Project 2- Vector Portait

For project number 2, our challenge was to find a portrait of a selected individual and recreate them through vector art (for more on what exactly vector art is and what it looks like, check my previous blog post on Mel Marcelo). After selecting various portraits ranging from Mike Tyson to Bill Murray I resided on a graphite sketch of Johnny Depp as seen on the left.

Not only is his visual composition both strikingly attractive, it conveys a bit of instability and madness- giving the photo more depth compared to that of a casual smile.  

Once I had begun working on the piece through Adobe Illustrator CS6, I mapped out large portions of his face, neck, and ears with the pen tool.

Now the pen tool is honestly an animal in itself (in a bad way). To trace the edges of Mr. Depp's face for example, one must zoom deep into the pixilated edges of his finely crafted features and trace, millimeter by millimeter, till a section is covered. Once that is accomplished, I filled in the area with color. The following steps can be seen bellow with the following pictures...

After outlining the largest features I proceeded to fill the areas with
different skin tones to give depth. I then began to work the upper lip.

At this point I am adding even more layers of skin tone depth, tracing
the shadows of his cheek, nose and jaw.

After further detailing his facial features, I was pleased to see the face was
FINALLY beginning to take shape. I was also not a fan of the skin tone
approach so I went for a more wild, yet more appropriate red based color scheme.
Still a ton of work to go! Updates will come shortly.