Oklahoma, Part One

My class has been going really well! It's so nice to go to class, feel good there, and feel like I'm a competent individual; it's been a hard week at work and in life, so a little reassurance that I have talent at something is encouraging!

I'm hard at work on my Black History Month project (updates in a later post), but I also have a fun little side project. One of my close friends, Bill, is turning 30 this month, and we are of course welcoming him into his 30s in style with a big shindig! Yours truly is planning the party (and enjoying it a lot; I may be more excited about the party than he is)! Bill is from Oklahoma and loves Bluegrass, so in honor of him, we're having a Bluegrass/state fair theme party. Here is where I confess that I've never actually been to a state fair, fun fair or carnival most definitely, but never an actual state fair. Rather than letting that deter me, I have been doing a lot of Internet research to make sure my colors, decorations, and food go with a state fair, and I made sure to look into the Oklahoma state fair (I'm a little too detail-oriented sometimes). In googling the Oklahoma State Fair, I found a sign for it that I liked and felt I could incorporate into the party, but there was a problem: it says 2010 and this is 2011 (see below). I talked to my mom (also a very creative person) and we figured that I could change it using Photoshop or something.


Luckily, I'm in graphic design school and have access to Photoshop and other cool programs. The next day I had class, I took the picture in and showed it to my teacher Stephen and he told me that I could change it using Adobe Illustrator, the program we just learned. This was a win-win because not only could I change the sign to reflect the correct date, it gave me excellent practice on the computer and I learned some new tricks in the process. We had some lab days to work on our projects and I'm lucky to be a little ahead so I could work on both my school project and this, so I took a couple of hours each day I had class this week to work on it.

I figured the best/coolest way to describe the process was to show it, so I included pictures of it from beginning to end (mostly).

Step 1: Enlarging and Tracing. We enlarged the image so it was large enough to trace (another flashback to elementary school). It was a little pixelated so it made for interesting tracing, but that's okay. After the tracing, we made a copy and I went over it in pen to clean up the lines a little, change the year, and darken them so that I would have an easier time when I put it into the computer.

Step 2: Scanning the outline into the computer. We scanned the outline into the computer so I could use it in Illustrator.

Step 3: Creating the background. I actually did this as the last step, but for visual purposes it looks better to put it here. Because the shadows on the letters don't cover the paper, there are blank spaces for the background, but it can't be white as that's the color of the shadows, and the original background is this beige kind of color.

Step 4: Creating the shadows. Since the letters will go over the shadows, they didn't need to exactly follow the letters, just enough to create the right shadow/3D effect. That explains why they look ugly here, but doing it this way saved me so much time.

Step 5: Tracing the letters. Finally, I traced the letters and the state and tried to match the colors, except for the "a." I don't like that in the original it was the same color as the border because it all blended together, so I re-colored it to give it the extra pop.

Step 6: Put it all together and voila! I put all the layers back together and had a finished project. This is a before and after, you'll notice a few small changes from the original to mine: some colors, cleaner lines, and of course the 2011.

So, why call this part one? I figured that if I did this much and if I was going to make it large enough for a poster anyway, that I might as well add a finishing touch to it and put "Bill's Bluegrass Birthday" (yes, I named the party) on it to make it an entrance poster. What do you think? I think it turned out pretty good for my first real project in Illustrator. I really enjoyed using Illustrator for this, I think it may be a new favorite program, there's so much cool stuff to do with it. Stephen said that I have a talent for it and that it turned out well, I thought that was nice of him to say.

The rest of it (part 2) will be fun because I get to play around with typography. :) I haven't figured out exactly what type of typography I want to use, so it will be a surprise for all of us; hopefully it turns out well.

The party's in two weeks, so I'll be sure to post part two soon.