Cornucopia

          This is my cornucopia. The first thing I did was make the cornucopia itself. It was made from a series of overlapping ellipses and an arrow at the end. The circles and arrow have a fill of light brown with a grid 7 effect of 3%, and a stroke of brown with a tip size of 3. The last circle had a fill of dark brown with no stroke.

          The background is a rectangle with a rectangle gradient effect, going from red to orange to brown and finally to yellow. These are fall colors to match the feeling of the rest of the objects.

          The pumpkin is a series of overlapping ellipses with a gradient effect. The stem is a green rectangle with black bars. All of these are combined into a group for ease of use.

          The grapes are all just copies of the same grape. It is simply an ellipse with a gradient effect, and the stem is a green line I adjusted with the freeform tool. The grapes are all in a straight line because I copied them and moved them over with the arrow keys. I then used the skew tool to rotate the whole thing over.

          The corn is an ellipse with a yellow/orange gradient effect. Most of the corn is a copy a group of three corn kernels. There is also a layer of two behind it to keep it from being see through.

          The potato and tomato are both simply tracings of pictures of real tomatoes and potatoes. They both have the same gradient effect, ellipse, with different colors. They have a stroke of 1 in black. The maple leaves are also tracings of a picture, but with no stroke or gradient effect.

          Lastly, the apple is two ellipses, with one having a small ellipse effect to make it appear that it is shining. It's stem is simply a green line moved with the free form tool.

            

3 Name Plates

This is my basic nameplate. Being my basic nameplate, it was very simple to create. First, I simply selected the canvas, went to canvas color in the properties menu, and selected a color (in this case it was yellow). Next, I selected the text tool and dragged a box. In the text box, I typed my name in arial unicode MS font with a font size of 51. Lastly, I applied bold, italics, and underlining to the text, and made it blue with the color picker.

Next, we have my mid-level nameplate.The text was the same as before, clicking and dragging a box and then typing my name. Here I changed the font color to green and changed the font to Adobe Caslon Pro bold. Next, instead of changing the background, I used the rectangle tool under vector and clicked and dragged a rectangle to the size of the background. To this, I applied ellipse in the fill category. I then changed the fill color in the fill options menu to red and blue. Finally, I moved the text to the top layer in the pages, layers, frames, and history tab.

This is my last nameplate, my professional nameplate. First, I made a text box like normal. That text was the same font as the basic nameplate, arial unicode MS, with a font size of 50. I then gave it a font color of orange and an outline of dark blue with strong anti-aliasing. Next, I selected the skew tool and pulled the top corners of the text toward it's center, to make it look as if the text was coming out of the screen. After that, I made a rectangle as before and gave it a black outline of 8 pixels with a hard outline. For the fill I gave it the cone pattern and changed the colors to brown and white.

Optimizing and Exporting Graphics

The first step in optimizing and exporting graphics is to create a picture. Then, you need to click the button below the name of your graphic that says 2-up. A copy of your picture should appear. Click on this copy and go to the panel in the top right that says Optimize and Align. Select a file type from the drop-down box to save it as (I recommend a JPEG). After that, with the copy still selected, go to file, select export, name it and save it. Your graphic is now ready to be exported.

Art Terminology Definitions

Hue: All shades of color, excluding white, black, and any shade of grey.
From: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Hue

Chroma: The saturation, or purity of a color.
From: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chroma

Tint: Any lighter or darker variation of a color
From: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tint

Tone: How solid or bright a color is.
From: http://www.talktalk.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0050673.html

Shade: When black or dark grey is added to a pure hue.
From: http://arthistory.about.com/cs/glossaries/g/s_shade.htm

Complementary Colors: Colors on opposite sides of the color wheel. When mixed they produce a dark, neutral color.
From: http://www.worqx.com/color/complements.htm

Analogous Colors: Any colors that are next to each other on the color wheel.
From: http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0882846.html

Contrasting Colors: Two colors that are not next to each other on the color wheel. The more colors between the two, the greater the contrast.
From: http://desktoppub.about.com/od/glossary/g/contrastingcolors.htm

Texture: The way objects appear in art, and the way they look as if they might feel if they were touched.
From: http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/asia/sculpture/documents/vocabulary.pdf

Graphic Design Principles: Suggestions on how a designer can best arrange the various objects of a page layout  to the overall design, and to each other.
From: http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/basic/g/principles.htm

Balance: a feature of art where each area of a painting suggests a certain weight, or a certain degree of lightness or heaviness.
From:  http://www.chacha.com/question/what-is-the-definition-of-visual-balance

Symmetry: A type of balance in which objects are arranged the same on each side of an imaginary line, usually down the center.
From: http://en.mimi.hu/finearts/symmetrical.html

Graphic Formats

PNG:
Portable Network Graphics.  The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format was designed to replace the older and simpler GIF format and, to some extent, the much more complex TIFF format. PNG provides a useful format for the storage of intermediate stages of editing. Since PNG's compression is made to prevent and loss of data--and since it supports up to 48-bit truecolor or 16-bit grayscale--saving, restoring and re-saving an image will not degrade its quality, unlike standard JPEG (even at its highest quality settings). PNG is a raster format, which is to say, it represents an image as a two-dimensional array of colored dots (pixels). PNG is explicitly not a vector format, i.e., one that can store shapes (lines, boxes, ellipses, etc.) and be scaled arbitrarily without any loss of quality.

From: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/

GIF: 
The letters "GIF" actually stand for "Graphics Interchange Format". GIF is a compressed image file format. GIF images use a compression formula originally developed by CompuServe . GIFs are based on indexed colors, which is a palette of, at most, 256 colors. This helps greatly reduce their file size. These compressed image files can be quickly transmitted over a network or the Internet, which is why you often see them on Web pages. GIF files are great for small icons and animated images, but they lack the color range to be used for high-quality photos.

From: http://www.techterms.com/definition/gif

JPEG:  
(Joint Photographic Experts Group) An ISO/ITU standard for compressing still images.  JPEG format is very popular due to its variable compression range. For example, an image can be saved in high quality for photo printing, in medium quality for the Web and in low quality for attaching to e-mails, the latter providing the smallest file size for fastest transmission over slow connections. JPEG is a lossy compression method, wherein some data from the original image is lost. It depends on the image, but ratios of 10:1 to 20:1 may provide little noticeable loss. The more the loss can be tolerated, the more the image can be compressed. For text, it is recommended to compress the file and transform it into a GIF file.

From: http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,1237,t=JPEG&i=45676,00.asp 

TIFF: 
TIFF or the Tagged Image File Format is a file format that is strictly used for bitmap data. TIFF files  don’t contain text or vector data, even though the file format theoretically would permit additional tags to handle such data. Despite being one of the earliest file formats for images, it is still very popular today. It is a highly flexible and platform-independent format which is supported by numerous image processing applications and virtually all prepress software on the market.

From: http://www.prepressure.com/library/file-formats/tiff