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CHAPTER 4: ILLUSTRATION [ 171 ]
ALTER EGO AVATARS
2. VECTOR OVERDRAWING
Although its only 50 x 50 pixels, the tiny “buddy icons” that appear in instant mes- saging windows make a powerful representation of who you are and set a tone for your online persona.
Import your high-contrast image into Illustrator, place it on its own layer, and lock it. Open a new layer and start to experiment. Try the Pen, Pencil, and Brush Tools to see which you like best. I recommend you select no fill and start with a stroke that has a line weight of 5 points. You might want to try Illustrator’s Template Tool or the Auto-Trace Tool. When you are done, label this traced layer “outline” and lock it too.
Sean Michael Aaron
This exercise is a roll-up-your-sleeves introduction to Illustrator. It requires you to get comfortable with the basic drawing tools. The scale of the project may be small, but the learning curve is big. I am banking on the fact that because it’s your image you will be working with, there will be enough motivation to carry you through.
3. SIMPLIFICATION
Permit me a word or two about working loosely. You are going to drive yourself absolutely nuts if you attempt to capture each and every significant detail in the photograph of yourself. Truth is that unless you let go of all but the most essential shapes, the resulting portrait will not only be a cluttered mess, you’ll lose the like- ness that is essential in such icons.
Now begins the process of reduction. Hide your original photo and make a new layer on top of the outline. Overdraw again, but this time simplify your first tracing. Work toward self-contained shapes and away from freestanding lines. Work in steps: Save a layer and then make a new layer. Keep going. Turn your image into a cartoon.
Katie Elmore
In fact, go for exaggeration. Try to assess which of your features—hair, eyewear, lips, eyes—is the most characteristic one. Work as caricaturists and cartoonists do when they draw our national leaders—take it to the extreme.
Daniel Julius Kamil
Your photographic source image journeys through many steps to yield the simplified self-portrait/vector graphic. Jamie Kruse
5. TAKE IT ONLINE
1. HIGH CONTRAST SELF
When you have an alter ego avatar you like, save a few copies as JPEGs. AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM) is the most widely used format for avatars. AIM calls them “buddies.” There are lots of other instant messaging services that use avatars, including ones pro- vided through Windows, Yahoo!, Google, and Apple. AIM (over one hundred million active users) posts alter ego images at 48 x 48 pixels. Mac’s iChat squeezes source JPEGs to 64 x 64 pixels. Because you have created a vector illustration, resizing down will not be a problem.
You need a good portrait of yourself, head and shoulders and evenly illuminated. You can crop your im- age out of a larger one, but it’s important to “square-up” the version you will use in this short project. Make it 300 x 300 pixels. This gives you an image that is big enough to work with, but small enough to help you from getting too fussy with details. Save the source picture. Next, turn your source image into a black-and-white version. Play around with the brightness and contrast so that your image starts to lose its mid tones. Save the high-contrast version as a JPEG, GIF, or PSD file.
Daedra Kahler
Your alter ego will meet your real ego as you mess with different coloring and filling in. Try to choose ef- fects that don’t just make you look gorgeous or darling, but that also reflect your personality. Jamie Kruse
4. ADD COLOR AND PATTERNS
Now you get to play with Illustrator’s color and pattern palettes. Try monochromatic palettes or flashy ones. If you want to eliminate the outlines, match the color of the path with the color of the fill. Illustrator lets you fill with patterns of many kinds.
Benjamin Ing
Here is a small gallery of alter ego avatars. Thanks to my students for being guinea pigs. Send your Avatar to mediapedia.net.
Larry Lowe photo and Ella Tufenne drawing