Making a Shoe Ad

For the final project of the year we were tasked with designing a shoe in Illustrator a then using this to create an ad for it. It was similar to the cartoon we created in the previous project with the exception being that it was colored with gradient tool in Illustrator rather than with paint tools in photoshop. Mine turned out well enough, again like always with some parts stronger than others. A weaker point to start off would have to be how I handled the areas between sections of the shoe. What ended up happening is that some differently colored sections would have non matching borders that unrealistically stood out, this could have been fixed by just altering the color of the sections so they did not clash. A stronger aspect of the piece would be how the shoe was sectioned off, this ignoring borders. The shapes seem to flow like a real shoe and the overall shape works making the shoe itself look better. Some things could still be worked on while others are well enough as is.

Being not the first project in Illustrator anymore but still earlier in my use of it there were still some difficulties. After setting the initial shapes for the shoe it took a while to make sure that there were no gaps. This took a lot of finagling to make it still look good while also being solid. By contrast an easy part of the project was adding the stitching onto the shoe, all this required was to select the dashed line option and to draw a line where it was needed.

The objective of the project this time was to learn and use the gradient tool, this was used to make basically the whole body of the shoe. How it worked was we would need to make closed shapes with the pen tool and turning on fill with color using the gradient tool created the gradient effects visible in the above image of the shoe. All that aside I would still change a few things, one of these would be to use more layers when setting up shapes. When making the shoe off of an original image the work I did sometimes made it hard to see for later shapes, with more layers I could just switch them off and have a easier time.