More descriptions of my illustrations can be found at https://vsco.co/rustyillustrations.
“Ills”
To show appreciation for all my friends who have supported me throughout the time I’ve known them, I asked them what their favorite colors were and decided to make portraits of each one of them. This took about a month, taking some free time I had during the week to create them. Each took about 30 minutes to make and in the end I had 25 illustrations. Since all my friends have made me who I am today, I posted these illustrations on my birthday. Of course, that prompted people to be confused for receiving a gift on my birthday… it made me happy, though.
I made the illustrations on Adobe Illustrator, where I would place an image of one of my friends, trace the image, and color the layout how I wanted to. After doing my first illustrations I started to develop a routine where I would create all the layers I needed (Name, Outline, Coloring, Background, etc.) then insert the image, trace, then color. It made me VERY satisfied each time I finished a drawing.
Here is the complete collection:
- Abby Barahona
- Alex Mayer
- Amy Tey
- Cary Higgins
- Colby Johansson
- Abby Hahn
- Elen Parry
- Elise Joshi
- Gem G
- Ilsa Askren
- Jeanette McKellar
- Jeremy Banks
- Kate Ahrens
- Katherine Sun
- Katie Becker
- Aidan Lanksy
- Laynie Tamada
- Lucas Baptista
- Lydia Lam
- Matt Tuliao
- Reeya Vasishta
- Roni Robbins
- Aiden Stein
- Trevor Tonge
- Wesley Weatherspoon
I was very appreciative with the turnout of this project. With the combination of the person’s favorite colors and my personal relationship with them, each illustration perfectly encapsulated each person’s personality. This was a project that was completely self directed and I was very passionate about and I’m glad that it came out the way that it did. Overall, this was truly just an opportunity to show gratitude to my friends who continue to love and support me.
I continued to make these drawings for other people in my life I care about. For a couple of them, they wanted their’s to be their wallpaper.
Birthday/Celebratory Cards
One-Page Event Flyer
Making flyers and posters is a common job in the design industry and to learn how to make flyers we created our own. We were allowed to choose any event (real or fake) to advertise on our flyers and we had to create it using Adobe InDesign. I decided to create a flyer advertising a performance that Japanese Iwata Minami High School exchange students were putting on at Mountain View High School.
First, I redrew the Iwata Minami school mascot, known as Shippei. I dragged an image of the mascot and traced it in Adobe Illustrator to make it look sharper.
Next, I created the necessary titles I needed to make the design of the poster fit the color scheme of the mascot.
Finally, I dragged all the elements I needed into Adobe InDesign and added the text I needed for the event information.
Tri-Fold Brochure
Another job that requires intricate thought about design and layouts is creating brochures. To practice creating brochures, we downloaded free images and implemented them into a tri-fold layout with placeholder text where the information about an event would go.
To create the tri-fold layout, we used Adobe InDesign to create multiple pages and edit photos in.
Political Cartoons
For our AP US History Final, we were required to write a research paper and create a creative product to demonstrate what we gathered from our research. I decided to write my paper on the existing Confederate monuments in the country and why they were established. My product consisted of two political cartoons.
Eric Rustum-USHAP Final Project Write Up
For the first cartoon, I traced an image of a real Confederate statue and colored it with the shape of the Confederate flag. I drew in the shadow. For the second, I sketched the figures out first in my sketchbook and then dragged an image of the sketch into illustrator. I traced it and added color.
Mandalas
A mandala is a geometric Hindu and Buddhist figure that represents the universe in those religions. For my own personal mandala, I really valued being able to create something that was much different from everyone else’s mandalas. I draw little emoted characters all the time and I often clutter page after page with faces overlapping and going all over the place. I often draw these to express certain emotions, which is why I decided to categorize those emotions and culminate them in this repeating fashion.
The character in the middle is Japanese for “me”. I’m not Japanese (I’m Korean, people get it mixed up all the time like “oh you speak some Japanese, are you Japanese?” “No.”), but there’s a certain aesthetic about Japanese lettering that really appeals to me and I try to implement it in my art.
A lot of the mandalas that are “beautiful” have very complicated and intricate patterns, but I think mine is beautiful in the way it represents me.
Personal Illustrations
On my free time, I like to use the process that I used for my other illustrations to create personal drawings for myself. I often like to trace my own drawings I’ve sketched or trace images from my phone or popular shows I’ve watched. These illustrations have ended up as profile pictures, desktops, and album covers for my music playlists.
