Project 2

It's uh, oh, 2 hours and 20 minutes late but here is my Project 2!

As you can see I got maybe a little carried away with making it look good so maybe Mrs.DeAngelis can excuse the lateness because of effort, eh?  Eh?  Okay there's no excuse.  Sorry.

What challenges did you experience using the drawing tools? Which drawing types did you prefer?

I had a little trouble changing the size of the brush tool because I  was used to changing the size in the properties menu.  I figured it out though so it's a-okay.  I liked using the brush tool and tweaking it with the sub-selection tool, mostly because I was used to doing the same thing with Illustrator.

What deco tools did use? Were you able to create the objects you wanted?

I only used the required tree deco tool since I think using the premade flash decorations makes things look a little amateurish.  You can see I tried to tuck a third of the tree out of the picture.  Since I had to use a variety of tools (some of which I would not use like the tree deco tool) sometimes I would get frustrated that I had to make something that would be better suited to be made with another tool to make the picture look more uniform.

What did you draw using the pen tool?

I made the boulders solely with the pen tool and sub-selection tool.  I often like to make a quick rough outline with the pen tool and tweak it later since if I do it all at once I make a lot of points which are harder to work with when I edit it later.  Which is why the brush tool is good because it makes creating a rough outline with few points even easier.

Alien Creation Process 

First I made a rough body shape with the brush tool on the body layer.  Then I made some circle eyes with the brush tool on the eye layer and filled a dark pink into the center.
I tweaked the body around to my liking with the sub-selection tool and used the brush tool's fill selection option to form the outline of it's hover teeth.  I used a white color to fill the teeth and deleted the outline.  After that I made a gradient on it's lower body and used the gradient transformation tool to angle it to the feet spacing and moved around the gradient to get the effect I wanted.  I did the same for the eye stalks.  It's eyes looked weird to me so I added eyelids via brush tool selection fill with the pupil and outer part of the eye selected.  It still looked unfinished so I selected the pupil and used my old friend brush selection fill to add some highlights, bam, cute lil alien.

As for how the layer order helped me out, well, you can't have the sky in front of the mountains.  And locking the folder elements I wasn't working on helped with not accidentally selecting them.  Naming helped me locate them easily which was also nice.

PS I used http://colorschemedesigner.com/ for the pretty color palette, I really cannot recommend it enough, if you start out with one color you like it gives you colors that work with it and if you hover in front of the color blocks it gives you the hex code.