Calligram: Final Project



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 shape look the way I want it to. I also used the pen tool to create the butterfly. For the text, it was a mixture between the area type tool and type on a path tool, as well as the envelope distort feature that we learned in class. Initially I had a tough time getting the words to fit the way I wanted but I eventually figured it out. Since the daisy was white, I decided to make the background black, as if it were at night, and had a moon in the corner that was the beginning of the letter.

 

Overall, I had a fun time on this project. It was much more fun than the Canvas project, because I was manipulating the art by hand, not by code. It was fun to make a style of art that I had seen before but had never made. What makes my project successful is my use of different fonts for different parts of the flowers, and my three styles for filling shapes with text (type on a path, area type, and envelope distort) which kept the piece interesting, and made it have variety in its design.




Comments

  1. Richard JacobApril 29, 2022 at 1:36 PM

    The premise of the calligram is very creative. I love the inspiration behind the song.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ben BickerstaffMay 2, 2022 at 5:18 AM

      Thank you. I had a great time making this one.

      Delete

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