Color me Illustrator: Day Three

Aneda's Taste Drawing

"bitter, relaxing, sweet"

The first thing we did was a warm-up free draw. Eliza gave everyone a selection of candy and dried fruit. She told the students to use Illustrator draw whatever they wanted and to let the flavors inspire their drawings. Everyone came up with very interesting drawings using various colors. Some students used the warp and twirl tool and others found symbols to add to their drawing. Some students were drawing more abstract images that reflected their sensory experience, while Kim drew a plum and a peach because those were the fruit flavors she was tasting.









Besma's taste drawing

Aubrey's taste drawing
"Toughts provoked by Eliza giving us sugar"

Next, Chou demonstrated live trace and live paint. He showed how to upload images and then how to change the settings in live trace to affect how the image looks. Then he demonstrated the way to select colors and add them to the image using the live paint bucket.

After that, Eliza talked about how to use color effectively so we can make really cool designs. She showed the color wheel and the students identified the primary, secondary and tertiary colors. Then we talked about what complimentary colors are: they are the colors directly across from each other on the color wheel. Analogous colors are next to each other on the color wheel. We learned that different color combinations create different moods and feelings in a design. Also, Eliza explained that to make a really interesting picture, the colors can be used in the proportion of 3:2:1. That means that you choose one color for about half of your image, then choose the complimentary color for 1/3 of your image and last you choose another color for contrast and use that for only 1/6 of the image. We looked at several examples to help us see what that means.

After break, everyone worked on images using live trace and live paint. Sometimes it was frustrating because when you don' t know how to use the tools yet, you have to keep experimenting and trying different things and sometimes it is hard to make it look like you want it to, so you have to just keep trying. The first images were line art, some of them were cartoon characters. We all chose the image we wanted to work with and practiced using the tools.

Kim's Livetrace drawing

Nick's Livetrace drawing

The next project was a really interesting one. We got together in groups and chose an image to use to express the four seasons and then we each worked on one season. It was really interesting to see what everyone did with their images.

During break time, our friends from the Photoshop class came over to check out what we were doing and then some of us went over to see what they were working on. Everyone was making such great stuff! And it was fun to show each other our work and talk about what we were doing.

After our break we had a little more time to work on our Four Season images. Then we did a class critique. Because the images were about the four seasons, a lot of people used analogous colors and the ideas were often based more on warm and cool color schemes.

Clara's Four Seasons

Patrick's Four Seasons

Juan M's "Winter Flower Flurry"

Itzel's Autumn Rose

Nandi and Saige's four seasons drawing

Lucy's four season's drawing

At last! Behind the Wheel work time! This was just an introduction to our BTW, but we thought about what kind of website we want to make. We looked at the web designs we started last week and some students deicded to keep the design they started with, but others were looking at other ideas. Then everyone worked on their blog and posted an artifact from the day's work (or tried to!)

Overall it was a very productive day. Everyone did at least three drawings and did a great job too!