That......dragged on far too long

There was a quote about best laid plans

I remember hearing a while ago and hearing it again intermittently about even the best laid plans never as they should, or something like that.

Well that happened multiple times over to me.

Painful lesson was learnt

The first thing I did which cost me three hours of wasted work was expanding the appearance and expanding it again in live paint. Every time I did this, illustrator kept grouping all of the objects together in the layer that was selected. For a few hours I kept undoing and redoing the process because I needed everything to be on their separate layers so I could rearrange them near the end. After an hour or so of repeating the process and reverting the work to its previous save over and over again, I bit the bullet and decided to try and rearrange the objects manually.

It did not go well.

After an hour of banging my head against my desk, I went back to the book, YouTube videos I was watching and the forums I was frantically searching to finally have it kick me in the face. The way to cut off the extra lines and use live paint bucket to fill was to do it one layer at a time. It was at this point where I threw my hands in the air and said "screw it, I'm done".

Plans didn't go according to plan

The next day I was intent on getting on with the assignment and trying to get the logo completed. I had zero motivation after the waste of a whole day trying to work around a simple problem and spent my time on different pursuits. 

The next day I was determined to get on with it due to me having a day to myself, but I had my other secret weapon delivered for the movie part of the assignment, my drone. So for the best part of the day between school runs, I was setting the drone up, watching videos and testing it out.

(On a side note, do not wear shorts when flying it close to yourself and make sure you definitely don't wear shorts while trying to fly it in a small space).

Finally nailed it, Virtual high five!

So after that break and nearly destroying the drone, that brings us to today. The first thing I noticed when I zoomed in to some of the drawings is that not all of the paths were adjoining which meant the live paint bucket would not have worked, so I had to go round and connect all the paths that were not due to be removed. I focused on the Zeus drawing first as I wanted to get one done at a time.

After all the paths were connected, I went and removed all the pieces of over hang by first selecting the sub layer of the part I was editing, selecting expand appearance from the object menu, then selecting live pain > make from the object menu and then finally selecting object > live paint > expand appearance. What this allowed me to was remove all of the over hanging lines.

Once that was done, I moved onto live paint bucket and was about to start filling the drawing in when I ran into another problem. Live paint bucket only works in objects that are connected in the same layer. So when trying to fill the hair for Zeus above the leaf crown (no idea of it proper name), it wouldn't let me. So the only solution was to copy and past in place, and then drag the selection from the layer it was pasted in and paste it into a brand new layer and call it colour fill. After the fill on the copy was done, I moved the layer behind the other layers and locked it so it could not be edited.

I repeated the same process until it was all done. But there was still more to do. I wasn't happy with the appearance of the crown or the lightning bolt, I wanted to give it a sort of shine. 

The first thing I decided to do was make the lightning bolts look more alive, and I found the best way to do that was to select the layer and change the graphic style from the graphic style panel. Luckily enough there was a neon library and after selecting that and editing the stroke slightly, the graphic looked a little better. I then selected the jewel on the crown of Poseidon and gave that a gradient that worked for it.

It was at this point I decided to call it quits as trying to do work with a house full of children is nigh impossible, but what I did manage to achieve was good as you can see for yourself:

Stage 2: ready for final touches

So all that is left to do is to add some shadow onto the characters to give them some sort of definition, add a background which is relevant to each character and then add the text to the bottom. Doesn't sound like much but will take me most the day to research and complete unless I have a free house.