Tracing activity

Week 5 - Session 1

I completed the Tracing activity in Adobe Illustrator with two paintings from the Edward Hopper paintings.

Painting using geometric forms:

The most effective tool for me was the Polygon tool which then I could use the small diamond widget on the right-hand side of the initial shape to drag it up or down to increase or decrease the number of sides I would like to have. Or just one click while in the Polygon tool to enter the desired number of sides. I also created rolling hills and mountains with many triangles placed next to each other. To maintain the shades of the original painting and keep the liveliness, I tried to add more acute and obtuse triangles with appropriate colours. Rectangles and triangles were combined to build a house and a tower.

The most challenging part for me in the process was placing the elements next to each other to create proper visual results without leaving very small gaps between them. Sometimes I needed to use the Direct Selection tool to alter a bit such as pulling out the anchor point and the Selection Tool to rotate the shapes in the desired directions.

Large parts of the painting were certainly retained to preserve the meaning such as every part of the house, the tower or the area of hills. However, because the original painting had a lot of tint and shade, I attempted to keep it as much as I could by adding more shapes instead of just leaving the large area of one colour. Different saturations and values in the colours of the sky, the house and the hills were used.

The grasses in the original painting were what I couldn't keep in the tracing-over painting. I could see blades of grass with varying saturations and values but it would be extremely detailed to include all of every blade after this process.

Painting using organic forms:

It's quite a detailed painting with lots of objects stacked on top of each other. I created a few layers to place the background's elements and others to easily complete the painting with full colour after that. The Zoom tool helped a lot while using the Pen tool to trace over small details of the painting. I tried to keep the shade on the ground, of the house and the gas station but removed the shade of a forest of trees. Instead, I traced over some of the forms of trees with different values to symbolize the whole forest. The tree trunks were also removed because I saw that the trees placed next to each other were enough to visualize the lust forest in the original painting. The long narrow area of land and grass below were also illustrated with alternating symbolic colours. Same as the above painting, I also didn't keep the blades of grass from the original painting.

The most time-consuming part was arranging the order of such a great number of elements. Some details that should have been at the back were drawn later, so they obscured the smaller details. It took time to carefully consider which element should be traced first and after. If they were created in the wrong order, I would need to pay attention to rearrange them. The horse (or any animal in red) on the sign could be kept as even if it was a small object but it was worth tracing and then just copying and pasting to the three other signs on the gas station.