#3 Vector illustration, Part 2

Vector illustration

This particular piece took about 6-8 hours all together.
The small white spots on the top right of the piece are pretty
 good indicators how detailed the piece was going to be. One
square was about the size of 3-6 pixels.

Doing it again

What I did was practice and practice a lot. At first this is a picture of my girlfriend and I didn't imagine it could be this hard to draw. At first I scaled the whole picture with mesh tool trying to do it as sharp as possible... A mistake! The illustrator was super slow and it collapsed couple of times without saved file. The second time I divided the face into different layers... Another mistake there! I couldn't find a way to connect those different meshes so that I would be pleased. The third time I did the whole face again, but I watched first couple of videos from Youtube from the user "frankwyte81." I found out the basics, but what I didn't saw is that by using a mesh tool the more detailed areas will show out badly, so the mesh tool should be used little by little. However, I manage to keep it in decent contrast somehow.

         

The Vector illustration

   

The original picture

            The body and the background were really simple to make when I started learning the mesh tool. Only the patience is needed. I also used some basic techniques learned in the course to improve the mesh a little like hair shadows, some bright details with opacity changes, and using a mesh tool on a mesh tool creating more detailed layers like in this case the mouth and the eyes. One very good advice for people when using a mesh is that you might want to color the mesh simply with just few colors quickly by selecting more than one dot at the time. Then the image can be reshaped and more lines can be added, but still keep in mind what is going to happen next, because some dots might be forgotten when the mesh area is filled with same color than the actual mesh area.