SKILLS UPDATE NOV 2019: ENTER ADOBE

Drawing is hard!! I’m not good at practicing things that feel so difficult. It’s difficult for many I’m sure. Luckily I’m also a bit stubborn. Even more so since the concept of “growth mindset’ convinced me I can grow my skillset. So when not busy with procrastinating I’m trying my hardest to get better at drawing, painting and pattern making.

Getting Adobe Illustrator has been a bit of a game changer. As much as I love Procreate it is nice to be able to use the computer to image trace my doodles straight from the paper. Here are examples of some of the ways I’ve learned to create image with Adobe Illustrator.

Here I’ve used image trace in Illustrator on some pencil doodles in Adobe Sketch app.

These roses were first traced from a photo in the Adobe Draw app, and then transported to Illustrator for a lot of line smoothing and fixing and colouring.

Here I’m playing around with geometric shapes by following a tutorial from the book: Digital Textile Design by Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac.

This sweet is an image trace of a print I made with a lino cut stamp.

I drew these carnations over a photograph in Illustrator, with the blob brush tool. I used my iPad Pro, Apple pencil and the Astropad App.

Now I just need to find a way of getting as close as possible to blending vector crispness with raster textures. Wish me luck 🤞