For the third and final design of this Adobe Illustrator, Procreate comparison experiment, I decided to challenge myself with a photo in front of the CD wall. The CD wall is something my roommates and I put up our sophomore year and it was always the reason I decided not to trace certain pictures.
However, for my last portrait I decided to give it a shot. I used my favorite picture of one of my roommates and me and started with Procreate. After taking the lazy way out with the sweatshirt on Procreate for the second design, I wanted to redeem myself with this picture. Between the CDs and sweatshirt lettering, I knew the picture would be more challenging than the previous two designs, but I was excited to give it a whirl.
Below is the picture I decided to trace for my third design:
Surprisingly, the lettering was not as hard as I envisioned. When I drew the lines of the letters I just held the pencil down for an extra second and the line straightened itself out. This Procreate feature helped make crisper, more defined lines for the outline of the letter design. With the tracing part down, I just used layers to create a similar effect that the sweatshirt in the picture had.
What was even better was that I got to do the whole process twice. Since my friend and I were matching in the picture I was overjoyed when I realized I got to do the lettering all over again on her shirt.
With the sweatshirt details all set, and the majority of the portrait done at this point, it was time to tackle the CDs. For the Procreate design I threw on a movie and outlined every single CD. As tedious as it was, I definitely got into a groove with it.
After finishing the outline of all the CDs, the design still seemed off and during the individual capstone critiques everyone mentioned the streaks of light on the CDs from the string lights on the wall. Adding this would definitely draw in more color and overall create a more accurate depiction of the original picture.
But, finally after all the details were accounted for, this is the end result of the third Procreate design:
This time around as rewarding as finishing the Procreate design felt, I was really not all that excited to do it all over again in Adobe Illustrator. As much as I wanted to see how it would come out on the computer, all the details that went into the portrait took quite some time and I was not very eager to jump back into the design process again.
Despite my hesitation, I eventually got started and this time I tried to be more mindful of my use of the pen tool. Instead of creating all these unnecessary points, I did my best to manipulate the pen tool into the shape of the outline I was creating. Still working on my technique, I clicked on the shape after it was complete and deleted any unnecessary anchor points.
I did not expect this process to work as well as it did. Because of this change in technique I think some of my lines are much cleaner and more accurate to the original picture than my earlier digitally traced picture portraits. What was nice this time around was that for the CDs I did a lot of copying and pasting. This definitely sped up the process a bit more and made it a little less tedious than the Procreate design.
It still took me over 8 hours to do the CDs alone, which I only know because my friend kept my company on Facetime throughout the whole process, but in the end I think it was all worth it.
Here is the final design from Adobe Illustrator:
After flipping back and forth between these two portraits in Procreate and Adobe Illustrator, there is the usual color difference between the two programs. I still favor the Procreate design in most aspects, but I have to say the CDs in Illustrator look better in my opinion. I like the lighter gray and the way the background complements the rest of the image better than in what I produced in Procreate. Aside from this though, I think the Procreate design was once again stronger overall.
Despite this leniency towards Procreate for each portrait pair, I think these two designs are my favorites of the whole project, which is exactly what I was hoping for. I definitely have so much more to learn, but I noticed small differences from my first design to this last design that made me think I did improve in some shape or form.
I’m excited to continue doing digitally traced picture portraits like this for fun. I really like the design process and the look of these types of portraits so I hope I make time for this kind of work outside of class and keep learning new things about these two different, yet equally great programs.
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