Babe Ruth
I’ve been working the last couple of weeks on my final Illustration 1 assignment. We had to choose from a series of facts that are on websites like these here:
They are exactly the type of “facts” that would show up in email forwards. Some of them have some truth to it, but after enough playing telephone with them you eventually find ones that are so off of the original source that they could have just been made up. The one I decided to go with was “Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his cap to keep him cool! He changed it every 2 innings!” Which of course, could possibly be false. Who knows.
I did a lot of research, learning about Babe Ruth, The Polo Grounds, The House That Ruth Built, The Called Shot, what teams he played for and did a massive amount of photo referencing too. He is quite a strange looking character, so I had to make sure I got it right. Originally I started with a very classic baseball image, the kind that brings memories of days past, or stuff that reminds you of people thinking about days past. But I wasn’t really having fun. So then I switched gears to having it be an action shot where Babe Ruth was hitting the ball so hard that his hat and his cabbage leaf both were flying off of his hat. That didn’t solve the “why” question about the cabbage leaf, so I ended up completely changing directions and brought to class a colored pencil sketch of an 8bit/pixel art Babe Ruth with a diagram of his hat and where the cabbage went. My instructor liked it, it was different and it was clever. So I decided to keep going with it and build my own grid structure in Adobe Illustrator. From there I drew out each “pixel” in vector graphics on individual layers to build what would become the piece.
Just vector:
After I did that, I exported the layers into .eps files so that I could open them in Photoshop and start adding textures to them. I used a high resolution image of scanned ham skin for his face, wall paper for his clothes and hat, cabbage leafs for the cabbage item and wood for the bat. After reconstructing these and adding the textures the last step was to give it a collaged look and added the faintest shadow for extra depth.
Final version:
Making it 8bit/pixel art, I decided to give the image an item bar at the top, conceptually that the viewer is the player and because his temperature gauge is nearly filled it was time to use the cabbage leaf item. Its weird, but I had fun making it.
I’m going to hopefully be wrapping up my Graphic Design 1 class soon, once that is complete I’ll be posting photos of that, and my last project. See you then.
