More practice with a dose of "omg how did I miss that" x500

So I guess I can call this part of the "quote" project I do once in a while where I illustrate something off of a quote I read or, in this case, draw the actual saying.

The quote this time is "her heart was a secret grade and the walls were very high" from The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I picked this quote in particular because 1) it had few enough words to work into a graphic design/illustration and 2) was articulate enough to describe how I felt about some things in my life.

 

So, as usual, I first experimented with how I was going to place the words. Initially, I wasn't too concerned with scratching up other thumbnails of different word placements because I wanted to work quickly and just experiment. I tend to have a tendency on being overly concerned with the details from the start and just drawing loosely allowed me to just relax and have fun. 

On one hand, that method was pretty nice and I was able to get to the guts of the main drawing fairly quickly. On the other hand, I forgot there was a reason why I developed my detailed habits in the first place; it made me stop to consider things more carefully and to double check that I wasn't going ahead with something that was going to bite me in the butt further up the process. 

tl;dr: my nonchalance bit me in the butt.

Once I got to the final lineart after a lot of lining up and working with composition (which was fun in its own way with all its structure and straight lines), bumps started to appear immediately. I noticed that "secret garden" was hard to read as it was so condensed and, when I asked various people to try to read it, some kept confusing "high" as "nigh." Haha, numero uno of any graphic design is to make your content legible and, egh, already failed a bit with that.

So I tweaked a few things like outlining "secret garden" in some attempt to make it more legible and made the h's taller. I also centered the words better and added more decor in the areas that felt a bit too bare. I knew I wanted to create a fluid wildness in "secret garden" while the "walls" were to be strong, but unbending with a certain delicacy set into each crevice (check: medieval manuscripts).

I also saw that the S in "walls" was hard to determine because, unlike the word's W where it had some buffer space at the edges of its design, S didn't have that. I think it caused "walls" to look like it was aligned to the right rather than center, but at that point I was like agggggggh and barreled on because, again, practice and learning curves ahoy.

 

Now there was the coloring process and I fought with it, as usual. I tried to follow the three color rule (where you choose three different colors and basically stick with them to have a decent color scheme) of red, yellow, and green, but I kept fidgeting around with "walls", feeling that the work as a whole was a bit too red heavy and, well, boring to look at. 

So, instead, I said "nah" and "I do what I want" to the three color rule. I changed "walls" into blue and added touches of greenish-blue to the tiny details around the bricks of the word while making the borders more golden for contrast. It came out pretty swell, I think, compared to the original color idea.

Overall, I'm pretty happy how it came out. Even with the mistakes I made on the way, the work as a whole is pretty, I think, with its colors and designs I decided to draw the words into. It can be better, sure, but drawing this was a nice change from the typical illustration stuff I do.

So, yeah, couple of lessons learned:

1) plan/be paranoid in the beginning no matter what

2) letters won't follow your so-called rules of "yeah, that looks alright"

3) legibility is super important because if no one can read what you made, then whaaaaat

4) color rules are irrelevant if breaking them makes stuff look better

These lessons are probably nebulous and prone to change all the time. Next week, I bet those same lessons will just laugh in my face as they frolic away into an alternate universe where they'll decide to maybe work. Yep.

Practice, practice, and, wow, this is the truest adage in the world, but egggggh

For a random story, when I was kid I was forced to do sheets and sheets of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. At the bottom of each page there was also this cute little raccoon who would more or less cheer me on with random sayings to keep working. The most common adage the raccoon had was, of course, "Practice, practice, practice!"

Those math problems ended up being the bane of my nine year old life and, in extension, so was that raccoon. Now whenever I hear "practice, practice, practice" I have the weirdest urge to get on my feet and do something randomly violent like flip a table or make some roaring animal noise or something. If I look at another sheet of subtraction problems again, it'll still be too soon.

Haha, weirdness aside, been practicing a lot lately.

I tried out an interesting website app called Atarichan Drawer where the program would randomly give you a body perspective made up of only circles and lines. It was pretty nice, but there were several moments where I had to randomize to another body when I could not tell what in the world a particular chaotic bunch of sphere and lines were. I also wondered here and there if some proportions were off when following the guidelines, but then I'm not so great on that either so who knows. 

I also experimented with the 3D tool in Illustrator and holy moly, I wish I knew about this thing earlier because it's super, super cool. I had so much fun learning this and I definitely have ideas now to use this for some other future projects here and there.

This was my second attempt because I was curious if I could use the 3D tool on handwritten words. The answer is a yes, but it's also pretty illegible with script so I gave up halfway. Still, I learned another option for the 3D tool, a bit of live trace shenanigans, and a bit of no-no's to work around for next practice.

I learned from this guide here, so if you didn't know about this either, try it out! 

Heeeey, look, more concept sketches for that thing-I'm-working-on-but-I-can't-reveal-yet. On another note, head masks and capes are super fun to draw, oh man.

And lastly, this portfolio box/cover I made. It's a temporary container, but it does the job in covering my portfolio and looking nice at the same time. I basically used a shipping box that my prints came in  with and covered the outside and inside with wrapping paper. I encountered a surprising amount of issues trying to make this simple case and most of them were because I kept calculating the inside of the box wrong over and over again. The red wrapping kept warping and wrinkling and, wow, wrapping paper is as scratch resistent as a cat cheerfully shredding curtains. 

Still, I'm happy how it turned out and if I can get a few uses out of it, then I'm pretty swell.