Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Written News Story

ONW Students Receive Laptops By Josh Burton This week at Olathe Northwest, all students have been given district issued Dell laptops for their own educational use at school. The laptops will be used by students throughout their school day and teachers will be encouraged to create lessons incorporating the devises. The Dell laptops that were given out are very portable and extremely easy to use both at home and at school. Chris Zuck, the principal at Olathe Northwest said: “I truly hope that these new devices will help to enhance our students’ learning at school as we continue to modernize our classrooms.” Olathe Northwest is not the first Olathe school to receive electronics, however, as these laptops have already been distributed to multiple other high schools in the Olathe school district. Now the Olathe schools will continue the next step of this long process: making these devices an essential part of their classrooms. This above piece of writing is my written news s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Watercolor Transfer

For this project, we started off by taking our previous projects and sizing them appropriately. We then printed these photos. After that, we used water colors to paint a blank sheet of paper however we wanted. Once our paint had dried, we started the actual printing process. We cut our picture with a small border (1/2 to 1 inch) of white paper around it. Then, we applied mod podge to the areas with ink on it. Then we placed our photo face down onto our water colors (side with ink facing down). After that, we used a squeegee. With the squeegee, we applied light pressure to the entire image and tried to squeeze our all of the bubbles and places with too much mod podge. We had to be very careful to not get the excess mod podge on the back of our image, or else it would make later steps much much difficult. Once we successfully squeezed out the extra mod podge, we left it to dry over night. The next day, we used a small amount of water to wet our image. We then started to rub away the wh...
Post a Comment
Read more