The Poster has been Conquered!

Well after two fruitless days of work I was finally able to make some real progress on the Billie Holiday poster yesterday. I learned a lot about Adobe Illustrator in the process and am very pleased with it now that I understand it better.

Illustrator has this incredibly cool function called live trace that will create a vector illustration from any photograph. I was struggling because all the photos that I had to work with were really low resolution and didn't look very good. So I ended up using the live trace to create this more subtle graphic. I then played around with the 3d effect to loft the Text at a matching angle to the edge of the illustration. This was also new territory and so I had to play around with all the settings to understand them better. Then I figured out how to use add decorative rules using the Stroke function which provided a nice subtle edging for the piece. The original background was just a simple black, but my friend wanted a little splash of color so I selected the background and added a gradient fill with the blue and I think it adds some nice dimension. The gradient is banding a little, so I'll have to work to fix that problem today.

However today I am taking a bit of a day of rest because I have been working so hard this whoe week. I plan to do a bit of gardening, taking advantage of the wet ground from the lovely rain we had last night, and then a lot of house cleaning. We finally got the grand piano that had been visiting us moved on to its permanent home and so we are planning parties for the next three saturdays. What fun!