Combining Animals

First I took the picture of a spider monkey and cut out a cows head, using a light eraser to get a good border that doesn't stick out. Then I had to run the cow's head through color correction so that it's hue matched that of the monkey's fur. I didn't like the cow's eyes so I found some fish eyes that I thought were more engaging and put them in there. To get the whole thing to look like a more cohesive whole I added shadows with a really light brush. Added shadows around the eyes helped to blend those in better.

Project #3

So this wasn't too bad of a project to do. I Started out just looking at the piece I was supposed to copy and I noticed that the main image seemed to be mirrored, which would halve the work for me. So I outlined the black area with the eye and put in a white shape to make the eye form, mirrored it and voila. After that is was rinse and repeat for the rest of the face. Then the outline and red background for the type were easy enough to replicate with the rectangle tool. The sharp cornered forms of the 'e' and 'y' were a snap and the 'o' and 'b' were a bit harder, but they're fairly simple forms so it wasn't bad. I found that making your objects transparent while creating them makes it much easier to trace something since you can still see where the outline will be when it's selected or you're drawing it.

2nd Project

This one was tough for me because I didn't really know what Julius Klinger would make. He was well known for his charicatures in his work so I went with that. I drew a loose charicature of Klinger, scanned it into my computer and drew over it in Illustrator. This technique seemed to work out pretty well and I think that it makes it easy to go from rough work to a nicer draft.
Klinger was around when stuff was begining to go away from classical art and posters were popular so I tried to keep the shapes solid and not too complex. I think that I got caught up in making it like a particular body of work instead of taking themes of Klinger's work and things that he did a lot and doing them in my own way.
On the plus side this was my first use of Illustrator other than minipulating letters in project #1 so I learned a lot.

Project #1

For the first composition I focused on what each shape separately looked like to make the character (the first one is the polite Ogre). I enjoyed that process of combining shapes to make a larger figure so I ended up doing that for the next two as well. Although I went more abstract with the third composition (the circuit) it was still a representation of actual things so for the last one I wanted to make something more abstract. The last one (the one with the 'a' in the middle) was tough for me and I had no idea what to do with this weird shape I was just adding stuff onto. So I was able to get past that problem by just making the object small and numerous enough that it became more of a texture.