Staircase Towards Completition

The 1st Beat
First of all, I take these samples to draw their shape by using pen tool. Drawing the tree is a real tough one for me. It needs a lots and lots of patience to draw the leaves and put some curves (which I still haven't mastered yet...sigh...) to make it a little more realistic.














Somehow I managed to draw the upper part of the tree. Well...I guess it's OK even though it looks a little distorted (n_n!). As for the anchor, I successfully managed to draw it without facing to much difficulties like the tree.


The 2nd Beat
After drawing using the pen tool for the elements in my symbol, I start to draw the body or base of my symbol. For that, I use ellipse tool to create 2 big circles.

The 1st circle I draw was the smaller one and I make it a little transparent to make other things behind it easier to see. From the circle, I transform another copy of it with a larger scale than the initial one. I didn't use any stroke yet for the circle.

When that is done, I transfer the 2 images (tree & anchor) that I draw using the tool pen earlier into the circle.
After I arranged the position for the tree & anchor, also with some resizing, it then fits into the circle. I put some strokes & use basic colours to help me see & identify the images better. At this point, I was thinking on how to put 2 arrows around the small circle as shown in my sketch. hmm...


The 3rd Beat
To make things easier, I locked & set the tree & the anchor into invinsible. Then I started to figured out on how to put 2 arrows around the small circle. I doesn't want to use the arrows that provided by the Illustrator because there's none of my interest (actually, I didn't found them :p).

Then, an idea pops up. To make things interesting, I try to transform the bigger circle by shearing it a little bit 1st.
As you can see, there's a 2 crescent-shaped inside the image. That is the 1st step of making 2 arrows around the circle. I use traditional way of doing it which is using pen tool and follows the circle shape many times as reference until I successfully drawn a beautiful curve (sigh...). Again, I put some some strokes & colours to make things easier to see.


The 4th Beat
At this part, I adjusted the crescent shape by adding some anchor point and reshaped it, so that it'll look more like arrows. To make the arrows on both side equal, I copy & reflect it 2 times (reflect horizontally, then vertically). About the tree, I put some layers of what-looked-like shadows so that it'll look more livelier & realistic without using any strokes.

On the anchor, I add something like 2 bars with spiral around it...Well, that thing is part of the anchor. I make it by using rectangle tool and rounded rectangle tool. Then I copy and reflect it so that it produces 2 equal shapes.
Now...The tree can be clearly identified, & so as the anchor. but this symbol is still not finished yet. There's still a lot of "touch up" to do, and colours to be added.


The Final Beat
Finally, I add yellow in the oval-shaped of my symbol. I use layers so that the colour will looked better than just simply added the colour with 100% opacity. For the circle, I use graphic style, bevel soft to make it looks like a shield.

After a lot of adding, adjusting, transforming, curving, layering, shadowing and colouring...Finally I've done my symbol successfully...with passion!
Whew...! Done it in 1 whole day without sleep...Well, I just hope that my symbol is acceptable. About the meaning of this symbol...I'll explain it in the next post.