Spinning Through Life

An Illustration is an image of something recreated by an artist in the way they percieve it to be. They can use anything from markers, to paint, to colored pencils. The list can go on. The difference between illustrations and photographs, is that photographs show the artists' point of view through film.

In Design we were asked to basically make our self-portrait using an illustrated symbol that represented who we are as a person. To do this, we used Illustrator and Wacom tablets to create our piece. During class, we learned how to use the gradient tool, the mesh tool, and the pen tool within our illustrations.

For the Self-Portrait unit of Freestyle, I wanted to focus on expressing a side of me that is curious about the future and where I fit in the world. I find that through the experiences I have had in my life, my need for clarity is filled. For our Illustration piece, I decided to use a spider as my main symbol, which is also known as a “weaver of destiny.” Like a spider creates their web, I create my own path in life. In my composition, I used a light solid color on the spider to represent the sort of naiveté I have, and the red outline to convey how the different parts of myself come together as a whole. Also, I added in the spiders’ web to symbolize the lasting effect of what the spider symbolizes. For me, the web illustrates the connection of all the pieces of my life and how impactful they have been in shaping who I am today

The first thing I did when we were given this project was search up symbols that represent my personal statement and I immediately settled on having the spider as my main focus point. As I started making my composition in Adobe Illustrator, it was really easy for me to picture what I wanted, but the only problem was putting it on my computer screen. Eventually I figured it out, because once I started using the tools more, I became more comfortable with them. A really big problem I had though was that I didn’t know how the number of anchor points affect your piece. On all the different things I traced, a lot of them had too many, which caused my gradient mesh tool not to work. Other than that, it makes it really hard to print your image. There was no way around it except for having to retrace everything with fewer points, to delete something or create something new to put mesh on, so that’s what I did. It was really frustrating for me to do, but overall I’m really happy how good it turned out and that I was able to overcome that challenge.