Monday, October 4, 2010

Project 1 - Stephen Brooks

This was alot of fun! I'm a big fan of Southpark and watching an episode last night pretty much confirmed the they use FLASH. I can't wait to get more use out of it and move on to some animation, but for the time being here is what I have created...



This was my image that uses all three Merge, Object & Primitive Drawings to create a cartoon. I used Object drawings for geometric shapes that required no editing like the pupils, Merge drawings where I would edit them & primitive drawings when I wanted geometric shapes that required "clean lines" without alot of editing like the nose ring...



This image became my "catch all" for the other requirements so it's a little busy, but it gets the job done. I started with the Pen tool and found that it creates smooth flowing lines, much like a race course. Since I am partial to motorsports I felt like this was a good opportunity to create a test track of my liking. At that point I could tell alot of the curves were too "involved" and wouldn't flow as easy as I would like so I used the Pen sub-selection tool to delete a few of the anchors...

I used the Text tool to create my Label and it's available properties to setup the centering, font & size...

In the first Image I used the Gradient feature to give the character more life and made his face with:
#FFFFFF, E6F2AE, 939B42 & 34361F such that I could control how far it took to go dark...
For his hair I started with the brush tool and then filled it with the Gradient:
#553C22 & 1A1A1A which was rather interesting since the focal point started outside of the curved shape (but inside and centered if it were an Object Drawing)...

The Pencil and Brush were used exclusively in the second Image
where the pencil created the box around my text with a stroke of 5, no cap, join set to Round w/ smoothing at the default/NA 50. I used the brush to outline the drawing w/ a stylized stroke and smoothing set at 65 for a wide variation of thickness and a "calligraphy" type outline...

The last bit of editing came down to clean spacing and trying to give each element it's "space" in relation to each other. I used the transform tool to re-size both images and fit within their respective stages as well as re-size the border in the second image so it didn't crowd its interior elements...

I preferred using the line tool and transforming it to get the exact shape I was looking for which came in really handy with the cartoon. This is by far my favorite tool and is super easy to use, especially when zoomed in considerably. I'm looking forward to project 2 which I will start shortly. See you all on Thursday!

Steve

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