Kawaii Art in Illustrator

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Introduction

Kawaii is an art style that is an important part of Japanese culture.

You will study Kawaii art examples to identify its key features and how it is made up. You will develop basic skills in Adobe Illustrator by creating simple Kawaii feature sets, learning different tools each session. Once you have the key knowledge and character sets, you will use these to develop, improve and complete your own original Kawaii artwork.

Your Learning Outcomes

I can identify Kawaii art and its characteristics

I can navigate around Illustrator

I can identify and use the key toolbox tools

I can use the lines and shapes tools to create Kawaii characteristics

I can create, modify, and combine shapes

I can use fills and shading tools and techniques

I can create original Kawaii artwork using Illustrator

What is Kawaii?

The word “Kawaii” is derived from the Japanese expression Kao Hayushi, which means “blushing”. Over time, the word has changed to mean “cute”.

Kawaii is an important and ever more popular part of the Japanese culture.

You can find Kawaii designs and items in restaurants, railway stations, stores, and at almost every destination.

Task: What are the characteristics (the features) that you notice about Kawaii art?

What is Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator is a professional software application for creating drawings, illustrations, and artwork.

It is used to create Vector Art. Vector artwork is art that's made up of vector graphics like points, lines, curves and shapes that are based on mathematical formulas. This means it creates regular, smart and consistent looking art.

When you make a vector image bigger or smaller there's no loss of quality, so it can be sized to however large or small you need it to be.

This great video tells you a little more about vector art and you can see a real artist in action too!

Getting started

Before we get into creating Kawaii faces, we'll learn a few basic Illustrator and file management skills.

I'll lead you all through this.

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