Sep 29
Illustrator madness part II
2004 at 05.03 am posted by Veerle
Via kottke these stunning photorealistic drawings in Illustrator popped up. After the amazing cruise ship from Kevin Hulsey another fine piece of art that makes me dream of applying gradient meshes. A whole lot of patience is also needed to create such a drawing. You can view the drawing in outline to figure out how it was done. First class stuff!
7served
1
I just can’t believe this was done all by hand…
Couldn’t you just program something to convert all the curves to paths and then fill them up with the corresponding colours?
But be it by hand or by program...wow!
2
As Bert Monroy would say, It’s not about finding an easier way by just taking a photo but the process and understanding to create realistic photos from scratch.
3
These people should learn Maya or Softimage to create these images, they could be used in real 3D with camera view and lighting sets.
4
I agree with Stephen. Admittedly, I am guilty of trying to find the easy way to accomplish certain tasks. At the same time, there are instances where I have been known to work for hours on one task in order to make it look as realistic as possible.
There’s some pleasure in reinventing the wheel from scratch.
5
I’d seen this site before it was linked here (it was linked somewhere else ... I can’t recall where) and my first reaction was awe.
I couldn’t believe they were done in illustrator—especially that motorcycle outside the building. Those artists are incredibly talented.
After the inital awe wore off, my reaction was closer to “why?”. It must be cheaper to do a photo, or, if the product doesn’t exist (or the location doesn’t exist) then using a 3D program must be faster.
I suppose showing off for the sake of showing off is fine, but it does make me wonder what possesses people to do this in the first place.
Or—since I have no 3D software experience—is it faster/easier to do this (for these guys) in illustrator? Anyone? Just curious.
- Erik
6
In some situations it is better to have photorealistic vector artwork. Large format prints for outside advertising (giant posters) are a good example. Bitmap data required to print these has to be incredibly large while vectors don’t take more processing power or storage space depending on output size. I came across some product images that were vectorized to great detail (though not as realistic as the pictures in this post) just because it was easier to transmit and to print.
7
Patrick: Doing this in 3D would probably be easier and more flexible, but I’ve never seen a 3D human look as good as a gradient-meshed one