#008 Magazine Cover (Part 1)

On Tuesday I officially entered Module 5 of Design Technology. Upon entering it, I discovered that our assignment would also be our midterm project. We have two weeks to complete this, whereas usually we have until the next Monday. En lieu of our regular assignments, we will be working on this.

The assignment is to design a magazine cover for the fictional magazine Vector Life. I've been given industry-standard specs to work by as I complete the assignment.

So, the professor wants us to use a vector graphic of ourselves (self-portrait). We're supposed to use this as the main image in the cover. When I got home this afternoon, I did a little photo shoot. In this screenshot, I've got the JPEG in Photoshop, and I've resized it to 50 pixels per inch.

 

Here you can see my workspace in Adobe Illustrator, and as you can see, I'm already hard at work using the Pen Tool to create outlines of the stripes on my shirt. This is done by clicking wherever you want a point, and then clicking again to get another point. Then you use something called "Bezier Handles to make curves in the line that accurately form into just about any curve you can imagine. It's time consuming, but the results are really nice. Also, I've applied a clipping mask around the outline of myself. I think I'll turn that off right now for expedience' sake.

In this image, I've got my tie outlined (I like my tie!) and we've got sort of a placeholder color going here so I can see where I've worked. I think you can also see some points and Bezier handles there in the lower right fold in the tie in red. 

Coming up Next: Magazine Cover (Part 2)