Equal Design are Web Design in Lancashire

Today I spent much of the day teaching about using Vector tools in Adobe Fireworks CS3 (yes we are out of date a little!).  My aim was to create an avatar character to represent you as a person, or perhaps what you would call a caricature using Fireworks, to express the benefits of using the vector tools rather than relying on bitmap tools all the time.  This post is to tell you how I got on!

Inspriation

I started out looking for inspiration, as I am sure all designers do.  I have never been an artist and probably never will be and therefore when it comes to drawing something I need all the help I can get.  I found the image to the right, which I thought I could use as I wanted to draw my image in a suit. So the first thing I did was to use the Fireworks Pen tool in order to draw around the major features in order to give me an outline of the person.  This included the face and eyes, ears and short as well as the trousers and shoes.  Once the outline was draw it was a matter of then using the Pen tool to round off all the corners of the shapes so that I had a nice rounded shirt, trousers etc rather than angular shapes.

It was then a matter of changing the shapes so that they fit my body shape and colour much better.  I am much slimmer than the cartoon above and wanted to exaggerate those features.  I also added some hair to the image as I am considerably younger than the cartoon image that provided the inspiration.

After a great deal of effort and a little help from a colleague we finally produced the Mark Wilkinson Avatar.  I am really rather proud of him actually!