Today’s closing day!
I created this illustration for our moving announcement.
I started this illustration of our new home during my May SkillShare binge after taking a class with Draplin (Logo Design: Secrets of Type, Shape, and Color). He reminded me that everything is made up of basic shapes. He draws the most basic shapes and uses Illustrator to manipulate them, rather than wasting hours messing with the pen tool. Watching his workflow was the most helpful part of that class. Genius. I saw time I wasted flash before my eyes—if only I knew I could have been creating shapes this way. Oh, well; now I know.
This illustration took me about two hours from start to finish (minus playing around with layout for our moving announcement at the bottom of this post). I’m still not 100% happy with the stairs, but oh well. I bet if I changed the colors on them they’d work better. My illustration’s not perfect, but I wanted to see how fast I could illustrate something only by using circles, rectangles, and triangles. All the rectilinear shapes are derived from the original rectangle I drew for the main house shape. Pretty cool, eh?
After I finished the initial illustration, I punched up the color to match some envelopes I bought to send the announcements. Then I added some lawn and sky, on which I liberally used my creative license (we don’t have this much open space!).
I’m still impressed that I illustrated this. I’ve never done anything like this before. The last time I spent this much time in Illustrator was my first graphic design class where we had make a stupid illustration of a technical object using gradient meshes (I still have flashbacks…shudder). I thought I was being smart by cheating and tracing everything from the original photo with the pen tool. I bet that thing took me 100+ hours and its a bad illustration of a freaking tower fan. I don’t have it anymore or I’d post it.
Anyway—yay, closing day! Moving day is Sunday. 
