all spaced out man

for this project i wanted to focus more on mood than on anything else. that kind of lent itself to scale, focus, and color to convey a mood rather than font or lettering specifically, although of course they always will.

i was hoping to make it to printing today, but at the risk of sounding whiney, illustrator is pretty fickle. right now i am taking a quick break in my process to explain the process of what im doing so that i dont forget and to explain how things came together. my quote and final product are as of yet a secret but i figured i'd explain the synthesis.

i wanted to make a universe that would span a whole wall. i really like space photos themselves and some of the trippy things artists have been doing with them lately. the colors are surreal and the way they come together is in and of itself a mosaic. plus you can mess up and it still looks nice because isnt that the way organic things are supposed to look?



so i started with this picture of the galaxy. there are more colorful ones and crazier ones but i figured i'd keep it fairly simple for better clarity. then i taped paper around the perimeter of the wall i want to use and labeled the columns with numbers and the rows with letters. turn off your ceiling fan when you do that. its not as funny but it will make things go faster.

i dont have a problem with anyone who takes images and uses them, but i kind of wanted to make my own universe thing time. with the swirling colors and all. using the space picture as a guide, i drew and quartered it into the same rows and columns as my room. i used it as a reference for base colors and color progression. basically, i set down a base tone, usually a blue. then i overlayed shapes in various colors, changing the opacity to tint the sky. then i spent some serious time warping things.




i liked the swirls and things, but the way the colors were didn't really resemble the free flow of colors. i tried and failed to master the blend tool with no luck. this was about the time the computer lab started bailing out of illustrator. i think my many clicks were overload and i wasnt saving constantly enough so i was beginning to get frustrated and loosing alot of time and work very quickly. when using illustrator, it's a good idea to a) not open anything else on the desk top and b) give the program little breaks so it can process things better when you open it again.

when things didnt blend, i thought about using the masks that come on photoshop and are applied super easy. they are applied super easy because everything is already rasterized. i tried to use these effect right off the bat but the program wanted to rasterize, then pixelate, then rasterize, then pixelate BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH. this caused a string of frustrating program crashes. i went home and downloaded the trial version for my lap top. then i realized it was best to select everything in the piece, select object: rasterize. then select effect: pixelate. i chose 3%.





then lather, rinse, repeat for a-i and 1-10.