Ben Bickerstaff

The premise of the calligram project was to create art by using words in Adobe Illustrator. For this project, I tried to make flowers and a butterfly out of a letter that I wrote to my future self. I have a lot of experience in Illustrator, so I understood the fundamentals for the project pretty well. What I struggled with was coming up with an idea for what to make. The inspiration for this piece came from a song that I have been listening to a lot recently. The song is called Flower Shops, where the singer sings about how it’s a bad day for love, but a good day for flower shops, because to fix what happened he is going to buy all of the flowers at the shop. The song talks about violets and daisies, so I decided to focus on creating one of each. Along with that I added a butterfly, because I though that it went well with the flower imagery. When creating, I tended to use shapes and manipulate them with the curvature tool. I find this tool to be very useful when it comes to making a sh