The “Babe”
Good shape design is a challenge. I chose to work with a Babe Ruth photo because of my love for this favorite American pastime. Side note: I played baseball for several years, I also played all positions.
Project overview and objectives | Create a composition of positive and negative shapes using complementary colors of a favorite passtime. The composition needed to have a pattern or texture in the background and fit the parameters of size and presentation.
What I learned | I learned to design good shapes and to use what I knew to create the shapes. It was up to us to determine how to design our shapes. I chose to trace, then scan my shapes, then I used Illustrator to make the different vector layers and background. Overall it was an all day process that involved some intense attention to detail. My instructor Tim Tanner said that I nailed the assignment and that it was as close to perfect as I could come.
Process | I started with good image selection and began to trace. I retraced the first tracing and then scanned the cleaner, designed shapes into photoshop. Once in photoshop I had to make all the blacks black and adjusted the shape with my wacom tablet. Once my shapes were feeling right they were taken over to illustrator for a custom live trace. Now that it was vector I could use the pen tool to create the outside (orange shape) I overlapped the two shapes and adjusted the anchor points. Finally I used the blend tool in Illustrator to create the background. See the scans below to follow the process.
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