One of the many Adobe programs we have to develop skills in is Adobe Illustrator, a programme in which we can create vector graphics. The goal of this short lesson was to provide guidance on the different tools in the workspace and how to use them, but also to create a portrait from the newly learned skill.
To practice, our teacher had a screen on which we followed his instructions on how to handle the pen tool. We then practiced on a sheet he made for navigating through different curvatures, corners, and weird lines in general.
I enjoyed doing the different exercises and tried my best to get them exactly like the guidelines. The more I played around with the lines and their features, the more precise I was able to make them.
We were then tasked with creating a portrait of ourselves using only the pen tool. I have done something similar physically in a painting where I used different shades without blending them together to make a portrait, but it would be a good challenge to do it on Illustrator.
I picked an image that had good lighting but also an interesting facial expression, as I wanted to challenge myself. Our teacher advised us not to spend too little or too much time on it, but once I started, I couldn’t stop. I made two different layers of my portrait; the first layer was the picture that I used as a guide and set the opacity to 50%, and the second layer was my illustration layer, where I copied my guide image. When colour-correcting my portrait, I set back my base layer 100% to ensure I get the right colour instead of an opaque one.
I spent the whole night perfecting the portrait because I was so invested in it, but it was also something that I thought was really interesting in general. Apart from using Illustrator for my school work, I have also now been using it for my personal projects to make posters.
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