My Illustration

An illustration is something that you draw with your hand as opposed to a photo that you take with a camera. Many movie posters use a mixture of illustrations and photos. In design we were asked to use a symbol from our essay in English and create an illustration for it. The only requirments were for the illustration to have a main focal point of our symbol and to have use of the gradient tool and the gradient mesh tool.

The symbol I used for my illustration was a wilting pink rose. In my essay I talk about how friendships are like flowers because they start out as a small relationship, then it blooms into a beautiful friendship. In my essay I discussed how once you try to change a friend there is no going back and that is like the end of your friendship. This is represented by the wilting flower. When a friend tries to change someone in a friendship the friendship ends just like how a flower wilts and dies eventually.

The process I went through to create my illustration was very difficult but I learned so much. After I decided on the symbol I would use from my essay in English class, I researched and found a reference photo to use. I decided to use a photo of a drooping flower with petals dropping off of it. I then used the pen tool to trace the flower and its petals. Following that I used the gradient mesh tool to create a 3D effect on the flower and to give the illustration a lighting source. My biggest challenge in creating this was using the pen tool. The pen tool is harder to use than it looks. I found it to be a really big challenge when using the pen tool to create perfectly round lines as opposed to straight lines. Overall, I feel that having been exposed to the pen tool will help me a lot in my other projects using Illustrator.