Tracing Artifacts Project

The process:

The project required us to bring in three personal/sentimental objects, so I brought a powder compact, a vile of lipstick, and a polaroid of me and my friends from back home.

After scanning or photographing my objects, I vectored the outer outlines as well as inner details of them.

The symbols I derived from each object next to each respective vector. Whereas the vectors are quite detailed, I wanted to take a minimalistic approach to each symbol and derived the predominant colours (pink, gold) and shapes from the original objects.

Reflection:

Starting this project, I had never vectored an object in Adobe Illustrator beforehand so getting used to the pen and curve tools were difficult at first. After I got the hang of them, I quite enjoyed the process of tracing the scans and got caught up in mimicking the interior details of the original objects. After the vectors were completed, I wanted to take a minimalistic approach to the symbols, focusing only on the shapes and main colours of the objects and ended up making logo-esque derivations. After the peer critique in class, however, I wish that I had integrated more variation in the shapes and perhaps an element of collage in the finished symbols.

The finished piece:

Simple layout of the original object scans, vectors, and symbols.