School's Hard

Usually I write about how much I love what I am learning and how I really enjoy my program. But I thought that tonight is blog worthy because well, I think I've found the one thing I don't like about design school. 

GRADIENT MESH.

Does anyone familiar with Illustrator hear me on this? I'm sure it has it's purposes, but my instructor is basically having us learn through trial and error on an insanely difficult project. And folks, I'm finding that for me, it's usually error. Now, I admit that we had total freedom to choose the subject of our project, but had I known the difficulties that awaited me down the road, I would have chosen something much simpler. 

So to give you a little crash course on graphics to explain what I am doing, I will tell you that pictures that you take with your camera are made up of pixels. Depending on the resolution of your image, you can only enlarge it a certain amount before compromising the integrity and seeing the individual pixels. But with vector art (images created in Illustrator made up of mathematical equations), you can change the size indefinitely without losing any quality. Simply put.

Our assignment is to take a photo and draw it in a vector program (Illustrator). Now, it's totally an awesome concept if it turns out correctly. But it takes so. much. work. and makes your eyes feel like they are going to explode.  Here's the image I am using:

It's a lovely photo shot by my dearly loved and incredibly talented friend Aimee. 

And here is what I have drawn so far:

Yea. Don't judge. It's HARD. I really hope I am learning something useful with this. But right now it just feels like I'm pouring hours of my life into something that I will (hopefully) never do again. For the sake of my grade I press on. And Aimee, I am sorry if I totally butcher your lovely photo. 

Well, I'm off to give my eyes and mind a break. Goodnight!