For the design challenge i decided to follow a couple of tutorials for creating your own twitter bird with Abode Illustrator. The two tutorials that i used as guides were both very helpful, but i think that i still need more practice at using Illustrator to create characters (Rob Barrett’s twitter bird tutorial and George Coghill’s twitter bird tutorial for GoMediaZine). I wanted to create a fat happy twitter bird.
Both tutorials started with a sketch on paper of a twitter bird so i did the same as you can see below.
Drawing of twitter bird
I imported the image into illustrator and used it as a base for creating the lines of the bird in a layer above. As i do not have a graphics tablet i drew all the lines with my mouse, which i found a bit tedious. The following is an image of the bird that i drew in illustrator before i added any colour to it.
Twitter bird lines
Once i had the lines i added some colour to the bird. I found it hardest to create the shadows and am still not happy with the result, but learning how to use Illustrator and creating the bird was fun and stimulating.
Twitter bird in colour
I’m sure that i will try to create a new bird, but i plan to create a few other simple characters in Illustrator before i return to the creation of a new twitter bird.
