Kid Design and Illustration

In this week’s Behance Adobe Illustrator design challenge, I learned how to do a vector portrait. I learned about pencil tool options, blob brush, and how to work with photos. My desire to make something more painterly kicked in and changed up the style a little bit.

I found a picture of myself when I was about 6 years old or so. I dropped the image onto the canvas and dropped the opacity so that it would be easier to see my new line work that I put on top of it. I made sure to lock the layer so I wouldn’t select the photo by accident.

From there I tried a few different techniques to draw the portrait. With the pencil tool options, I tried setting a higher smoothness so any jitter in my lines would be smoothed out. I also found out you can continue drawing from the same line at any point on the line.  The program will automatically remove the parts you don’t want. 

After I finished outlining the face, I wanted to add some color. I selected color directly from the photo, and with the blob brush, began dropping color blocks onto the face. I liked the space in between the blocks of color and used it to give the image a cut out feel. The blob brush allows you to paint, and all strokes of the same color combine into a single vector shape. This allows the image to be scaled to any size without loss of quality!

I used some of the previous challenges to add some graphic elements. I cut up the word “kid” and played with the direction of the serif’s to create a logotype. Then layered the word on a dot patterned version of the vector portrait to experiment with branding.

This was my first time trying something painterly with vector. I liked how it all turned out.