Animal Illustrations | Adventures in Digital Art

soulturtle (55)in #art • 7 years ago (edited)

This post is about my first foray into digital art that actually started out as a mistake!

Good design starts with an idea, but executing it well is equally important. The design school I went to made sure we had good software, but didn't do much in the form of explaining them to us. I had to learn how to use the provided software to capture the meandering thoughts floating in my head and turn them into physical tangible forms. There are a lot of helpful tutorials online, but I found myself getting lost or just zoning out as they covered tools and concepts that weren't familiar to me. I figured the best way to learn was to just open the program and mess around to see what did what.

So there I was, figuring out the basics behind Adobe Illustrator, making something vaguely elephant shaped, when I wanted to erase something. I'd left the stroke on from creating a previous shape and didn't realise the eraser would have a stroke too. Instead of removing everything as I had expected, the strokes left by the eraser tool left some interesting shapes in the negative space. I thought this was pretty neat, because it could be used to create interesting patterns. After layering a few different colours, I soon got a decent looking aesthetic forming in front of me. I finished the first elephant illustration and was excited to try my newfound discovery on other forms. I thought I'd stick with the theme of using simple animal forms and just kept going at it. I soon had a collection of 12 different animals, all because I'd discovered a technique and style through a mistake.

This was a fun exercise using limited knowledge and tools. As of today, I'm probably a little more efficient at using software but also enjoy working directly with my hands. I'm getting better at turning my ideas into reality, though there still is a loss in that conversion which probably happens with everyone, with talented folk able to bridge that gap better. Even then, everything is relative. With eight billion people on this planet, there are that many separate realities and perspectives anything is viewed from. The best I can do, is create and share to the best of my ability, knowing it will resonate with others in ways that is unique to them. I've steadily improved my techniques and presentation with time, and will hopefully keep getting better. I've put this up on behance before, but thought you may appreciate the story behind it. I don't mean to sound cliched when I say that you can learn from your mistakes, but in this case I absolutely did!