Dachsund Vector Painting

A vector graphic of my dog frank, reaching desperately for the ice cream sundae.

One of the assignments in my catalyst graphic design course was a vector painting, using a photo as a reference. I scrolled through my gallery desperately, searching for something that would work well, and came across this. I realized the photo had a compositional element to it, the movement of my dog was visually interesting. So I chose it, determined to make it look good to create comedic irony of the source photo.

To create this, I imported the photo into illustrator and started tracing basic shapes using the pen tool. I would trace using pointed edges and straight lines, then turn the anchor points into curves to get a more organic look with less work. then I chose 3 colors for my dog (excluding black, grey, and white), 5 colors for the man holding the sundae, and 3 for the sundae itself, and applied them to said objects. the limited color palette limited my painting abilities and made this a bit of a challenge. Finally, I created the background, the couch and the wall, using just 2 shapes and a simple gradient.