THE SYMBOLS OF LIFE

Welcome to the first entry of my blog. I want to share my work in illustrator, which was made during the holiday after the first semester, with our class. Please feel free to give me any comment so that I can know what is wrong with my work.

Here is my work:

Source of idea:
Actually, my inspiration came from a New Year calendar in my house. All the images illustrated in the calendar are ceramic vases with traditional flowers of Vietnam, which remind me the strong and energetic flow of life. Interestingly, I remembered an old story of Tibet that considers fish as the symbol of life and snake as the symbol of death. As a result, I added fish into my work. After that, I found out that my work was quite simple, just only a vase and some fish. Therefore, I tried some symbols to fill that empty space and I finally chose the Chinese spiral symbol, which represents sea or water. At the end, all of them make sense, don’t they?


Illustrator drawing:
_ Most of the lines I used to draw the fish are made by the Arc Tool and the Line Segment Tool. I think that the Arc Tool is very useful to draw curved lines while it is difficult for me to use the Line Segment Tool to make the same curved lines. However, it is true that the Line Segment Tool is really good to make complicated lines. I also used Direct Selection Tool to modify the lines so that they can look perfect.
_ I had same patterns for decorating the vase. I used Pen Tool to draw each curved level of line and filled them with color of the ground such as yellow and brown. After completing each level, I pasted them one by one and used the eraser to clear some parts of them. It sounds like a long and tired work. So if anyone has better method for doing it, please let me know.
_ Finally, I used the Spiral Tool to make spiral symbols. This step is easy. We just create them and scale them to the size we like.


In addition, I have made a second edition of this work with some Photoshop skills that we just studied recently. I feel like my work is better when I use the Hue / Saturation option in Image adjustment to decrease to -80%. I then use the History Brush Tool to make the vase and fish become brighter in the black background. They just look like shining stars in a dark sky. This even matches my idea: The vase and the fish are symbols of life.

Enjoy:

Thanks for viewing.