Joe Mills - Illustration Blog

Series of Chicago Posters Finished!

April 6, 2012 By joemills Leave a Comment

Before jumping to my finished work, I just wanted to mention an update on a work I finished a couple months. I changed the colors to the Chicago Communities Map. By default, I tend to use blue a lot…I find it to be easy on the eyes. It can also seem rather boring which is what I found with this illustration. I think the new colors are much more interesting. In reality, I created it with the idea it could be screen printed using different colors and different paper, but I felt it was important to have the online image look strong.

New business…I have just finished a set of 3 Chicago posters. These posters are intended to be seen as a set with similar styling. Right now, I envision expanding on this set as I come up with new ideas, but I am considering it finished as of now. I discussed this artwork some in a previous post, so I will only use this space to show the finished work and any updates I have made. To see larger images of this work, click here.

With Blocks, the major change was taking out the Bean and Millennium Park fountain. While I liked the difference in scale of these items in the foreground, they took attention away from the buildings. And since they are supposed to be children’s blocks, it made more sense to keep in the buildings because the blocks are being stacked. I also made some slight adjustments to the color.

I figured deciding on a color scheme for The City That Works would not take me a long time…it did. Originally, I had the machines outlined in white and filled with a dark blue. The background was a lighter blue. After playing and playing and playing with a color scheme that kept the outlines in white, I eventually decided to bag it and make the outlines disappear into the background. It was the right move. I wanted to stick with the white outline because of the other two illustrations, but I believe this looks better and I have not lost any continuity between the pieces.

$Chicago Math$

The piece I just finished is called Chicago Math. Chicago is set on a grid system and in order to get around the city, it helps tremendously to know how the grid works. Even if I didn’t exactly know where I was going, I could use my knowledge of the grid to help me out. Honestly, I’m not sure if other Chicagoans use this method, but I don’t know how you would get around the city without it. I wanted this to be the theme of the final illustration in this series. I went through many ideas using this idea that centered around the output on the receipt in the current illustration. In other words, it would be heavy on typography. All of these ideas, though, were just too simple. Since the main imagery I am working with now is machines and factories, I came up with this idea of a super computer that generates these mathematical equations based on the Chicago grid. This is my most cerebral illustration of the bunch, so I hope it does not get a lot of blank stares. In terms of color, I toyed with the notion of making this illustration multiple colors, but preferred this monochromatic look.

What’s next…I have a quick street vendor factory illustration I want to complete. Then, I plan on working on my most ambitious idea to date. It will be another Chicago piece and the best way to describe it is as a crazy city scene based on the icons and landmarks of Chicago.

Filed Under: Artwork Tagged With: aon, art, art director, artist, ashland, balmain, belmont, block, building, button, chicago, chicagoland, chrysler, city that works, cityscape, cloud gate, computer, damen, dial, factory, gear, grid, hancock, illustration, illustrator, infographic, keyboard, king, landscape, legend, lettering, machine, map, math, mural, navigate, pipe, poster, print, road, sears tower, stony island, street, switch, sydney, united states, vector, wire

Tools for Passing the Adobe Illustrator ACE Exam

April 3, 2012 By joemills 2 Comments

After using Adobe Illustrator exclusively for my artwork over the past couple years, I decided recently to turn my affinity for the program into something more than just a hobby. If I passed the Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) Exam for Adobe Illustrator CS5, I could eventually teach it to others someday. Since I like the program so much, it just seemed to be the natural next step for someone who has teaching in his blood. And, I am happy to report, I passed the ACE Exam over the weekend.

Since I was approaching the exam as someone who does not use the program day in and day out, I took the entire process rather slow. It took me close to two months to prepare with the last two or three weeks dedicated to just studying. At the beginning of the process, I had trouble finding information on the best ways to prepare, so I thought I would share what worked best for me:

Prep Guide First thing first…make sure you have the latest preparation guide right from Adobe.
Adobe Classroom in a Book If you are familiar with Adobe products, you know they have these books for all of their products. This is where I started, and it was helpful to get better acquainted with the product since there were a lot of tools I did not know much about. Since I bought the CS5 version, it was weighed heavily toward the newest update which might not be the best when you need to learn the entire program. In the future, I would probably skip this step since I did not return to it to study.
Illustrator Manual I’m sure reading a computer program manual is not high on most people’s priority list but it was a necessity when preparing for this test. You will not find anything else with as much detail. I used a PDF version and just highlighted information and added notes as needed. If I had done it all over, though, I probably would have started with the manual combined with the next point.
Flash Cards This was the major contributor to me passing. I made screen shots of virtually every tool, menu, options box, dialog box, panel and panel menu I could find. Then, I printed them all out, glued them to cards and added notes as I went back through the manual. As you can see, I ended up going through the manual twice so it probably would have been better to print all the menus first and then go through the manual to save time. I found this useful because having to go through every menu as I studied while staring at a computer screen was not helpful and virtually counter-productive. I liked being able to sit on the couch and flip through the cards to study.
Keep Illustrator Open Since it is a hands on tool, I had to see how the tools worked as much as possible. If clicking Shift while using the rectangle tool constrained it to a square, I needed to see that for myself. It helped me remember how things worked. I even kept working on some artwork as I studied so I could practice new skills I learned.
ExamAids I also purchased a test simulator through ExamAids to get a feel for the types of questions I would see. Since I had not taken a test in many years and I had no idea what to expect, I used it more to prepare myself for actually taking an exam than for studying the tools in Illustrator. If it has been a while for you as well, I would definitely recommend this step. In the future, though, I will most likely skip this step.
Allow 3-4 Weeks If you really focus on studying, I believe you can fully prepare for the exam within a month. I spent a lot of time with different tools and most of it could have been consolidated. For re-certification, I will only prepare a month ahead of time.

Now that done…it’s on to more artwork!

Filed Under: Announcements Tagged With: ace, adobe, australia, balmain, certified, chicago, cs5, exam, expert, freelance, illustration, illustrator, preparation, study, sydney, test, united states, vector

Update on Series of Chicago Posters

March 7, 2012 By joemills Leave a Comment

My current artwork started off as an idea to have ten simple posters of Chicago. I would use similar styling but each poster would highlight some aspect of Chicago. After sketching some and batting around a few ideas, I felt that ten was a tad ambitious to complete all at once. Plus, even though it is a nice round number, ten is an arbitrary number. In the end, I settled on three strong ideas. And since simple is not always in my vocabulary, I decided to pursue the ideas I thought were the best regardless of complexity. As of now, I have finished the line work for two of them yet still want to play with the color.

The first piece is entitled Blocks and was originally going to include a child playing with the blocks. After completing the line work and moving on to something else, I continued to come back to it because it never seemed right to me. Then it hit me, I didn’t like the image of the child. It was too large and overshadowed the buildings. I was worried that the whole theme of blocks would be lost without the child there, but I don’t think it really matters. This piece is one of the more simpler works I’ve created and pretty straightforward. I like the color scheme as it is right now, but I plan on playing with the color a little more to solidify my choice.

The second piece is entitled The City That Works. If you don’t know, it is one of the nicknames for Chicago. Typography seems to be inching its way into my work recently and I certainly took it to the extreme this time. The letters have been created by different machines, gears, motors and pipes bordering the letters. I’ve seen this negative space technique before and it seemed like a natural fit with my factory themed drawings. I realized the neighborhood map I created uses blue as well, so I probably need to choose a different set of colors. To see more of the detail, click on the image.

The final piece I am doing is entitled Chicago Math and will revolve around the grid system used for streets in Chicago. I plan on completing everything in the next couple weeks.