Illustrating with Dimension


The clock and TV illustrations in this chapter should have warmed you up to the idea of drawing with Illustrator and working with the Pen tool. With simple shapes, curves, and colors, we were able to capture the essence of the objects they represent without making them too realistic. All it took was a little creativity and some observation of the actual objects to figure out what was worth drawing and what we could leave out.

You'll continue with this idea of drawing stylized objects in the next project, but we're going to take it a step further. An image doesn't need to be flat to be stylizedyou can work with color and perspective techniques to give realistic dimension to your drawings.

Project Brief: Accessories with Style

A new clothing and accessories shop is working on the in-store signs that will mark each product department (for example, hats, shoes, neckties, jeans). They'd like you to pick a single department and create one illustration for it before commissioning you to do the rest.

The illustration should contain a pair of items (such as matching gloves or two different shirts) that should have some depth but still be stylized. The illustration should be only of the two items and not include other elements or textand it must be drawn completely in Illustrator; no bitmapped art allowed.

Figure 5.55. For this project, an illustration of a pair of shoes, I combined stylized contours and an illusion of depth using color and detail.


Project Summary
  • Brainstorm and sketch illustration ideas for a pair of clothing or accessory items.

  • Use the Pen tool and other drawing or shape tools to create the outer and surface contours of your items.

  • Apply color fills that represent the highlights, midtones, and shadows to give the items realistic depth.

  • Introduce details to the items that maintain a stylized appearance and contribute to the illusion of depth.

STUDIO SESSIONS

www.studiosessions.net/portfolio

Post this chapter's project online for feedback from professional designers.

access code: STUDIOp


Project Steps

Before you begin, choose the items that you would like to draw. Select a pair of items that suits your skill level in Illustrator so far. It's best to use items that you have on hand so you can set them up however you like to sketch. But you could use a photograph of items from a magazine, the Web, or elsewhere.

It's also recommended that you choose solid-colored items so you can focus on their shapes and lighting rather than on intricate patterns or color changes.

1. Sketch the Pair of Items

Arrange your items so that one is in front of the other, and angle them however you like for an attractive setup. With just pencil and paper (yes, really!), create a rough sketch of what you see.

As you sketch, first look at just the contoursthe lines and curves around the objects and on their surfaces. Which ones are most important in helping a viewer understand the shape? Which ones could be exaggerated for effect or removed because they are unimportant?

After contours are drawn, look carefully at the lighting on and around your items. Try to pinpoint the middle tonesthe ones that are neither very bright nor very dark. Shade these midtone areas lightly in your drawing. Avoid shading areas that are brightthe highlights of the scene. Shade more heavily the areas that are shadows on the items or cast by the items. As you look at the highlights, shadows, and midtones, also think about their colors and how you might represent them in Illustratorbecause that's what you're about to do.

2. Draw the Front Item

In a new Illustrator document in RGB mode, use your Pen tool (or shape tools, depending on the item) to draw the outer contour of the front item of your pair. Make sure the finished path is closed and has no stroke. Take your time to get it pretty accurate, but remember that you can adjust what you've drawn with your Direct Selection tool.

Fill the shape with a color that you feel closely matches the main midtone shade of the object. What you have now should look like a silhouette of your item, since it's just a flat, filled shape that has no details, highlights, or shadows yet.

Figure 5.56. Depending on your item, the silhouette might not look like much now. Adding highlights and shadows will make the shape much clearer.


Notice the highlights and lighter midtones on your objects and on your paper sketch. Your next step is to draw those areas and fill them with the appropriate lighter colors.

This can be a little tricky, so let's think back to the highlighted areas we placed on our clock and TV drawings. To make those, we reshaped simple objects like circles or drew little shapes using the Pen tool. The shapes themselves were pretty abstract, but they followed the main object contours nicely and were in realistic locations.

You may use several shapes to build up to bright white highlights, using colors closer to the midtone for the larger shapes and colors closer to white for the smaller ones.

Now it's on to the shadows, so check out your actual items once again, as well as your sketch. As with the highlights, draw shapes that follow the item neatly and fill them with the appropriate darker tones.

And don't forget about the shadows your objects may cast on the surface. Remember that for our clock all we needed was a simple gray oval. Maybe that's all you'll need for your object, or you might need to draw something with the Pen tool if your item is complex.

Figure 5.57. You can see my highlights and shadows here. My use of abstract shapes and flat colors keep the stylized look that I like but give it instant dimension.


Here's a handy trick that works for those shadows that items tend to cast. Copy your midtone silhouette shape and paste it on your Artboard as a duplicate. Fill it with the appropriate shadow color (such as a light gray) and put it at the bottom of the stacking order. Then just move it, rotate it, or transform it as necessary.

3. Draw the Back Item

You might think that drawing the back item would be just like doing the front one, but I've got even more tricks up my sleeve that will help you achieve realistic-looking depth in your piece.

Start on a new layer above your front item. When you're done, you can simply drag this layer below the front item layer to change the stacking order. You may also want to hide your front item's layer so it doesn't get in the way.

Draw the shape of your back item and fill it with a color, just as you did for the front item. But instead of the same midtone color you used in your front item, use a slightly lighter and less saturated version of the hue. This instantly makes it look farther away.

Your back item should also be smaller than the front onethe smaller you make it, the greater the perceived distance between the two objects.

Next, as before, add in your highlight and shadow shapes. These should be a bit subtler in color than the ones you made on your first item, and you can make them a little less detailedall contributing to the illusion of depth.

Figure 5.58. My back shoe is lighter, smaller, and less detailed than the one in frontwhat a difference that makes to the illusion of depth. Cool!


Imagine where else you can use this handy technique. How about in an illustration of a group of people? The detailed people with more color contrast will appear closer than less detailed, softer, smaller people in the group, even though it's still just a drawing made of colored shapes.

4. Add the Finishing Touches

Spend some time comparing your Illustrator image with your actual items. Most likely you have left out many of the detailswhich is good, since we want the illustration to be simple and stylized.

But, like with our clock and TV, there may be some accents or details that you feel are key to these items and give them some punch. Maybe it's a touch of color around the brim of a hat, or a small starburst shape indicating a sparkle on a belt buckle or eyeglasses lens.

Go ahead and add these now, and recall that these would be best placed on the front item (and only very subtly on the back item) to maintain the depth of the image.

Student Work

What icons have other designers created? Here are some work samples from Sessions.edu students:

Figure 5.59. Brent Brooks made his sunglasses more realistic by including gradients and transparency. Finishing touches add sparkle to the final project.


Figure 5.60. Jane Boss used the Pen tool very carefully to work with the challenging folds in these shirts.


Figure 5.61. Strong reflections can make the highlights tricky, but Jonathan Swihart was up to the challenge and created realistic shine and depth on these boots.





Sessions. edu Graphic Design Portfolio-Builder(c) Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator Projects
Graphic Design Portfolio-Builder: Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator Projects
ISBN: 0321336585
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 103
Authors: Sessions.edu

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