Take That, Spirograph! Photoshop Illustration.

Take That Spirograph!

As a challenge, I was presented with a mechanical grid pencil drawing and asked simply to “transform” it. Such broad direction can either be intimidating (where do I go with this?) or liberating (I can do anything I want!). As with many things, attitude makes the difference.

The original drawing reminded me of Spirograph, a geometric drawing toy popular in the 60’s and 70’s. Another popular toy at the time was Etch A Sketch. Drawings created using Etch A Sketch were rather, uh, sketchy by comparison to the structural artwork created using Spirograph. Interestingly, there are artists who use the Etch A Sketch as their medium, with rather stunning results.

As the two toys seemed polar opposites: one rigid in mathematics, the other playfully sloppy, it seemed only natural that I take the dichotomy route and transform one into the other. I used references to create this (the original grid drawing and main reference are shown below). With these references I recreated the logos in Adobe Illustrator and placed them in Photoshop where I composed the bulk of the illustration.

Illustration ©Ed Ward.

Source and Reference Images Used to Create This Photoshop Illustration

Etch A Sketch, illustration, Photoshop, Spirograph

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