an original piece of artwork

I have well over a decade of experience with Adobe Illustrator, but I find that I do graphic arts work less and less as my professional life takes me deeper into C#. Before I learned C# and before there was a C# language however, I earned an associates degree in multimedia and worked in the industry at a Houston multimedia house for a few years straddling the turn of the millennium. I thought I'd put some of the skills I learned there to use, just for fun, and make myself an original piece of print art. I came up with what is above which I hope you will find tacky in a fun way as opposed to outright offensive. ;) It is a memory of mine from my multimedia days, which, again, lay in the heart of the Rave era. Specifically, this is a hodgepodge of something I recall from Houston's NUMBERS nightclub and a spin on events that came up in retelling the story to a friend soon afterwards. The artwork is completely of vector graphics nested inside of this Adobe Illustrator file. I handed the file to a Speedpro Imaging in Austin. They printed it on a five foot by three foot and change canvas and put grommets along the top. A pole pocket was placed at the bottom edge and I bought a wooden pole at Home Depot to sit inside of it. There used to a program called Adobe Streamline, which Wikipedia suggests is now discontinued, which would attempt to convert raster images into vector images! This too is something of the Rave era. I still have a copy and I used it to turn scribbles I made with sharpies on index cards into vector shapes!

I scanned the index cards on a scanner at a FedEx Office Print & Ship Center, and then used Streamline to get them into .eps format. I then brought them into Adobe Illustrator one at a time and assigned uncoated Pantone colors to them. The outlines converted to shapes not outlines. For example, if one were to draw the letter O, scan it, and then convert it to vector format with Streamline, one would not get a white shape with a black outline. Instead one gets a black shape with no outline and a slightly smaller white shape with no outline sitting on top of it. To make one shape of the two a subtraction operation has to occur. On the other side of that, you nonetheless have a shape and not an outline. This is not a bad thing however as the variations of line width in my sharpie doodles survived the translation into vector format. I made all of the people in the piece the same size when I drew them so the ones that end up farther in the background had to be scaled down and thus the widths of their borders are proportionally smaller than those of individuals closer to the foreground. The way all of the lines look is what I am most proud of. Streamline tries to make shapes based upon colors. A photo of your face will end up sort of becoming a stained glass window. That sort of conversion is pretty worthless. However, black lines on white paper, where there is strong contrast between only two colors, translate well.

 
 

Addendum 9/3/2017: I've grown to hate this piece of art as the pole pocket was too long for the four foot pole I bought at Home Depot. There is no way to buy wooden sticks of various lengths at Home Depot. Maybe I can find a longer pole somewhere. The one of time I used this print shop while I was at Headspring they just furnished a pole but this time they said they would not. That makes me cranky. Does it have to ruin the artwork?