Whim of the Week: Blog Logo!
8:17 PMA couple weeks ago, I was watching a video by Draw with Jazza on Youtube and I got inspired to create a quick Flash animation that introduces myself. I wanted it to be simple, cute, and characteristic of my personality.
Well, that animation has yet to happen, although I did begin the first steps of creating it - designing the character. You can see her at the right-hand side of my header, signing out my signature! While she may never become animated, I think she does encompass all the ideals of the animation I wanted to create: she's cute, simple, and she encompasses the carefree and artistic nature that I like to think I have.
I wanted to take you through the process of creating her, just in case you were interested in doing some character design or some vector drawings! Please note beforehand that I'm pretty amateur at everything, so I probably don't do this in the most efficient way.
I began with sketching out a couple doodles in my sketchbook, and then transferring them to the digital platform by re-sketching it with my tablet in Photoshop.
As you can see, the sketch is very rough, but it has the most important elements - the braid along her hairline, the guidelines for her face, the pose and position of the body, and the location of the paintbrush in reference to her body.
Once I was satisfied with where everything was positioned, I imported the file into Illustrator, which is where all the vector magic happens!
So here's how I layout my Illustrator (for PC people, this might look different): I have my layers and my swatches on two separate windows on the right (usually, these come together and can be found on different tabs of the layers window) and I have the pen tools extracted out of the left toolbar and placed at the bottom.
For my layers, I like to separate everything based on type: original image, line work, colors, etc. Here's a close up of that:
I also like to pick out my colors beforehand (even though these are liable to change, depending on how many shades of things I want/need and if I picked a good color for something) and save them in the swatches:
For the actual illustration, I chose to only use the pen tool, with a black stroke and no fill. This way, I can create vectors easily, and then tweak them with the direct selection tool (shortcut is A!).
Here is the finalized line work! You can tell how I cleaned up the messy Photoshop sketch, tweaked some things (like the eyes), and stylized it a bit more. Once I was happy with the lines, I started to put in blocks of color (also outlining the area for the color with the pen tool, only this time with no stroke and with a fill color from the swatches tab).
...aaand the final drawing! You can tell that I didn't use all the swatch colors I picked out. I added a line for her brush to be drawing, which I deleted when I inserted it into the header because it was replaced by the signature.
I also helped out a friend and fellow blogger, Catherine, with her logo! She had a logo that she had already designed, but just needed me to help clean it up for her. Check out her blog and her post about it here.
0 comments