'Soldier Bar' illustration in progress; finally 'lazy' enough to use live trace

layout sketch

progress so far (5-13)

(Ai: Adobe Illustrator) 'Soldier Bar' finger board deck graphic design project

My great skateboard pal, Geng, who's a skateboard shop keeper, is trying to produce some decent wooden fingerboards. For the graphics on the deck, he asked me to 'design' a few. yeah there's quotation marks on that word because I'm not a person who draws! But, I'd like to be one and took the opportunity.

Don't have a Wacom tablet. (Actually I'm planning to get an intuos4) But this won't make much of a difference cause I'm planning to draw in Ai. If I draw in Ps, even with a tablet I'd die of frustration by now...

In Ai you draw vectors, which doesn't require you to drag a mouse/pen across a imagined line in order to draw it. Rather you define points and two directions for each point. As a result it is easy to produce perfect curves and they are extremely easy to edit. Perfect for a person like me who can't draw a nice curve in one stroke.

In fact I only watched some starters tutorials and never drew anything in Ai. So before I start to mess everything up I diligently watched Deke's Illustrator CS4 one-on-one: fundamentals and followed along with the exercise files provided. After that I really felt to have a solid foundation on using Illustrator. The shortcuts I memorized proved to be a life-saver when I worked on the project.

But I was not felling ready for the project. I then hand-traced a picture of Detective Conan using traditional approaches. Later I watched some of Mordy's Ai CS4: Beyond the basics tutorials and learned some very valuable modern illustrator techniques and realized that the Conan portrait could be be easily drawn within a few clicks using the live trace feature. I also discovered the live paint feature, which changed my approach of drawing with vectors entirely. live paint gave me the power to modify path attributes based on appearance (what I see on screen).

After some more testing in Ai I started the project. I measured the dimensions of a fingerboard to create some guides. I then made a layout sketch of the design and started this exacting project. While I worked on it I'm still wathcing some new tutorials to gain some inspirations in terms using the program. For inspirations on designing the deck I collected many elements from the web. I also took pictures of things that might be useful, including some scribbles I did while at a friend's house.

The second screenshot shows my progress so far.

Today I did the wine glasses and liquers on the shelves. For the first time I utilized the live trace feature. The liquer bottles are live traced, and I hand traced masks for them. The bottles will appear very small on finger boards, so I could create some typical liquer bottle outlines and duplicate them. But I think live traced bottles give them a feel of liquer bottles. Because liquer bottles are usually quite complicated they deserve more details. At least they should 'look like' with more details. Anyways, if it could get your work done as well, why not use the easier, automated feature?