Illustrator exercise comparisons

I’m almost done with my Adobe Illustrator course from IACT.ie and it’s been great! I’ve learned the basics of the regular tools and figured out the principles of layers and objects. I used to think everything was one big piece of magnificent art, but I’ve realised it’s usually a lot of much smaller pieces working together. I should’ve realised that before but I guess I was so impressed by it. I really enjoyed the course as I’m into designing and making things. I’m confident with Illustrator after making a bunch of logos and following along with the exercises provided by the course. Hopefully I’ll finish it up this week and move onto Photoshop then, really looking forward to that too. It’s really a matter of practice once you know the basics I guess, just like anything. There was a few advanced courses being run around Dublin in the past few months but I don’t think I was ready for them just quite yet.

Here’s a few things I’ve done so far, the originals are on the right and the Illustrator creations by myself are on the left.

Factory Exercise

This exercise was to replicate the factory seen above. I used multiple shapes, gradients and groups to achieve this, with overlays creating an angled-perspective of the factory itself. Drop shadows gives the clouds, text-box and rings a heightened position from the artboard. 

Monroe Exercise

This exercise was to replicate the image of Marilyn Monroe seen above. This exercise required a lot of usage from the Pen tool for the many different shapes. I created the hair first to define the area of the face, and from there I overlapped many different shapes to replicate the original image. 

I made a quick copy of the Pepsi logo using the Pen tool. Nothing too difficult to it, just another logo to make. I’ll have a folder or section of everything I’ve done with Illustrator and try to keep it updated!