Rebecca Shostak
University of California, Los Angeles

Feeding Frenzy

Biography: Rebecca Shostak was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she won numerous awards for her drawings during high school. She is now a second-year undergraduate student at UCLA’s department of Design | Media Arts. A lot of her recent work focuses on blurring the line between fine art and design, exploring digital illustration with organic forms, and working with print media. Her dream is to have her own design firm and work to solve the world’s environmental problems through design and art. Her other dream is to be an Olympic horseback rider.

Objective: For this illustration, I wanted to take a photograph and convert it into a three-dimensional piece, using Adobe Illustrator as the tool to accomplish this. I do not mean three-dimensions in the traditional sense as with a 3D render, but rather seeing time as a third dimension and creating a feeling of past and future motion, as well as what is happening now. I attempted to capture the frantic bundle of movement, which characterizes a koi feeding frenzy using Illustrator’s strong, clean lines, and brilliant color. The end result was an illustration that took a flat, still photograph — a representation of only a single moment — and turned it into a visual language of motion and time.

Tools used: This piece was created entirely in Adobe® Illustrator®. I used the pen tool to trace a photograph of a few fish and the smooth tool to clean up the lines. I duplicated this pattern of fish many times over and adjusted opacities, stroke weights, and fill color. The piece would not achieve its feeling of motion and continuity were it not for the beautiful, clean lines Illustrator produces so well. The piece was outputted in EPS format and printed directly from Illustrator.