Studio Practice: VECTOR ART

Here I have used Adobe illustrator to create a series of images that represent 4 places in the world. I focused on alcohol from different places. I did this as I feel that the bottles that these drink come in are visually pleasing and wanted to see if i could replicate this in my illustrations.
I first started out by finding images of Gin, Vodka, Rum and Whiskey bottles, as they is such a huge range of these it took some time to find the ones i felt would look the best.I struggled on how i was going to get these illustrations represent the cities just from the drinks bottles. Then on a dark cold winters night I was skulking around in the world of Pinterest when a ship in a bottle appeared on my screen and BINGO EUREKA HUSON WE HAVE LIFT OFF the idea was there put the cities in the bottles. I needed to look and find buildings, objects and anything that best represented the cities/places I had chosen.

Once I had decided on my subjects they were put in illustrator so I could copy their shape.

The page of the finished bits and the photos i used to copy them from.

The tools

Pen tool

Curved line tool.

Live Paint tool.

Shape tool.

I found the whole process very very confusing and fiddly, I felt like the program had been made by someone on a bad day at work and was pissed off at everything ever as thats what Illustrator is like to use. I know i did not set myself the easiest of tasks to learn how to use illustrator but i didn't expect it to be so stroppy, i feel a lot of what i was struggling with will come with time if i keep using it regularly.
I only really finished one off properly and you can see thats london the obvious one. The scottish one was nearly finished but i could not work out at all how to get a tartan fill in the bottle lid. I tried everything I could think of to do this but could not get it to do what i needed it to do. Very happy with how the hat on the rum bottle looks but is let down by the bottle fill the gradient fill looks very poor, shold of added some water to to represent the sea with a reflection. With the Vodka one i also really like the hat on top and the bottle shape but I the content is boring. This is down to me been way too ambitious and trying to use Saint Basil's Cathedral as my first image to create in illustrator.

IM happy with these final results but not a big fan of illustrator but will keep trying to use it as i know it can be a useful tool in some ares.