Surface Design with Illustrator - An Update!

For the past three years of university, ive been using Photoshop for repeat patterns. Its quite embarrassing to say. Its not professional, i know, but it seems easy! I know ive needed to make the jump from Ps to Illustrator for aaaages.. but im not brave enough!

Well - today ive had enough of putting it off.. I contacted Adobe, and my Photoshop Subscription has been cancelled, and i bought Illustrator. No more excuses!

You may have seen on my Regular UK blog that i started an Illustrator surface design class on Creative Live. It was so good, i bought it, and i spent today reminding myself how to do the most basic things, lines, pen tool, blob tool, and hey, i can even zoom in and out using the special short keys on my keyboard. Im learning!! Im learning!!

Ive banged on about it already, but i thought i would upload some images of my progress.

This image has been made by following the course very closely. The images are made by me, but are not my ideas at all. They are simply created to learn the tools, in this case we have used to pathfinder tools including unite, minus front, we have rotated, reflected, scaled and copied, and learnt to apply text to a shape. I've learnt alot!

I learnt how to create a design-seeds style colour palette, although i could achieve this on Photoshop, this way is so much quicker. The photograph is my own, of what i wore to my graduation this year! I realised my palette was kinda dull, this always happens to me! But i like natural colours, oatmeal, linen, and i love purples and blues, so i guess this palette is a good representation of myself.  Ive kept this picture small because the quality is awful. Forgot to save-for-web. But i did learn it!!

And lastly - when i watched the course for the first time a few months ago, i downloaded an illustrator trial, and i created this illustration of a shoe from Clarks. I work there, and i had grown attached to this shoe. I couldnt pull it off myself, so i thought i would draw it! It was a lovely red brown leather, with a tweed style fabric in between, with ribbon laces. Not sure my illustration does it justice, but i tried!

And here is a photograph Clarks posted to their instagram just yesterday, a close up of the tweed on this beautiful shoe.. now you can all see what i was going for!