Design process

First off, thanks for the sympathy and comments about my falling and my dumb Crocs. I will not leave the house in them. I promise. They really are good for working in the kitchen or the studio where I am on my feet for long periods. I Googled "falling Crocs" and read horror story after horror story. I was lucky. Lots of really serious injuries resulting from one of two Croc properties. 1. They are extremely slick on damp or wet surfaces and 2. They "catch" on dry surfaces, bringing the forward moving wearer to an abrupt stop, which is, I think, what my problem has been. You have been warned. Wear them with caution.

I started some design work for a new piece today and thought I'd show some of the early process I often use, employing Adobe Illustrator.

I want to use a heart design as part of the whole piece and doodled some ideas on paper. This one seemed like it might have possibilities.

I opened a new file in Illustrator and started by drawing half of a heart shape.

The rectangle you see represents a letter-sized sheet of paper. I started drawing in the design lines in the half shape.

Then I copied all that and flipped it to create the other half of the heart so I could see how it looked.

It seemed a little wider than I think I want, so I selected the whole thing and pulled the shape a bit narrower. That changed some proportions a little strangely so I tweaked some of the lines. I made the lines bolder as well. I can see some further changes I need to make before it is where I want, but these are easy to do.

Illustrator is a great tool for creating drawings to work from.

To be continued...