Project 1 - Kevin Bowman

For this project, I started out by drawing a merged rectangle (red), an object oval (brown), and a primitive oval (blue) on one layer. I then double clicked the brown oval so I could treat it as a merged drawing, skewed it a bit, made an indentation with the envelope tool, and used a smaller skewed oval to cut a hole in it. Then I took out the brush tool and created a custom gradient, and used the stipple setting to give an interesting look to the paint on my palette. It seems to me that it is always a better idea to use an object drawing, and if you need to use the features of a merged drawing, to double click the object and go from there.

I created some text on top of my rectangle and carefully inside the oval primitive, copied it upwards, and set their color to the inverse of the background the words were sitting on. Then I broke apart the text back into a merged drawing, and deleted the bottom "SOME". Doing that deleted what was behind it in the rectangle. I then selected the rectangle and all the individual parts of the letters, and used the envelope tool to distort both the rectangle and the text.

Next, I broke out the pen tool and drew a combination of bezier curves and straight lines on a lower layer. I used the subselection tool and dragged the design around a bit to fine tune it, and made good use of the alt key modifier. I also played around a little with the add, remove and convert anchor point tools to vary the design a bit more. The pen tool has gone from something I hate using to my default when I need to make lines. Then I took the brush tool and created the shape with the green gradient, and modified it with the transform tool, as well as the edge and corner handles. After that, I modified the colors of the deco tool and used it on the pen layer, inside the design.

Finally, I used the pencil tool with its cap set to square, drew an X, placed the text reading "Treasure?" and broke that apart into a merged drawing. I'm not a big fan of the pencil or brush tool, but I would expect to achieve much better results with them if I had a tablet. Overall, I wouldn't call this a work of art, but it serves as a good demonstration of the tools, and that's all it was supposed to be. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone else's projects.