Illustration Workshop- Shape and Variety

The aim of this workshop was to learn how to create an illustrations using Adobe Illustrator from our drawings. The task came from the idea of a Victorian parkour game called: What are you like? where the players had to describe themselves by making a series of drawings of their favourite things.

We started with looking at some of the work from the 45 artists that showed in the House of Illustration's first exhibition 2014, which used a variation of the games idea. We used the prompts that were given which included: animal, comfort, food, transport, pastime, place, possession, weather, aversion, shoes, music, book and clothes. 

To start I drew a pig as my favourite animal, clouds, pierogi, an airplane and my toy dog as a comfort. We then converted them to illustrations using the shape tool and anchor points to manipulate the lines.

I first illustrated my toy- I found this easier to do than the cloud and dumpling as there were less curves to create. Using this method was to make us familiar with using anchor point; using the dumpling to practice using anchor points was very challenging but this helped me learn most, and the steps became easier as it enforced me to ask questions.

I later looked up how to trace an image to create an illustration. This should be an easier method, but I didn't understand using layers so I wasn't successful using this technique. The video I looked at did however teach me how to utilize the anchor point tools better.