Second semester, first year. Bug's Life was my first illustration project at Devine and honestly the first time I had ever opened Illustrator seriously. Before this, zero experience with vector illustration. Not even close.

The brief was straightforward enough: take a styleboard and build a visual design around it, then apply it to a website concept. Two weeks. In practice that meant figuring out a visual language from scratch, learning the tool as I went, and somehow having something to present at the end of it.

Looking back I definitely spent too much time on the illustrations and not enough on the website. Classic first-year mistake: you get absorbed in the thing that's new and exciting and forget the thing that was actually the assignment. But the illustrations turned out well, and that mattered more to me at the time than it probably should have.

What stuck with me most was a comment from Junes, one of the teachers, who pointed out the highlighted illustration and said I did a great job. Small thing. But it was early in the program and I was still finding my footing in a creative degree, it was a real shift from what I'd done before, so hearing that landed differently than it would now.

What I learned

This was my introduction to Illustrator and to the process of going from a mood board to an actual visual system. Understanding how to extract a style from reference material and turn it into something consistent is a skill that sounds obvious but isn't until you've done it once. This was that first time.