Katie Barry: Vector Portrait

Pre-Production

I didn't want to do a photo of myself for this project and instead do a vector portrait of a family member. I originally was going to do one of my brother when he was younger, but couldn't find a good photo, so I did my grandpa instead. Once I found the photo I wanted to do, I dragged it into photoshop to posterize it, or to lower the quality of the photo a little bit, and cropped it to 8 inches by 10 inches. Once all that was done, I saved it to the school server.

Production

Next was putting the posterized and cropped photo of my grandpa into Illustrator. I did an organic portrait, which is outlining the entire photo using curves and lines. I learned how to use the pen tool. I used to have no idea what the pen tool did or how to use it and now I can trace anything with the pen tool in Illustrator. I used multiple layers to stay somewhat organized. One layer was for the face, another layer for the neck, one for the ear, one for the shirt etc. etc. At first, I was detailed but got a little less detailed as I went on due to me realizing that some colors I see when I zoom in didn't really appear when I zoomed out. I mostly focused on making sure the major parts of the portrait looked similar to the original. I started falling behind and knew that I would finish when the original due date was announced. I did come into my graphic design classroom for two-three weeks during study hall to get myself back on track. On the third week, I had graphic design, which on this particular day was just about an hour long, study hall, which I came in to work on the portrait, which was about 30-45 minutes long, and finally, stayed after school for an hour and a half to work and finish this portrait. At this point in the project, I knew a lot of shortcut keys to use certain tools, like P for the pen tool, I for the eyedropper tool, Command S to save, Command Z to undo. My muscles in my hand and forearm were a bit tired after working on this project for two hours straight. I then added a gradient background which was blue and green.

Post-Production

I am proud of my finished version. I like how it came out and wouldn't really do anything differently except realize that the really tiny details won't be seen in the "big picture". After I finished this project, I worked on a couple different portraits at home due to me getting Illustrator and photoshop downloaded onto my mom's laptop. For now, though, I won't work on anymore due to how time-consuming this type of project is. I love this project and the end results, but after doing four more portraits, I got tired and felt drained from working on them for long periods of time. I will probably do more in the future, but for now, I've had enough.