Illustration
A selection of some of my better examples of digital illustration
A selection of some of my better examples of digital illustration
I *love* working in Adobe Illustrator, and I'm still learning about all of the neat tricks it has up its sleeve. However, great digital illustration can be created in programs as ubiquitous as Microsoft PowerPoint—it's all up to the talent of the illustrator! Some of the following are projects I've done for clients, and some are things I've done for class. Anything that looks "science-y" are illustrations I made during my tenure as a graduate student in Materials Science.
The front side of an informational postcard I designed for Iridescent (www.iridescentlearning.org), describing ways that university faculty can partner with Iridescent to develop their research focus into an educational mobile app, part of an interactive educational website, curriculum taught to K-12 students in extracurricular engineering education programs, or a book of projects aimed at school students.
My first experiment with Illustrator's Effects palette, using textures and shadows to achieve a "cut-and-paste" construction paper aesthetic.
Chessboard illustration fChessboard illustration for Illustrator class I'm taking for my UCLA Extension DCA certificate (www.uclaextension.edu/dca). As the first homework assignment for the class, we were instructed to draw a chessboard and at least four chess pieces.
My first experiment with Illustrator's 3D effects. Rudimentary, but I wanted to challenge myself to make something that looked cool :) I call this one "Alice Intends to Take Her Own Chess Set Through the Looking-Glass, but Accidentally Takes a Tab of Acid Before Falling into the Hole to Wonderland Instead"
I made these graphics to supplement the curriculum for the Technovation Challenge (www.technovationchallenge.org), explaining the Build-Measure-Learn loop used in design (where the images depict building a house, measuring the house, and learning that the house would be better with a garage) and the steps that comprise the cycle of "Lean Thinking".
My first time experimenting with creating a realistic 3-D box and using a black background shape overlaid with colored foreground shapes to create the illusion of stroke and fill.
Logo concepts for the final project in my first design class ever! The final concept—"Derailer", in the bottom center—was not only the most simple and effective, but also the most technically challenging; blood isn't very easy to draw.
A summary of the many programs run by Iridescent (www.iridescentlearning.org). You can read more about my work for this nonprofit in the "Iridescent" album. This graphic was actually conceived as a ~4' x 4' poster, and is meant to show the relationships between Iridescent's programs, participants, and beneficiaries.
This ancient graphic, depicting transmembrane proteins embedded in the phospholipid bilayer of a cell membrane, was created when I was but a wee 18-year-old, fresh out of high school and a useful-yet-still-woefully-inadequate introductory class in Illustrator. Here, with reckless abandon, I applied gradient meshes and styles without knowing how they worked! The "lighting" is also pretty wonky—someday, I will recreate this properly, now that I actually know what I'm doing with the software, especially as I've long since lost the original file.
