These are a selection of vector illustrations from 2004, which was the designer trend at the time that involves a photo taken either by you or sourced from an actual photo, placed and then traced in illustrator.
That’s right, this process involves tracing from the original source image, but to be fair to those that do this…comic book artists tend to do this all the time and lets not forget the biggest crime to vector illustrations that made a media sensation (and controversy) which is the HOPE poster from Shepard Fairey for the Obama campaign.
And speaking of controversy, my next post will be vector illustrations of the pornographic variety. More on that later!
I like some of the “illustrations” that I’ve done thus far over the years because I got to learn about using flesh and skin colors as well as using different textures with the illustrations.
Believe it or not, a couple of these illustrations made it on Black Magazine wee whiles ago. I don’t remember the issue that it was featured but I do remember submitting a vector to the editor at the time of well…. all things, an Obama image.
Believe it or not, a couple of these illustrations made it on Black Magazine wee whiles ago. I don’t remember the issue that it was featured but I do remember submitting a vector to the editor at the time of well…. all things, an Obama image.
This sort of thing was running rampant at the time around 2004 that there was a sense of joy and guilt behind doing vectors.
The sense of joy came from the bright color Platte that was in illustrator and the experimentation that was had with said colors as well as the tools, but there was the sense of guilt in which you essentially were tracing an image from the original source because how else would one get it to pinpoint accuracy when the thing was finished.
Admittedly I am a terrible drawer, I can be proficient in doodling but I wouldn’t say its photo realistic. But doing vector illustrations, I hopefully developed a style to make them at least stand out. Again, the validity of Vectors can be hard to justify in whatever context you’d put them in be it art or sham.
As it stands, I don’t do much vector illustrations as much as I would love to but like I said previous, I need to take my own photos to circumvent my guilt of tracing photos, which is why I stopped.
But I believe some are still doing vector illustrations today, which I will leave you with the links to.
