Below is a style guide template I made on Photoshop for Thuy when she helps me finalize the edits for the clients. Sneak peaks of the first drafts of illustrations are also shown below!
The image below are the first rough drafts of ideas I came up with. They are very sloppy and might be hard to understand visually. They have changed a lot as me and Suloni talked over ideas and layout.
I’ve been working on training myself with the advanced cascade tutorials before assigning them out to the other STAs. One of them included adding a pull quote onto a page which is shown in the first image. The other tutorial was trying out three different styles of tables by editing the HTML in the editor. They are all about insects and have links to information about them. The next step is assigning these out to the STAs who haven’t done them yet. The only one not included is a button training because that is on another post already in this blog.
I continued with my Basic Training, and the description for creating a Color Wheel in Ai really captured me, so I decided to work on that.
For a little bit of context, I didn’t really have any formal training in traditional or digital art, so I misunderstood the purpose of the assignment. Instead of exploring color theories and all that good stuff, I thought the assignment was to explore how the basic colors blended together create new colors :p. So my product turned out to be something completely off. Oops.
Suloni kindly complimented on the product, and clarified the purpose of the assignment for me (thank you Suloni!). So I’d just need to do some research on color wheel and color theories. Afterwards, I’d check in with her on my findings.
BUT, Suloni thought that the process of how I came up with the choice of style for the artwork above is interesting, and so she assigned me that task of creating a new STA training on defining artistic elements as they relate to different styles (specifically the distinction between digitally-made art and also-digitally-made-but-has-a-more-human-feel art 🙂 ).
All the STAs are creating caricatures to put on the Design STA banner for 2019-2020. After seeing some of the amazing drawings that people made for previous years’ banners, I decided to try my hand at digital drawing. I’ve only ever drawn on paper but I’ve been fascinated by digital animation for a while so I’m glad this assignment gave me the push I needed to try it out. Because I didn’t realize there were pads available in the Development Studio for drawing in Photoshop I ended up using the tablet part of my laptop, a Bamboo Ink stylus, and the first website I found that had drawing tools (sketch.io/sketchpad). The website was super straightforward and easy to use, I would recommend using it for drawings if you don’t mind doing it all freehand. For a simple caricature it had all the tools I needed but for more detailed drawings, Photoshop’s more advanced features would probably be more time efficient. Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment and now I’m set on improving my digital animation skills.
Here are some results from my Photo ID training. I’ve got a nice template set up for easy consistent composition between images. I touched up a few images if they were too dark/warm/cool for consistency as well.
Results of the work and links to the uploaded photos were mass emailed out to the senders.
I practiced adding buttons to my cascade test site by changing the code. The informal instructions given to me were then combined with the process I went through to formulate instructions for the knowledge base. Below is a screen shot of my practice page and of the instructions I made on the KB. (:
