Medium: Fantasy Vector Illustration
Supplies: Adobe Illustrator, your imagination
I happened to stumble upon this crazy amazing you tube video of a fantasy landscape created in Adobe Illustrator, and as soon as I saw the thumbnail, I knew I wanted to do something like it. Starting out I had no idea on what I wanted to do. Usually, I would sketch out some ideas and go from there. But for this particular project I just jumped right in. At first, I was just dinking around, playing with the gradients and different trees. I had tried creating one leaf and added that to my symbol library to so I could use the sprayer tool to get as many random leaves as I wanted. The color scheme in mind was a dark purple tree with yellow and orange leaves. Well, that turned out to look like some weird peach tree, and after more playing around I decided the trees looked better without leaves in general.
Tips & Tricks: I’ve always wanted to get a glowing effect, whether it’s in painting or in Illustrator, but I’ve never been able to figure it out. It’s taken quite a bit of time to learn just by watching other people. If you want, say, fire to glow, build up layers using red first, then orange, yellow, and finally white. At least, that’s in painting. But it’s basically the same concept in Illustrator just with some creative adjusting in the gradient panel. I would encourage playing around aimlessly. You can learn so much that way. (Then again, you can also get horribly lost and extremely frustrated 😀 I wouldn’t be too worried! *worriedly twiddles thumbs*)
Pitfalls (aka, what I learned the hard way): If you’re going to add in a person or animal and you’ve only been using illustrator for roughly nine months, then I would advise finding a photo online, downloading and opening it into Illustrator, and then use your pen tool to trace over top. Thus, you have a perfect silhouette of whatever it is you’re wanting to incorporate into your design. You can fill it in however you please, so long as it is not copying other peoples’ works. Trying to create the creature or person or project free hand can be a little difficult and take too long if you’re impatient like me.
Outcome: I am in love with the outcome! I’ve always adored the color scheme and while I incorporated it throughout every element, I don’t really care. There are things I could absolutely touch up on, but that’s where practice comes into play. I am definitely going to create more of these, trying out different elements and tricks.