Sci-Fi Character Illustration

  June 11th, 2023

  For this assignment, I was a bit conflicted what to do for a character concept for utilizing what I currently know of Illustrator’s workflow.  I was tempted to do a fish in a marine scene, but I already did that for a similar assignment for Multimedia Authoring.  For this assignment I chose to translate a 3D character model I use for game design research as a vector image.  This was daunting at first as the character’s texture was very detailed oriented, and creating details in Illustrator is a bit tedious still as all the details will be individual shapes.  I attached a screenshot of the 3D character I used titled “reference” under my background layers.  The end result bared some similarities to the original model, but I omitted much of the details considering how daunting it would be and I’m still not entirely familiar with all the effects that can be used.  I stuck with a very simple character pose.  Technically it’s a T-Pose, I chose it since I was nervous about jumping into human anatomy as my second Illustrator project.

  Starting out, I nearly forgot to group my images together to keep them somewhat organized.  One thing I really liked about Illustrator I learned through this project was being able to adjust the width and density of the strokes in a shape if applied.  This was particularly cool to learn when drawing the eyes as the strokes are nice to mimic eyeliner or lashes.  I would love to experiment with this further as I can picture replicating cell shading effects.  Similar to what is used in anime and other 2D animations.  I got a little caught-up trying to create shading for the face, but I had to divert my focus to her body since that had more detail.  I do like how the hair came out. Most of the initial shapes created “Hair, eyes, hands, limbs” use the pencil tool to create free-form shapes.  The details in her outfit use more generic quad shapes. I did learn a great deal about placing additional anchor points on shapes to give more flexibility.  I wish I experimented a bit more with effects added to shapes.  I only started adding effects when including the background.  Since the character was in a T-Pose, I was conflicted what to do for a background.  I just experimented with random shapes that wouldn’t distract too much from the character while playing with effects.  The stain-glass effect for the top horizontal rectangle in the background looked the most interesting.  I also decided to implement a drop shadow to the character at the end.  I also  changed one of the background rectangles from the stain glass effect to another as it was creating some off-putting white artifacts around the edges.