Having had a good look at the different styles of illustrators and designers, ranging from hand-drawn to computer-based; we are tasked with another mater-apprentice exercise excise.

Like the first icon mater apprentice exercise, I have to recreate a project that my teacher has set for me. However, this time instead of recreating icons I'm recreating a city landscape.

Again, we were given a choice between two illustrations, and below is the one I chose;

I chose this one as the other illustration didn't have much colour, which I wasn't a big fan of. Also because I love the extra details of this illustration ( different shapes of houses, different window shapes, individual bricks and shadows on the walls); if you loosed closer, you can even see stairs up from the doorway!

Even if this illustration is going to take me far longer to recreate due to the extra details, I feel like the ned result will be worth it!

The next thing to decide is which tool I am going to use, and it's again a battle between Figma and Illustrator. Having done the icons on illustrator, I'm now much more familiar with illustrator. upon closer inspection of the illustration that I'm trying to recreate, I do see a lot of curves and trickier shapes such as these;

However, as much as I wanted to be lazy and use illustrator again, I feel like this is a great opportunity to learn and use Figma better. Since I can do most of the tricky shapes easily with the curvature tool on illustrator, I feel like I won't be learning anything new.

The first thing I did was to create a frame in Figma and placed the original illustration into that frame and set it to 50% opacity. In this way, I can start tracing over the buildings;

At the start, I actually made a big mistake in not understanding how Figma works. I traced over the windmill with individual lines instead of shapes, thinking that like Illustrator I can just join the lines and make a shape. I find out that Figma actually can't do this, even if I learnt to use the flatten tool to make the individual  lines merge into a vector, when I fill in the vector it doesn't actually fill in the "shape", it just stays empty;

( one of my experiments)

So in the end, I had to go back and remake the windmill ( and the subsequent buildings) by manipulating the shapes already available;

Luckily, the mechanism for manipulating shapes on Figma is not too different from illustrator. All I have to do was double-click click on a corner and drag it out. After a while I was able to create the outlines of the windmill, then the full windmill;

Next, the bridge was tricky, as it contained a lot of curves and extra detail;