But is it Art?

I'm teaching myself Illustrator CS6. One of my chosen topics this week was Live Paint. It was in other versions, but not one I used a lot. So, I decided to get serious about it. For a design idea, I was playing with the text of a common question "But is it art"? and decided the answer is that art just is. I did a quick sketch.

Then spent about an hour deciding on the right font. There wasn't one. Spent another hour modifying Felix Titling with two different versions, one that I came up with first and then a second closer to my sketch. Decided I liked the first attempt better.

I drew lots of other objects in Illustrator in black, white and shades of gray - things that are sort of my favorites: sprirals, birds, flowers.

Then converted that in a variety of ways to a live paint group. (If you ever used Flash, Live Paint was pretty much taken from Flash's clever way of letting you color objects based on where they intersect.) The first attempt I kept the intersections simple. Live Paint is fast. 23 minutes to totally recolor this!

The next one I changed the colors to mostly primaries. Time spent: 15 minutes.

The next one I changed to my preferred colors and created a new set of background shapes and let them create more intersections.  Time spent:45 minutes.

Fun exercise. The great thing about Live Paint (and Illustrator in general) is that it took so little time between the gray version and experimenting with the next colored version. (Actually painting each with acrylic or watercolor would have taken me weeks.) I'm not finished with Live Paint yet. I've only painted the "faces."  You can paint the strokes, too!  More fun to come. So is it art? Art is!