For today’s final project I wanted to try my hand at a “new” drawing tool. Throughout boot camp there were many times I needed to create graphics. My whole final project was a series of hand-drawn cartoon graphics and backgrounds. To everyone’s surprise/amusement/astonishment I did them all in PowerPoint. It may sound weird, but I’ve always thought of PPT as a drawing tool, being first introduced to it that way as a child by my mother.

Anyway, many people told me I should try Illustrator and that after a bit of an adjustment, it would be an amazing tool. They were right.

For today’s project, I decided to hand draw the scene mentioned earlier in my process post, but to learn how to use the basics of Illustrator when doing it. Luckily Adobe had some really awesome tutorials disguised as miniature interactive games, and that made things a breeze!

After half an hour of the tutorials, I was moving along great! The layers were especially helpful.

At the end of the day I think this came out really great. I could have done similar in PowerPoint, but the range of options for opacity, textures, patterns, layouts etc. was so much better in Illustrator. Being able to combine and subtract shapes had to be my favorite part (how i created my crescent moon).

So enjoy  “Drawing 22 (It feels like one of those nights…) illustration below! As I mentioned earlier, the motivation behind this was how the “scene” can be kind of zombie-like many nights. This illustration shows a live person fleeing from the waiting line of zombies, all try to get into the party. For me it represents the difference between where I am now and where I was at 22. I most certainly would have been in line then, and absolutely run away now.