Pre-Production:
I started off by choosing a picture to use for the portrait. I didn't want to use a picture of myself so I decided to choose one of my dogs. I have two dogs, Buster who is the one pictured, and Jordy who is all white. Posterizing the images in Photoshop was pretty easy. This step was needed since it was prep for when we brought the images into Illustrator. When in Illustrator, we made two identical dartboards with the picture on each. One of them we had to turn down the opacity and colors a little to see which areas could be grouped.
Production:
The first thing I did after the steps above was changing my pen tool to a pink color and making the stroke big enough to see over my dog. I started off by tracing around his body and ears where the curves were visible. After that was completed, I added a few more lines where his paws and legs were. I tried to find the different areas where the colors were similar. Next, I started to form the triangles, making more of them around areas where the photo was more detailed and less where it was not. For example, I did less triangles on the back of my dog where it is mostly black compared to where I did a lot for his paws and nails. The triangle making step was very time consuming but wasn't the longest part. After you make all the triangles we had to go into the Pathfinder and divide them so it would form all the triangles into individual ones. Then we took the Eyedropper tool and filled in the colors. One struggle I had was when I was filling in the colors. Since it grabs the color from pixels, you can accidentally pick a color that seems green or blue and doesn't fit everything else. After filling in everything, it looked like my dog was floating so I decided to include the cushion he was sitting on. This was fairly simple but overall I like the look of it.
Post-Production:
If I were to change something about this design it would be adding more triangles. Obviously since we don't have forever to work on these projects, I didn't add as many triangles as I would have liked. I didn't have enough time either to try and do another vector illustration. I wanted to see if there was a way for me to make my single colored dog into this type of portrait. This was definitely one of my favorite projects so far since I could actually tell it was my dog with the low poly technique applied. I hope I get to do this style of graphic design again next year.
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