The greeting cards I made for 2022 got me to thinking about vector art.
How do you draw a star shape? I used to break out a compass, ruler, and protractor every time. Very fussy. Last year, I finally realized I could use Adobe Illustrator to make a template: stars in different sizes that I could cut out and trace as needed.
Even with this template, my painting titled “Public Access Xanadu: 1980 Timeslip Broadcast” took long time to make. It’s my least favorite design from the batch, but ate up the most hours. Every one of those straight lines had to be carefully paralleled with my brush, acrylic dabbed into countless tiny angles.
Mind drifting while in the painting-trance, I imagined these rainbow stars as neon animation at the start of some late night TV show from the 1980s. In my fantasy, a signal from that mysterious broadcast slips through a rip in time… And some lone insomniac, flipping through channels in a darkened apartment, accidentally receives an impossible message from another era.
I like it when stories come to me while I work. And I like giving my paintings titles that provoke curiosity and imagination.
Still, after completing Xanadu, I had to ask myself: Why did I do that in paint?
I think viewers attribute special value to things that have been hand-painted. But precise geometry can be accomplished much more easily with a computer. I’d taken a first step in that direction by making the star template. And my neon fantasy really made me want to see this particular design in motion. So, as an exercise, I decided to make a reproduction using vector art.
The vector version of Xanadu is faithful. But inspiring? Not so much.
However, what I discovered underneath Xanadu was exciting!
At some point, I turned off visibility for the top layers of the composition. Underneath, I found that all my developmental drafts had quietly piled up into a chaotic tangle. Compelling. And not something I could have ever conceived of, had I been working in paint.
This accidental composition made me wonder: What if I tried doing all my greeting cards for 2023 in Illustrator?