One of my job duties that I truly enjoyed at our business was performing the graphic needs of the business. This ranged from creating the Corporate Identity items, presentation drawings and illustrations, web graphics, technical drawings, and anything and everything that had to do with the visual needs of the business. In addition to the need to master the technical design programs to create construction drawings and technical documents, I had to learn how to operate many graphic arts programs.

This dragonfly is drawn in Adobe Illustrator which is a vector graphics program (Adobe Photoshop is essentially a raster graphics program. Your camera produces a raster image which is made up of thousands of individual pixels).

Illustrator has many of the same tools as Photoshop and elements can be imported and exported between them as they are intended to be able to work together. Both programs rely on using multiple layers...layers are your friend when it comes to graphics so be sure to use them.

The "Pen Tool" is the most important tool for it creates the lines and shapes. The pen can have just about any stroke imaginable, such as that used to create the hair of the dragonfly. The body of the dragonfly is created with simple shapes that are filled with gradient colors and different opacities. These shapes are copied, pasted, and scaled to create the body. If you look closely, you will see that the shapes are quite primitive.

A wing starts as a basic oblong shape and then manipulated to "what looks about right". Then a mesh of lines is added. The mesh is stretched, pulled, pushed, and aligned to the wing shape. Add extra squiggled lines until it starts to resemble the veins of a wing.

Colors on the wing are shapes put on a separate layer and manipulated and filled with a lesser opacity color. When one wing is designed, it can be copied and sized and mirror imaged to create pairs to be attached to the body.

The body and wings are attached and the shape of the dragonfly is traced and filled with a transparent grey to create the illusion of a shadow.

A background is created with a radial gradient fill to complete the illustration. Because this is a vector graphic, every aspect of the illustration can be modified.