This project entailed creating an 11x17 CMYK Movie Poster of our choice. I chose to make a movie poster for one of my favorite books that I'd like to see adapted into a movie, Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. I wanted to make something from scratch without using Image Trace for this project, and I ended up really enjoying the process of building objects and manipulating the shapes to create different spaces in the composition until I found the perspective I was looking for. I was encouraged to try to put the horizon line at a tilt and pan the 'camera angle' into the classic hero pose, and I appreciate constructive criticism and enjoyed putting in more work, but this was an artistic choice based on the source material, which is basically a bible for Humanism, and I didn't want the return of the anti-hero scene depicted to appear menacing or heroic. Instead, I decided to shrink the size of the character so he wasn't the same size as the rocket, and his eye-line was closer to the horizon, so he seemed more like just a regular guy, despite the whole spacesuit and rocket and being totally ripped from his extended detour on Venus. I also had the goal in mind to keep it simple and just use a series of simple gradients, but I tackled a lot of the project early on in the five week period and felt like I needed to put a bit more effort into it, so I chose to dive into the Gradient Mesh tool. That ended up being the most frustrating part, because even after I built these awesome meshes with separate muscle groups, I realized that without having a photo behind the mesh to pluck the colors from, it can become a very difficult process to use the mesh, and in the end, it kind of looked horrible... So, I ended up just keeping the initial figure I drew out, and drawing out a three tone pattern using the blob brush to get a very similar effect to what I was looking for in the gradient mesh with much less dread. To show the depth of field more, I chose to draw in some strokes of grass in the foreground and show some tiny footsteps in the background approaching the figure. I also had fun playing around with layering up the clouds and using them to create more atmospheric perspective. I feel like I learned quite a bit from this class, and it proved to be invaluable in both of my other classes this semester, as well as in my personal life as I was able to use Illustrator to design my own wedding invitations, address labels, and thank you notes. I'm very much looking forward to using it in conjuncture with Photoshop and creating some animations that I've had swimming around in my head for a while. Also, after this class and my Raster class, I can't believe I was never able to figure out the pen tool on my own... I struggled with it for many years as a Photoshop noob, and now it just seems like second nature. Playing around with those meshes, even though it ended up being a bust, really forced me into figuring out how to create an elegant shape with as few points as possible, and for that I am grateful
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