It was a Calendar!

For one of my classes at KVCC, we were tasked with coming up with a 4-part project that we wanted to complete over the course of the semester. It could be whatever you wanted it to be; you just had to stick with it and meet your deadlines. I chose to do a calendar that was inspired by nature. I wanted to do a small format, with each month contained on one page and loose. I didn't want them all bound together in a traditional calendar style. As it turned out, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be to come up with good illustrations that really "went" with each month.. working from photographs I had taken.

Oouf. Yea, it was rough.

Add in the fact that I decided to go for as photo-realistic a look as I could using Illustrator? I ended up with some monstrously huge files. But they looked awesome. It was a learning experience for me. The end results turned out well, but I realized after doing 12 illustrations like this that there were places I should have been cutting corners. I didn't have to stay so true to the changes in color, I didn't need to be quite as precise with the placement of lines... Simplifying would have saved me a lot of time; as well as a lot of anchor points.

But I still love the end result.

Here's a small sample of the pieces..

As always, clicking on the image brings it up larger and in a new window!

This was my favorite month of all. A Luna moth! The colors were my favorite, and the way the illustration worked into the composition.. it just was my favorite.



July came in a close second; I had fun with this one. The colors were a bit of a departure from the rest of the calendar. A bit brighter and hotter overall. But, hey- it was July! The only criticism I've really received so far is that I chose a "bad" swan for someone from Michigan. Apparently this guy is invasive and not very nice. Whoops.



Now for one of the months that, to this day, I'd still like to go back into and fix some. I love, love, love the illustration of the leaf; but I have never been happy with the background, or the colors for the dates and month. This is already round 2 of color scheme, and.. it just isn't quite right yet. With this set-up, I was trying to achieve the color of that "Too-Blue" sky you get in fall, behind the bright leaves.



And, that's all for now. More months later!