"This is where the fun begins."

Wow. Sorry for the insane delay between this post and the previous one. Life has been extremely busy recently - for the past fortnight I've been training very hard for my black belt grading which I completed on Sunday 24th April. That means it's time for a very long blog post! You might want to put the kettle on...

Anyway, with the scissors, glue bottle and tree finished, I've moved on to the most complicated part of my deforestation piece - the banknotes. I started with the rear of a 2000 issue £10 note (due to the leaves on its left side in association with Charles Darwin's voyages), and the tracing process has proved to be quite a challenge!

As always, I started with a high-res image of the object as my bottom layer in Illustrator.

Rear of a 2000-issue £10 banknote[1]

So you can see what I had to work with. I decided to omit most of the more intricate details such as the HMS Beagle, the compass design, the sun motif and the lower left-hand corner decoration. I started with the text elements "£10", "Bank of England", "Ten" and "Pounds" in the top section, as always using the good ol' pen tool.

It was difficult trying to replicate the shapes of the letters exactly in terms of stroke weight and curvature. However, the anchor point tool took care of this, and most of the text was surprisingly easy to trace (especially the "Ten" element, as it's just straight lines). I put it all on the same layer.

The part of the text which gave me the most trouble was the letter "d" in "Pounds". The particular font used made curving the "d" quite tricky, but I eventually settled on the result below, which looks quite clear.

After tracing Darwin's signature and life dates, here was the final result:

Easy part done! Time to finish the "main outline". I had to decide what colour I wanted the note edges and Darwin's base colour to be. I chose the stone grey I have been using as a neutral colour on the previous elements of my deforestation design, so that it wouldn't be too overpowering. I also decided to simplify the oval-shaped text into, well, an oval shape, so that the design wouldn't look too detailed (and therefore cluttered).

I ran into a problem whilst creating this oval. Seeing as it's squared-off at the bottom (and actually has no bottom edge at all), I had to find a way to remove a section of the path created by the ellipse tool (which makes full shapes, not arcs - and I'm no master of the arc tool). I drew a simple guideline using the pen tool, making sure it was straight by holding the shift key.

To get rid of that bottom arc, I used a clever button called the scissor tool. With it, I simply selected the points of the arc which I wanted to cut from, and hey-presto! Then I just needed to tidy up the rest of the arc using the anchor point tool.

Great stuff! Unfortunately, it was at this point that I realised that I had missed out the fold-like "third" lines on the right side of the note. Whoops! Thanks to a bit of layer adjustment, this was easy to complete and didn't hinder my progress.

Then it was time to move on to the big man himself. I started with Charlie's eyes and the back of his head, as these are the darkest parts of his design on the note. This gave me guidance to highlight the lighter areas of his face (forehead and cheeks) before detailing his beard with white hair highlights.

It's nice, that.

Time to spice up that left side of the note. I began with the magnifying lens (new layer) because it's both the darkest and largest element. Very easy to trace using the ellipse tool - I held down the "shift" key to increase the circle size incrementally, and at the same time I held down the "alt" key so that the circle was drawn from the centre outwards. 

Then I decided to work on the hummingbird. I decided to fill it in the neutral grey (code #B7B7B7, by the way) so that it wouldn't blend with the magnifying lens in black. I also added its highlights in white (#FFFFFF), and its wingtips in black (#000000).

On a side note (geddit), I like to be specific when it comes to the names of objects for layers, so I searched online for exactly what species of bird this is. I found out that its appearance with Darwin here is actually quite controversial. In its official description, the Bank of England states that the hummingbird is here because it's one of the birds Darwin may have seen on his travels. Apparently, some people don't like this very much because Darwin is usually attributed to his voyage to the Galapagos islands, where he observed finches - but no hummingbirds. Also, the hummingbird has absolutely no mention whatsoever in On the Origin of Species. So... pick a side? 

Anyway, it's a hummingbird, so enough chin-wagging - back to business!

Time for the focal point of this entire element - the leaves. I'd already traced one of these particular leaves to use in the tree part of this deforestation piece:

This meant it was pretty easy to take the existing colour scheme I had chosen for this type of leaf (fill: #BEF4DC and stroke: #0A663C) and apply it to the other leaves I needed to trace. New layer: "Leaves", set behind the "Magnifying Lens" and "Hummingbird" ones. Here's the finished result...

...and without the background image:

I thought I might be finished at this point, but I decided that there wasn't enough going on over to the left, and the leaves looked more like islands without any surrounding visual context. I therefore started to trace the flowers which encompassed the leaves, including the highlights on their petals. New layers: "Flowers" and "Flower Highlights". The fill for the flowers was the now-standard #B7B7B7 (grey), and the highlights were #FFFFFF (white).

Here are the flowers added (no highlights):

 With highlights:

 And finally without the background image:

 The more observant of you will notice that I've left out one of the flowers. This was due to the fact that I didn't want to surround the poor hummingbird in grey, which would dampen its presence grey-tly (oh dear). So I left it's tail out in the open. This also helps to give an effect that the leaves towards the bottom of the note are falling off of the flowers (i.e. like in autumn). Filling this area with shapes to represent oil would likely help to show how slippery and unstable the current economic distribution system is. I know, this is some deep stuff here!

For now though, the banknote tracing was finished. It was then time to sort out its position, because we all know that no banknote stays this rigid for long! Showing the note with the rest of the deforestation piece as it stands illustrates this issue very clearly:

To sort this out, I started playing around with some of the lesser-known tools that Illustrator has to offer, including the "Perspective Distort" option which is itself accessed through the Free Transform tool.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Here's the result of playing with this feature:

Cool, eh? But not quite what I was looking for. I started searching the web for other fun things to do to a shape in Illustrator, and found the use of the "Effect" menu (via another creative blog, of all places: waycoolwebdesign.com). From this, I chose the "Warp" tab from the menu, then selected "Wave", and mucked about a bit.

Oh, man. The sheer power of Adobe's Creative Suite BLOWS ME AWAY.

And I suppose my work looks alright, too.

Here's the final Layers panel for the banknote design:

Now for the extremely tricky part. I've got to get all these elements ready for laser cutting. Eurrghh...

^[1]www.bankofengland.co.uk