Meet Victor, the Vector Dragonfly.

One of the options for our final project in Illustrator was to do a bug – I loved that idea, especially because it meant being able to visually study God’s creation up close. I started by choosing the photo I wanted to copy, knowing that I would have to really love it in order to stay inspired! Below is the original photo from Wikimedia Commons.

For those interested, I’ll describe the process of converting this photo to vector shapes. I placed the photo in the background of a blank Illustrator document, and started with the body. I used the pen tool to draw the shape of each basic segment, and then with my new friend, Gradient Mesh, I filled in the shapes with more exact color varience. Gradient Mesh creates a grid on a solid shape, and each intersection becomes the origin of a specified color. The colors fade naturally in to each other, leading to a much more realistic vector image. For example, the tall part of the stem is a single shape filled with Gradient Mesh.

Then I started a new layer and used the pencil tool to draw the black stripes, and so on and so forth…
I was able to break down my dragonfly into left-brain, logical layers for the most part. The pupil layer goes on top of the iris layer, which goes on top of the head layer… But the big exception were the wings. They are foreshortened, translucent, irridescent, and in and out of focus – way too many complex variables to even begin to think about them in the same way as I did the body!  So I drew those entirely on the right side of the brain, telling myself to see only shapes and color, saturation and value.

I used some short cuts: the white spots on the dragonfly’s tail come from the Symbol Sprayer, his hairs were created using the Cristallize tool, and some of the wing stripes I generated using the Blend tool. The best secret weapon of all though, was listening to the dramatized Chronicles of Narnia while I worked. It kept my imagination alive, and dulled my sense of the passing hours…

and hours…

and hours…