkward Date: 2/22/06 Ramblings: This was inspired by a recent dream.	■13. Two Faces Date: 2/21/06 Ramblings: This was inspired by a flashback on a previous social situation.
Reflection insert (2/22/06): At this point I feel totally comfortable with Illustrator and I no longer feel the need to do focus studies. Hence from now on, I'm just going to draw whatever with no particular emphasis on certain features.

	■12. General Study - "Banana" Date: 12/18/05 Features used: Pen tool, brushes, opacity, blending modes, clipping mask, gradients, blending path, pattern fill Source image: Photo of woman Ramblings: This is a combo tracing, blending path and brush study. I traced over the photo of a woman in an artistic way. It has a banana theme for no apparent reason. I like how I did her hair.
	■11. Pattern Study - "Optical Illusion" Date: 12/18/05 Features used: Pattern fill, pattern scale/shear, pen tool Ramblings: This was created with a single checkerboard pattern. I slapped together all sorts of shapes with the pattern. With each bundle of shapes I edited the pattern fill in various ways.
	■10. Gradient Mesh Study - "Flower" Date: 6/10/05 Features used: Gradient mesh, pen tool, clipping mask, brushes Source image: Photo of flower Ramblings: I hate using gradient mesh! >_< I've been avoiding it, but I have to get comfortable with it sooner or later, so in this study I put full focus into it. Gradient mesh is a powerful feature of Illustrator that allows you to create custom gradients. You can stretch or contract gradients in any direction, in any shape or form. But as wonderful as that sounds, gradient mesh is time-consuming! So yeah, in this study I traced over a flower and its spuds using gradient mesh. I think I did pretty good.
	■9. Tracing Study - "Cats" Date: 6/1/05 Features used: Brushes, blending paths, envelope mesh Source image: Photos of cats Ramblings: Eh, I learned some useful things in this study, but it came out ugly. I should've attempted to trace over the whole cat first instead of outlining it first.
	■8. Blending Path Study - "Tube" Date: 5/14/05 Features used: Blending paths, opacity, blending modes, pen tool, gradients Ramblings: Blending path is Illustrator's wonderful feature that creates a morphed pattern between two objects. Attempted to create the inside of a tube with Illustrator's blending path feature. Used gradients to emphasize depth of field.
	■7. Tracing Study - "Forest" Date: 5/05 Features used: Brushes, symbols, pen tool, blending paths, path finder, gaussian blur Source image: Photo of forest Ramblings: This is more along the lines of an artist's interpretation of an image rather than a 'true' tracing. I experimented again with the brush to see how well it can draw trees. The smaller trees are just the same tree converted to a symbol and repeated over and over, because there's no way in hell I'm going to draw like 100 individual trees. I had trouble drawing the sky, as it is supposed to be something that's full of hundreds of colors. The result didn't make the clouds look like a background, so I tried gaussian blur on them, and it seems to have done the trick.
	■6. Gradient Study - "Gel Sphere" Date: 5/14/05 Features used: Gradients, opacity, blending modes, outer glow, inner glow, path finder Ramblings: Here I'm experimenting with with the famous gel sphere that you see everywhere on the web and on the Mac OS. I'm playing with it in an array of circumstances to create some sort of robotic scene.
	■5. Gradient Study - "Two Frames" Date: 5/10/05 Features used: Gradients, pattern fill, opacity, blending modes, clipping mask, gaussian blur, path finder Ramblings: With my gradient studies I'm not specially experimenting with Illustrator's gradients. I see it as studying with 2D lighting in general, since whatever I learn here can also be applied to Photoshop, Freehand, Flash, etc. Anyway, here I'm experimenting with lighting on a wall, and controlling how the light interacts with objects on the wall.
	■4. 3D Study - "Bottles" Date: 4/05 Features used: 3D revolve, gradients, pen tool, gaussian blur Ramblings: Playing around with Illustrator's new 3D revolve tool, added to Illustrator CS. It came out neat! :) But I'd rather create things myself rather than have a feature generate it for me, so I won't be using the 3D revolve feature much in my studies.
	■3. Brush Study - "Cliff" Date: 11/25/05 Features used: Various brushes, opacity, gradients, blending paths, gaussian blur Ramblings: More experimenting with Illustrator's brushes. I wanted to create some sort of mystical scene.
	■2. Line Study - "Cubes" Date: 11/25/04 Features used: Pen tool, symbols Ramblings: I wanted to see what I could come up with attempting to create some sort of 3D block world.
	■1. Brush Study - "Ocean" Date: 11/25/04 Features used: Various brushes, opacity, blending modes, gradients Ramblings: My first work experimenting with all the brushes that come with Adobe Illustrator.

■My Adobe Illustrator Art

■22. Perseverance

■21. Cruiser

■20. All-seeing Eye

■19. Heaven & Hell

■18. Caught

■17. Monsters

■16. Plastic

■15. Wings

■14. Awkward

■13. Two Faces

■12. General Study - "Banana"

■11. Pattern Study - "Optical Illusion"

■10. Gradient Mesh Study - "Flower"

■9. Tracing Study - "Cats"

■8. Blending Path Study - "Tube"

■7. Tracing Study - "Forest"

■6. Gradient Study - "Gel Sphere"

■5. Gradient Study - "Two Frames"

■4. 3D Study - "Bottles"

■3. Brush Study - "Cliff"

■2. Line Study - "Cubes"

■1. Brush Study - "Ocean"