Shape and Colour
When choosing an image for task 1 of this project I was contemplating various different options. To start I wanted to pursue this assignment with my friend's 3 week old kittens; however, I felt like a kitten would make it quite hard to use while designing a scarf. Therefore I started to look through photos I have taken of plants because a lot of the photos I’ve taken have tons of different highlights and shadows. Furthermore, I felt like incorporating plants into my scarf design would be seamless and overall look very good. The plant I chose as my object is called a monstera. These plants have a very bold green colour and tend to be really shiny, which is perfect for this assignment. While in nature these plants would typically have long up and down strokes when the wind blows at them due to the large size of their leaves. One of the challenges I faced while drawing this plant was getting the perfect shape of the plant. Monstera plants tend to be very curvy so I had to prioritize not using any straight lines while drawing.
To begin task 2 I started with filling in the highlights, shadows, and mid tones of my monstera plant. While deciding on a pattern or gradient fill for my image I decided to use a gradient fill. This was due to the main reason that I feel like plants don't have much pattern to them that I could experiment. Furthermore in the case of a monstera plant, a gradient fill matches the natural shine these plants typically have. Therefore I chose to use a gradient fill as I felt it was most appropriate for the monstera plant, and the most realistic.
Finally, for my scarf design I chose to use an illusion that sucked the viewers attention to the centre. I was able to achieve this by grouping my plant in the shape of a square and progressively make it smaller and smaller until it look like an infinity loop. For the exterior of the illusion I utilized the ellipse tool to create those small plant petals surrounding the border. I also used the ellipse tool to add white circles around the border, and finally I used the rectangle tool to create the dark green border and the light green inner background.
