Continuing my Illustrator Experiment

by Kathy Garvey
I'm just starting to get my laptop back in working order and getting back to work on my Illustrator project posted about two weeks ago. This is a continuation of developing designs for tiles by starting with a line drawing in Adobe Illustrator and from there gradually creating symbols to place into a masked square for printing to tiles. I left off in the last post at the point where I had created the designs and filled them in with black and white gradients. The next step was to start playing with color. This is just my first version using colors.

It took about eight hours to get to this step. Once I colorized my symbols, I rebuilt the design.

When trying to build the next one, I realized I needed a few more symbols so I created a half flower and some half leaves.

Now, to experiment with placement. Built some smaller leaves.

The fun of symbols is you just drag them in and put them wherever you want. So while getting to the color version shown at the top of the page took many hours, each subsequent tile takes about 10 minutes and is just fun to play with. I went a little crazy with this one. Built a new bud and turned some new objects into symbols, too!

Going for a more subdued version!

I'm still working on the coloration and building new symbols. I don't have this to where I'm ready to have tiles printed. That's a big expense so I need a lot more time. Besides, there's so many more directions I can go easily from this point, I'm sure I haven't found my favorite versions yet.

An advantage to using symbols is that if I modify the colors, my design will modify automatically. For these I used my favorite colors - blues, greens and yellows. But, I realize today's popular color palettes are much different. (I'm so trying to like them.) My next step in this exercise is to experiment with changing the symbols to use the more fashionable colors like that turquoise, orange and pale green I'm seeing everywhere. That's a real challenge for me. Next post, maybe!