Project 1 Fantasy Appliance: Progress 2 & Final Critique

As per suggestions from the first critique, I rearranged the cows slightly and made their necks bigger. After that, I continued to work on the shading of the toasters to make them look crisp. The mesh tool was my friend here, with several things such as the rounded edges of the toaster being shaded with it. After a while of fiddling, I was happy with them as they looked good in the environment, so I moved on.

After that was settled, the next challenge was to make the field look like a wheat field. I tried doing some image trace wheat images, but none of it looked very good so I decided to make my own wheat vectors and position them around the field. I didn't do every single one by hand (that would've taken ages). Instead of doing that, I made a row of copies and did object, transform each to get slightly random rotations so they weren't all sticking up one way. 

The biggest challenge was definitely getting this field looking good. I sat on this for forever, trying different things like coloring the groups by hand, but eventually settled on doing a gradient overlay on a compound path. The next big trick was getting the cows in the field and making them look like they belonged there. Doing the shadow behind the cows was really tricky, since putting a trace with lowered opacity over the field would make the field look flat. Eventually, I found what I liked with a combination of this trace underneath the wheat with some carefully selected wheat vectors over the shadow being darkened as well. 

And here's what I've got! I'm not sure if I'm 100% about the shadows, but I did my best. I could probably do this well in Photoshop, but in Illustrator, pulling those off was a chore. Another thing I'd change is my trees in the background. I wanted to do much more photorealistic ones myself, but ran short on time. But other than that, I'm happy with how it came out. I'm very proud of the toaster cows themselves, they came out very crisp.