A Breath of Spring

By: Nia Braccidiferro

Since I am less familiar with Adobe Illustrator than I am with Adobe Photoshop, I am proud of the work that I’ve created thus far. I’m excited to learn more tips and tricks to manipulating and creating my own work on this software. In class, we were given a blank outline of an elephant. We were tasked in adding color swatches to the pre-made drawing, and in the process also creating our own swatches to use in later projects. There were so many swatches to choose from, but to stray from what everyone else was doing, I chose to explore the gradient route. There are multiple gradient folders pre-made in the swatch section of Illustrator. I wanted the colors I chose to be bearable and enjoyable to the eye. I didn’t want to overwhelm the viewer with too many colors or colors that clashed with each other. I mainly chose gradients from the “Brights” and “Tints and Shades” folder because they looked so peaceful and turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. I decided to go the traditional route with the color of the elephant because that’s the vision I had in my head. For the objects and accent points surrounded the elephant, I chose colors similar to blue, such as pink and purple. The objects, for example, the flowers, further away from the elephant, I added colors that weren’t as similar to blue, such as red, yellow and orange. This provided a necessary contrast to the outline. I am very satisfied with the outcome of my choices.