Natalie Portman Illustration (Vectors) - a Work in Progress

as i've mentioned on here a few times, i'm really trying to improve my competence with Adobe Illustrator. photoshop has taken a bit of a back seat for me recently because, while i'm by no means perfect, i've hit a bit of a saturation point on what i want out of photoshop, and pretty much whatever i need/want to achieve with it i can. i still use it a lot but i'm voluntarily not really furthering my knowledge/proficiency with it at the moment. Illustrator is proving to be a great challenge and one i'm really enjoying and i've been meaning to set up a little project with it for a long time, something to keep working at. so tonight i've finally decided to do it and what better to keep the motivation up than picking a particularly beautiful woman as a subject? i'll keep this thread updated with any changes or ideas i have, and feedback is obviously always welcome. maybe even get a bit of discussion going in here, if you use illustrator, if you've never heard of it, if you don't know what a vector image or a raster image is, maybe this could be the place to learn!

this is the picture i'm using. a nice facial close up, fairly simple, strong shapes and good lighting. i've messed with similar ideas in the past but always picked an image that was too complicated, and this was many moons ago when i'd first picked up the software, so hopefully this will prove to be more successful.



and this is the very first work i've done on it, blocking out the main shapes and adding some colour to make it easier to work with.



it's taken on a slight picasso feel already

 

Killer Lukin !

 

I always wanted to be able to do vectors. Then someone explained to me the amount of time and effort involved and I suddenly lost interest.

I'll watch this with interest as I love vectors.

 

i just remembered why i can never get into these projects, it's fuckin difficult. had a go at doin some details/features in the face but i just got annoyed so i binned that and focused on highlights and shadows. you may notice this is slightly different to the ones above, i actually started from scratch again to simplify the shapes and go for a more basic, cartoon style look/colours.



the shadows have really tied it together so far, i wasn't too happy with how it looked as just flat blocks of colour, but putting them in has brought it to life a bit, hoping it will work in the long run!

 

This is really interesting for me Lukin because I've always liked vectors but never even looked up how exactly they're done. They look really tricky. I've heard of Adobe Illustrator but have no idea what it is (Googling now).

 

for those of us who cant be bothered to steal an adobe product, try Inkscape

Does the same thing as illustrator, it's just free. and cross platform...

Lukin, have you looked into the import tools to bring normal photos into a vectored state? Or is that kind of against the purpose of the project?

 

I really should start using illustrator.. for now it's just collecting dust & space

 

the live trace facility in CS5/6 is really good and very useful, but yeah, that's not what I'm going for. more just trying to improve my illustrator skills and using this as a project to do that. I also don't want an exact replica of the image, more a stylised illustrated version