Abstract Geometric Animals
Personal Project
Illustration
During the final year of my Fine Art degree, I developed an approach to painting birds in an abstract way. I have always been interested in animals and mathematical abstraction, therefore expressing birds in such a way came naturally. I reduced the forms of birds into basic triangle shapes, the simplest polygons.
For a while now, I have admired other illustrative works which use the same mentality for abstraction. I was very thrilled to discover that Adobe Illustrator allowed me to create this type of work cleanly.
Osprey
This was my first exploration of using Adobe Illustrator for creating this type of illustration. I was thrilled by how convenient it was to cleanly edit my work. I followed the recommended use of automated mirror symmetry. Whilst I appreciate the instantaneous display of the symmetry, I was rather frustrated by the difficulty of cleanly joining lines at the point of symmetry. For the tonal work, I created an identical copy of the artwork, and set the copy's layer to Multiply. I deleted areas which I wanted to lighten.
Hare
I had recently returned from visiting my godparents. My godfather is very much a fan of hares, so I made one. For this design, I traced over half the hare's head and constructed half the abstract artwork. I used the Reflect Tool to produce the other half of the head. Afterwards, I reviewed the design and added and subtracted lines to help the artwork come together. Of the two process so far, I prefer this approach since I feel like I have more control over the design.
For this design, I colour picked off my reference image to choose my colours. I wanted to keep a natural looking colours scheme. Out of curiosity, I do enjoy shuffling the colours around on my artworks to see what interesting effects can occur.
Owl
Kingfisher
Boar
Raven
With this piece I explored having hidden and white strokes on the artwork. I then applied this idea to the previous other artworks.
Sparrowhawk
Through experimentation with the stroke setting, I've settled on focusing on invisible strokes. It has allowed me to be more efficient. I have also decided to not explore chaotic use of the recolour artwork feature as I prefer the colours remaining linked. I'm really enjoying the cut gemstone aesphetic of this illustration style.
Kestrel
I tested applying the triangle geometry rule to the eye and nostral. I am very happy how it turned out on this piece. This will be something I will test out on future artworks in this series.
I saw an illustration using this same style that focused on value. I wanted to use this approach with colour. Therefore, I took this mesh and coloured it with grey values. I duplicated that mesh and overlapped it. This new mesh's opacity was set to multiply and I applied new colours on top. I chose this pallet because rainbows are awesome and I wanted to create a Pride graphic for myself.
Peregrine Falcon
Red Kite
Robin
Bluetit
Whitetailed Eagle
Puffin
Playing Card Personal Project Begins
I began designing a deck of 54 playing cards (including two jokers) which would feature these geometric animal designs. The deck would feature Welsh wildlife and be split into four catagories; Birds, Land, Sea and Insects. I enjoy collecting interesting decks of picture cards, so it felt like a very suiteable project to work on. As a result of wanting this project to suceed the best it could, I learned Adobe InDesign to help map out the designs more clearly and apply sweeping format changes more easily. Below are the artwork which I created especially for this project. I plan to use the former artwork as well.
