A Little Planning Goes a Long Way (Chieferu)

Nothing will help get an illustration started off on the right foot better than sitting down with a pencil and a piece of paper, and carefully planning what’s going to go where. Sketching out your ideas can save a lot of time and heartache! It’s much easier to work around mistakes on paper than to muddle through a fully composed vector illustration. Sketching out your ideas lets you quickly experiment with different compositions long before you break out the pen tool in Illustrator.

Example 1 really suffers from lack of planning. There are unnecessary gradients all over the place, the details of the file are sloppy, and the line weights are inconsistent throughout (in fact some shapes don’t even have outlines, which is distracting). Compositionally, all of the shapes appear to have been plopped down at random. Oh yeah, perspective has also been completely ignored.

The elements that created clutter have been removed in Example 2, resulting in a much cleaner and more dynamic composition. The gradients have been minimized and there’s much more attention to detail: all the shapes meet up exactly at the edges. The curves are smoother. The colors were chosen with care to imply a mood (that of an old fashioned comic book), and outlines have been removed in favor of carefully drawn details. There’s now perspective to the planet’s craters, which ties the composition together and gives a sense of realism and depth.

Style (Bortonia)

There are lots of stylistic techniques you can use to add oomph to a vector and give an illustration your own personal flair. Color combinations, line weights, graphic simplification, shading and highlights, and texture can all be manipulated to create different looks and feels. The trick is to pick a style and stick with it: mixing and matching styles can get distracting quick unless handled by an experienced professional.

Each of the characters in Example 1 are great. The problem is they have nothing to do with each other, stylistically. We have the simplified cartoony ladies in the back, a comic-style outlined girl in striped socks, a realistic business man, and then a more detailed cartoony woman in the foreground. The overall effect is weird, disjointed, and distracting. While it’s tempting to reuse elements from existing vector files in a new composition you still need to ensure everything matches in the end.

In Example 2, all of the characters are drawn in the same style: simplified, geometric, and angular. The colors are all flat with no gradients or detailed shading, and the color palette plays on a warm/cool complimentary color scheme (red and green). Nothing jumps out as being out of place or at the wrong party.