Analysis: Miles Donovan

Miles Donovan is an illustrator and graphic design who is a member of peepshow collective. His work has been used internationally for editorial and advertising clients including The New York Times, Creative Review, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Telegraph, TIME, Wired and Qantas. You can find Donovan's illustrations in the books 'Illusive', 'The Fundamentals of Illustration', 'Pen and Mouse' and 'Illustration Play'. With Peepshow Donovan also worked on designs such as, art direction and animation projects for BBC, Nike, Channel Four, Philips, Toyota, Redbee Media, Diesel and The Victoria & Albert Museum.

These are six out of twenty one of Miles Donavon's vector portrait pieces of artwork from his 2nd portfolio on his website. I feel that these vector portraits have been created in photoshop and illustrator because of the vibrant colours and smooth lines that have been used to created different tones on the peoples faces. Most of these portraits in this portfolio are of celebrities such as Rihanna, Lethal Bizzle, Kate Middleton and others. Miles donavon focuses a colour tones to use on faces for different light and dark areas on faces and clothing to show emotion and action in the artwork. Donavon uses a small colour pallet including around 3 tones of Blue, yellows, pinks, reds and green. I really like how Donavon gives an urban feel to the work by adding paint splats and spray paint affects on, around or behind the portraits.

This is a bunch of step by step screenshots of how I created my own inspired Miles Donavon vector portrait. When creating my Vector portrait of two members from modestep I first edited my photograph I found on google in photoshop by slightly blurring the image using shape blur and then posterized the image so that it would be easier to see the different sections of grey and black tones there are on the image. I posterized the image enough so that I could only see about three or four colour tones on the image. I then imported the image onto illustrator and created my different layers for each of the colours. I made four layers on top of the image (White, Grey, Dark Grey and Black). I then rearranged them in order of the amount of colour there was on the image, E.g. Black was the most of the image so that layer went underneath all the others. I then started to use the pen tool to mark out each colour section for each layer. Once using the pen tool to mark out sections, I then filled these sections with different shades of blue. I used darker blues for the darker colours like Black and dark grey and used a lighter blue for grey and a white for white to highlight where the light was reflecting on their faces. Once completing this I was really happy with how it came out and then started to add some finishing touches such as paint splats behind and more definition on the eyes using a dark blue. I really enjoyed experimenting with the pen tool and trying to create my vector image and feel that I will be trying this again and possibly could be a potential idea for my final CD cover.

Final Vector Image: