Making Logos with Raven

This week I learned to work with Raven, part of the Aviary tools that are free online.  Although I have worked with Illustrator before, I never spent enough time at it to become good at using the pen tool. Mostly in the past I used basic shapes or the pencil tool.

Logo 1.egg by vmeyer7 on Aviary

The first logo I made features a camera and the word art. I didn't use a font my work,  but drew it out instead, so the word represents actual art. Since my blog is about photos I take of art, I thought this would represent what the blog is all about. It seems to me to be a pictorial explanation of what my blog is about. (If only I could find time to write more actual posts on this, at least before the end of the term!) I really think I should have made the background white instead of transparent because that could look quite bad if anything was behind it that wasn't plain. Since I used the pen tool to make the camera, anyone else who is relatively new to this tool can understand the difficulty of drawing even something simple with it. For the letters I used the pencil tool and had to play around with the settings on that because I was getting either too many handles on them or not enough. I used the tools that let you add or remove handles and moved them around to fine tune my letters.



TMA Sculpture.egg on Aviary.

Above is the second logo I created. It doesn't say exactly what my blog is about, but it was interesting and fun to make. Anyone from Toledo could probably recognize the Stegosaurus Calder sculpture that is in front of the Toledo Museum of Art. I also drew this using the pen tool and did some rearranging to move some pieces of it behind other pieces. I wanted to use a gradient for the background. That was somewhat of a challenge to figure out how to use. Every time I clicked on the tool, nothing seemed to be happening. I finally figured out that I had to choose the fill first and select my options in the property boxes on the right before drawing the line that creates the gradient.