ADVE-CORE2291 Design Lab 1: Project 2 Illustrator Techniques
This project was to help get a fundamental understanding of many of the common tool used with Adobe Illustrator. Overall, having some relative experience with Illustrator already, this project help reinforce what I already had some knowledge on, and helped drive home aspects that were still challenging or unknown to me. Most of the practice I got with this project was with the pen tool as well as the shape builder tool.
Illustrator Techniques - Coca Cola Script
Aligning the reference image and eye-dropping colors from the image.
Completed tracing of the first half of the Coca Cola script as well as the finished curved text for the trademark.
Completed tracing of the Coca Cola Script.
All traced script formed into shapes.
Finished product with gradient background as well as a spare parts artboard on the right.
Pattern Elements - Coca Cola Christmas
For my pattern theme I decided to go with a Christmas theme. I chose Christmas mostly because of how many different approaches there were to tackle this project with a theme as large and important as Christmas. Christmas is all about giving and caring, and especially in current times, having a little reminder of that is always nice.
Visual Exploration
Because Christmas is such a large holiday there are so many different things associate with it, mostly winter related things of course. For my references I looked for things like snowmen, sleighs, ornaments, snowflakes, and most obviously, Santa. I also looked for a couple different existing pieces of artwork that I wanted to work towards incorporating a similar style.
Sketches
For my sketches I tried to sketch many of the objects I found references for but also incorporate some of them with each other, like the snowmen on the ornaments. I also sketched out my two pattern ideas, the first being the Coca-Cola logo with simple, flat almost icon like drawings behind it, similar to one of the reference photos. The second being a collection of Christmas ornaments hanging, with the large one in the center having the Coca Cola logo on it.
Progress on the Pattern Elements
The first thing I did was make very basic and minimalist versions of some of my sketch items, hoping to use them for a background pattern.
The next thing I worked on was getting a color scheme down. My initial idea was to do contrasting colors with the classic Christmas red & green, but it was extremely difficult to put those colors together and have them look good. Eventually I decided to just do a red version and a green version. After deciding this, the only thing left to do was put the items in a pattern and overlay the Coca Cola script. The final version of each color can be seen at the end of this page below.
With my first pattern(s) completed, I next worked on my second sketch idea of those same pattern elements but suspended in Christmas ornaments. This was relatively simple, I just reused the same elements from before, adding color, and using some clipping masks on the candy cane to ensure the stripes didn't bleed onto the ornament.
After getting most of my ornaments finished I decided to add little ornament strings and ornament toppers in to make it look a little more complex and unique from the first pattern. I used a couple different gold colors and a free-form gradient on the ornament toppers in order to give them some more dimension.
The nearly finished product after most things were finalized. I made a few more small changes from here including adding a circular border to the image so the strings didn't just float up infinitely.
Final Patterns
Final Presentation Board
Final Presentation board, CCAD approved legend, Coca Cola script redraw, and two of my three final patterns. I decided to just use the red version of the first pattern in my presentation board as it fit better with the overall theme of Coca Cola.
