2D Design Self Portrait

Final Result

It's been a hot minute since I've used Adobe Illustrator, and creating a 2D self-portrait was the perfect way to jog my memory. I hadn't realized until Richard's presentation that I had created a 2D self-portrait and a t-shirt design in the past. My very first screenprint was a quick self-portrait in hot pink, and over the summer, I made t-shirts using a design I created for a course called 40 Objects in 400 years.

First Screenprint

T-shirt Design

I reflected on my creative process while working on those two projects and drew on what I remembered in my approach to this assignment. For instance, for my screenprint, I drew my design using reference photos before simplifying it so it could be cut into a stencil. For my 2D design portrait, I did something similar but tried to save time by tracing part of my reference photo on my phone (ominous foreshadowing). 

Sketch

To create my t-shirts, I drew out my design in my sketchbook, took a photo of it, uploaded it to Photoshop, got rid of midtones, made it black and white, and then uploaded it into Illustrator to image trace it, creating a vector image that a DTG (direct to garment machine) could print from. I knew I had to do something similar for this assignment, so after taking a photo of my sketch, I uploaded it to Photoshop to clean it up. Well, that's at least what I tried to do. My laptop broke a month ago, and I've been using an old one until my new one got delivered yesterday. I discovered that my temporary laptop wouldn't let me download Photoshop, so I tried Photopea instead, but it was SO SLOW, and my PNG just looked weird. It keeps getting worse. I was able to download Illustrator, but it kept loading indefinitely, and I found myself wanting to strangle an inanimate object.  

Fast forward a week, and I got my new laptop. NOW I uploaded my photo to Photoshop! I had to look up a few tutorials on how to clean up my image and ended up adjusting the levels, threshold, and grayscale, which I think is different from how I've done it in the past (the new version of Photoshop is confusing me, and there's probably a more straightforward way to do it). I also used a white brush tool to "erase" some of the mistakes in my drawing. 

Next, I moved into Illustrator to image trace and expand my drawing. I wanted to experiment with different colors, so I turned the image into a Live Paint object. Unfortunately, I realized that since my drawing has open spaces, they would not fill with color, so I placed a rectangle and line segments around it and merged them into the Live Paint object. I tried a few different color palettes, but ultimately picked some colors from an image of my 2D Fabrication assignment, which I'll be posting soon. 

First Draft

At this point, I thought I had finished, but I kept looking at my portrait and felt like something was off. I asked several people if they saw the offness too, and received different answers as to why (nose too big/round, right eye slightly off, etc). I realized I could check this by bringing my reference photo into Illustrator, and sure enough, the tracing I had done earlier was wrong and, in fact, did not save me time (ominous foreshadowing follow-through). The rat on my head, which I did not trace, actually came out better. But not to worry, using the magic of Illustrator (pen, direct selection, and blob brush tools), I was able to reshape parts of my vectorized image! 

Altering my vector shapes

Finally, feeling good about how my portrait looked, I added some finishing touches, like a pattern in the rectangle's fill and a pastel texture effect. 

Overall, I learned a lot from overcoming the challenges I encountered while working on this assignment. Through the struggle of technical difficulties, navigating Photoshop and Illustrator, and noticing flaws in my design, I feel better prepared to help students when they encounter similar issues. Working through every frustrating part of this project has left me feeling satisfied and more confident in myself and my abilities. I am proud of what I accomplished with this assignment and throughout the course, especially as someone without an art school background.