Ever since I have had my pitch plus pitch feedback I have been working on my art work in Illustrator.  As I've said before in previous posts I wanted a stencil like theme to my art work.  However, ever since I have been playing around with my work looking at different shapes and forms I am having a slight change.  I am going to be heading towards a more detailed path.  I have created such parts to my animation like the globe and the plane.  Both taking me 2 days each to complete I got stuck in with the art work which is a bit more detailed.  Despite wanting to use a stencil like theme, I am still using simple shapes and converting them into different things.  By this I mean I could take the rectangle tool in Illustrator (M) and draw a simple rectangle.  From this I can delete anchor points and change and manoeuvre around to create the desired shape.  This is exactly what I did for designing my plane.

Below is my art work so far which I created:

Above here is my Globe.  I designed this in mind knowing I wanted it to be spherical.  I am going against my own rules in some ways as I originally said I wanted flat 2D simple shapes with simple colours and this looks everything but.  However,  It does work and I do like the way it has been finalised.  In a step by step process I started by grabbing a world map from Google which was flat and tracing it to produce my own vector based map.  Once I did this I coloured the countries and continents using a gradient.  This gradient here consists of 2 different greens, one lighter and one darker.  To get my globe spherical was surprisingly relatively easy.  I drew a circle with the circle tool (L) holding down shift and the option key to get a perfect circle.  I halved this circle and used the 3D effects - 3D - Revolve to create a sphere.  I then added my map to it by clicking map art and scale to fit.  This made everything look in proportion.  I then added 2 light intensity effects, one larger at the top and one smaller one at the bottom.  This was the final art work for the globe.  Back to the world map, I added that light to dark gradient in mind that I wanted to place light sources on my globe.  I attempted to put the darker green of the gradient where the light intensity is low and the lighter green where the light is.  

Moving onto my plane idea I wanted to use simple shapes as I didn't necessarily use them in my globe apart from the obvious which was a circle.  When I started designing my plane I was pretty stumped on how to start but I look at a photo of a plane and then knew the basic shapes around it.  In blue, this used to be a rectangle.  I added various anchor points around the shape and took some away to achieve the desired shape which you see above.  This is the fuselage of the aircraft.  I then moved onwards towards the wings which I made in a very similar way, adding and removing anchor points.  Moving onto the engines I did the same thing again using rectangles.  I purposely coloured coded each part so I knew which part was which and named them in my layers panel so they were easy to navigate through.  

Continuing with the structure of the plane, I added a tail fin in pink.  I also went over the fuselage shape which was in blue above and made it taller.  The fuselage (in blue) is actually attached to the fin in pink.  I drew out a shape and subtracted it from the plane structure.  I used the 'Minus front' button which is found in Pathfinder.

For me, this was the most difficult part of the structure.  I had to create a circle at the same angle of the shapes used for the other part of the plane.  Doing this, I originally set the shapes out completely flat and used a position tool to position everything at a certain angle in the air.  This was fairly complex and getting everything to fit together was very time consuming.  As you can see coming off the circles I had to join them up as the engine shapes were just a general guide. 

This is the finished template!  As you can see I added an extra fin on top of the pink one.  I coloured the top part of the fuselage yellow as this is a separate shape to the bottom blue part.  I placed all the simple shapes together to create the template for the plane as when I had it all mapped out flat as I said, I used a tool to angle everything in one direction.

Above here is the whole template drawn over with the pen tool.  Every different part of the plane's structure is again colour coded to differentiate between different parts.  Notice here I added small parts such as the yellow wing has a slight flick and the red wing has a slighting longer part to the fuselage to make it more life like.  I also added a very small fin on top of the pink one for realism.  I also connected the engines up. 

Here is my finished aircraft.  I roughly filled the above shapes in my drawn over template in greys and then added detailed gradients.  This was very complex getting the right colours and giving it that 3D feel to it.  I have used lots of greys, blues and whites.  I added a reflection on the right wing using different transparency levels and gradients over lapping each other to make this effect.  For the windows I created 2 of them and used the 'Blend' tool to create more specified steps.  There is 14 windows.  I then had to angle the windows in such a way that it matches the direction of the planes direction which was complicated.  I mirrored the windows and the door onto the wing and angled them in a specific way to create the illusion of of a reflection.  Overall this plane was a lot of trail and error.

Here is a very simple mock up of my first scene for my animation which is in the first scene of my animatic.  The only part I will change is the angle of the plane as I plan on having this flying around the globe effectively.