The Cephalopoda
The Cephalopoda was a project begun with the aim to vectorize a one-hundred-and-some-change year old scientific illustration of an octopus from Carl Chun's Valdivia expedition in 1910. What began as a lesson in replication and refinement ended as an experimental playground to test my newly-discovered graphic art skills. I found so much joy in iterating different versions of the octopus, and although I technically finished the illustration over a year ago, it has become one of my most cherished pieces because it is constantly evolving into something new every time I come back to it.
The original is on the left, and my final recreation is on the right.
I began with a very basic outline of the original piece, and then slowly started adding color using a freeform gradient once I had finished demarcating areas of shading and highlighting. I worked section by section over the course of three weeks, refining until I had a good foundation to work with before starting on the finer details.
I iterated several more designs where I experimented with layering the octopus onto different backgrounds with varying effects. I also experimented with modifying the stroke and effects on the octopus itself; I was especially drawn to the comic book style of the illustration on the right, as it is reminiscent of some graphic novels I especially enjoyed as a teenager.
I used truncated images of various sections from the original piece to create color palettes within Adobe Color, and exclusively used those palettes in each corresponding section to remain as close to the original as possible.
While my main focus will always lean towards UX and web design, graphic illustration is one of the strongest instruments in my tool box. Whether I need to call out a button more visibly in my page layout or increase visual interest within my website, having the ability to whip up a beautiful and dynamic icon, a stunning graphic for a background image, or simply convert a company's raster-based logo image into an SVG is invaluable for my work. Oftentimes, these small details end up pulling the entire project together and filling a gap that one sometimes didn't even realize was sorely needed.
