Our second Drawing and Imaging assignment consisted of us drawing a live contour figure of a male model in a Baroque-esque costume. Once we finished, we went over the drawing in pen, and then scanned it and put it into illustrator for later/further work.
Putting the drawing aside for a moment, we then had to pick seven varying cultural pattern swatches and draw them as thumbnails in our sketchbooks. Once done, we also scanned them and transferred them into illustrator in order to go over them in pen and perfect them. My final patterns, without colour, are pictured below.
Once that was all done and perfected, it was time to combine the two and put our patterns onto the figure using the blob brush tool in illustrator. Whilst doing this, I tried to play with making the patterns different sizes. In addition, I went over certain areas of the male figure with the pen tool and played with the weight of the strokes in order to give the piece more of a lively and realistic feel. I wanted to use a pattern on the background in order to further highlight him… I didn’t feel a pure white background worked, nor was it enough, in my opinion. Personally, simply adding a background made the piece feel more fun, lively and special.
Once all of the basic/black & white part of the project was complete, it was time to move on to adding colours! We had to create our own colour groups, and were also taught how to save our patterns into our pattern swatches in order to be able to use them wherever and whenever we wanted when working in illustrator. This was something I had never done before and is an extremely fun and helpful tool to now know how to use… I used this sort of burnt red (pictured below) to create my main colour group.
I then placed my coloured pattern swatches on to my pattern dude, and was very pleased with the final result (pictured below). The only real struggle and issue I had was with the outlined section between the figure and the pattern in the background… If I were to change anything, it would simply be to try and clean that section up as best I can. Other than that, I was very pleased with the final result of this project… I not only really enjoyed it, but was able to learn and execute new aspects of illustrator that I otherwise didn’t know.
