Digital Illustration (WK1) - Design Blog

Welcome back, everyone! I hope you had a relaxing break and a wonderful holiday season! 

For this week's design blog, I want to jump into the Bezier Game. I was absolutely *infuriated* while attempting to complete this, but (much to my dismay), I found it incredibly helpful. I have some experience with Adobe Illustrator, but I know I'm not using it to its full potential...and I've definitely avoided using the pen tool for as long as humanly possible. I tend to favor the curvature tool, but I'm learning how the pen tool can be more versatile. 

I'm trying to convince myself that the pen tool and I are going to be friends...I'm cautiously optimistic. 


Some of the test screens were more difficult than others, but they became easier overall as I continued. Learning how to adjust the direction of the curves and essentially "skip" around the image helped me to use fewer nodes while still creating the required shape. This will be really helpful in the future, as I primarily design clothing in Illustrator. While using the curvature tool has been sufficient, the pen tool might actually save me some time (once I'm more comfortable using it). 

I also found it really interesting learning how to overlap shapes and use the pathfinder tool to create new shapes and cut shapes out. With practice, I'm sure this will be something I frequently use. In conjunction with that, I had never considered taking the shapes I've created and saving them as a symbol, which is incredibly useful, as a lot of the clothing I design uses the same base or similar styles. Knowing this information will save me a TON of time in the future, allowing me to get to the physical creation of the item much faster. 

I am really looking forward to everything we're going to learn this month. I can't wait to see what everyone creates and to learn skills that I can apply to my small business! 

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