A few weeks ago while deciding what exercise to choose from, I had stumbled across a series of videos on TikTok by Lizi Phoenix, a mixed media artist who sells her creations online. Her most popular series revolves around making zen and stress relieving pattern pieces with watercolor. Last time I had replicated these pieces in my own style on Autodesk Sketchbook which is a freeform platform made primarily for thumbnails and sketches- the app is one of my favorites as it has a complex pressure sensitivity software that most others struggle to replicate, however sketchbook is purely raster based (other than text) and cant be resized too well.
This week I wanted to revisit the concept but plug it into an app like adobe illustrator and make a vector based piece that'd be easier to edit and modify. After my last project in Illustrator I had gotten quite frustrated with the tools not cooperating. This exercise is about clearing your mind and temporarily disregarding perfection, I thought this would be a great opportunity to further familiarize myself with Illustrator.
Majority of this exercise was super easy, just took time, as you have to work around each shape and have the lines "consume" one another while keeping a good spacing, after repeating this process you get a very neat pattern. To start this piece I grabbed the star tool and created a series of randomly sized stars in various places around the page, including some that pop off the page, as Lizi states, it creates even more unique patterns and makes natural leading lines- afterward I picked a star and stared using the pen tool to create outlines, after making many of these lines it really helped me get used to the pen tool and better understand how it effects anchors and points- along with how some of the smart guides gauge one another. Additionally this was an interesting way to eyeball spacing, while this page has many mistakes it sorta builds your eye coordination on how your lines may be spaced, for the points of the stars if I hadn't made the outer line long enough it wouldn't properly wrap around to make that finished look. One last thing i took away from this was discovering the View>TrimView tool, which took away all the messy edges I had while creating placeholders for certain paths. Below is the final piece, highly recommend the exercise or videos if you are stressed and need something to wind down!
Link to Lizi's page- Click Here!
Last Attempt- Click Here!
Finished Product-
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment