Icons Portfolio Project

 At the end of each tutorial in the book there are projects that prompt the reader to create things of their own- using what was learned in the previous instruction. I went with the project at the end of the first tutorial, here I was tasked with making up icons for a hypothetical park. 

First I went through and made my canvas size as required by the "clients" specifications, here I mocked up 4 icon spaces, as the book had taught me, after making sure things were aligned properly using my smart guides I went into the ZIP file to extract the images needed to make the icons. 

The images for the icons were in a PNG format, which after importing into Adobe and resizing, caused the resolution to drop immensely, so I took the images into their own separate workspace and recreated each of them using the various Pen tools.  One of the biggest problems I ran into was the negative spaces in-between certain objects, for example the rectangle in the picnic table and the triangle in the stilts of the scope. Each one I wanted to explore different ways I could cut the space out.

For the stilts I used the knife tool to make a rough cutout, then afterwards went in with the Pen tool set on a thicker stroke to clean it up, I do not recommend that method as it was time consuming and came out sloppy. For the table I went on a separate layer and created the blank space as its own separate object, then grouped the two shapes and applied the live fill tool- this was much quicker and came out cleaner.

After finishing the icons I copied them and resized them to fit into each icon box, I then went in and added colorful gradients and saved each version of the icons.

Gradient

Flat Color

Line art