This week in our lesson we were taught about vector imaging. A vector image is almost a direct opposite of a raster; it is easy to duplicate and recreate, you can draw free hand images, whole interfaces can be produced with a vector, it is smooth, flat and silhouettes work well. However photographs often do not work well as vectors, this is because they have pixels, which are separate blocks of colour and therefore their edges are hard and often sharp. Another selling point is that the resolution is irrelevant – there are no pixels – therefore resizing of the image is extremely easy and pixilation does not occur. Whereas with raster’s, the image will pixilate when you expand it bigger than it’s given resolution.

It is because of this lack of pixilation that makes vectors so great for web design, publications, interfaces and other media.

Vectors graphics are comprised of paths which have a defined start and end point, they also have curves, points and angles along the way. These are all adjustable after they have been set – unlike rasters which are not usually adjustable after placement.

This week we learnt how to create a vector in Adobe Illustrator CS6: the task was to create an octopus from scratch. We were taught how to use shapes and objects to create it, however, I wanted to try something a little different and draw the main outlines for myself using the brush tool. This made things slightly harder but I feel like it gave a better result than it would have done had I made the generic octopus that a few of the class created. It did seem to take a lot longer to make it look right though and it was really quite challenging, but I learnt a great deal! The only main problem I did have was drawing the mouth of octopus symmetrically, as you can see it didn’t turn out as expected.

It was my first time using Illustrator, so it came as quite a shock as it is so diversely different compared to my native editing program – Photoshop. Nonetheless, using Illustrator definitely made me feel a lot more confident in myself and made me want to create some more vector based graphics.

I then moved on to using an image of terminator and a robot and converting those into vectors. I used these two images because they partly relate to my project looking at cyborgs. For the colour conversion process I highlighted the image with the black arrow and clicked on the drop down box next to “Image Trace”. I then clicked on “6 colours” – unsurprisingly this converts the image to a 6-colour vector, losing a lot of detail but making it unlimitedly scalable.

Bibliography:

– Image 1: http://vector-conversions.com/vectorizing/raster_vs_vector.html

– Image 2: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Sony_Qrio_Robot_2.png

– Image 3: http://www.sunderedepoch.org/unofficial/Terminator/terminator.jpg