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Vector Portrait

Pre-Production

To start out with this project, I had to choose a picture for me to vectorize. I don't take a lot of pictures, so I didn't have a lot of pictures to choose from. I eventually decided to crop myself out of a picture with my family and use that for my vectorized portrait. Once I imported this picture, I brought it in to Adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop, I used the posterize option to clearly separate the differences in color. This allowed me to make more specific shapes that would eventually make my portrait look a little more realistic. Then I imported this updated picture into Adobe Illustrator. When I started in Illustrator, I had to make two art boards. Both of the art boards would have my original picture on it. However, one of them would have a decreased opacity, and that picture would be the one I trace over to create my vector. The other picture was simply used for reference, and to grab colors for my vector.

Production

When I first started this project, I didn't really know what to do. I decided to do some of the more detailed parts of my face first off. I worked on getting my eyes, mouth, nose, and ear to look pretty good before I moved on to some of the larger parts of my face. These first parts were a major struggle for me because I wasn't too sure how detailed I wanted to make my shapes. I started off making them very detailed, but then I decided it didn't look very realistic, so I made it more general. As I moved on to some of the more plain parts of my face, I adjusted some of the previous parts to help them fit better together. I tried to be very organized with all of my layers. I thought that grouping the layers together would help me later on in the project, when I needed to make some more adjustments. During the making of this project, I got a lot better with the pen tool. I can now use it extremely efficiently and with pretty good accuracy. When I had troubles with certain parts of my portrait, I quickly decided that I wasn't going to spend too much time in a row on a specific part. I think this helped me not to get burnt out too quickly. I also figured out a way to use my layers to my advantage. I found that it was much easier to make some parts of a shape very accurate, and then just place it behind another layer, so I could use more generalized shapes to complete it. This allowed me to reach my final product much quicker than I would've if I had traced every shape exactly how it was. For my final product, I wanted it to be very detailed, but also realistic. I think I did a good job accomplishing my goal.

Post-Production

In the end, I am very pleased with my final product. I put in a lot of effort in order to get my project finished, and I think it was definitely worth the time. If I were to continue to perfect this piece, I might have adjusted the coloring of some parts and I would have gone into more detail for the hair. Since I was in a time crunch, I made a lot of extremely generalized shapes and different shades of brown, so I think I could've made that part much better. However, as a whole, I love my final product. This project was honestly very fun for me to work on, although it was incredibly frustrating and mind-numbing at times. If I have time, I definitely would not be apposed to creating another vectorized portrait.

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