The main thing I wanted to do with the DVD label was to try and keep to the theme of the atomic symbol and to be more Duke Nukem orientated. Given the cover is largely set in the world of Doom I feel that having the disc being Duke Nukem themed will work quite well. I therefore set about looking for an image of an atomic explosion that I could use as a basis for my logo.
After doing an image search on Google I cam across this one which I thought would fit the stye of the game nicely.
Now I had my image I had to get it into Illustrator. This is accomplished by opening up Illustrator and setting up a new document. I chose 2 artboards for mine but one would be fine. Then you go to the File menu and select Place. This will then open up the file explorer so you can navigate to the image you want to put into Illustrator.
Once there it looked nice and bright, actually too bright and defined for me to use as a template. I therefore selected the transparency panel and whilst making sure that I had the atomic image selected I adjusted the transparency down to around 30%. I could still quite clearly see it but it would make it easier for me to trace over, especially when using black.
I next made a new layer and placed it below this one in the layers panel. I named the layer with the image on "Original" and locked it so it couldn't be changed. The new layer I called "Outline".
Then with that done I started working on the outline. To create the convex shapes that the drawing is largely made up from I would utilise the Pen tool.
I would put one anchor point on the tip of one of the convex and then holding down the left mouse button I would drag out the point forwards along the inline with the curve. I then dropped the other point on the tip of the other side of the curve and dragged this backwards and kept the left mouse button down and slowly moved the cursor around till the line matched that on the underlying template. Hopefully you can make it out on the image below and where the handles are to get the curve to look right.
Now to get it looking more like the the one below I need to adjust the thickness (weight) of the stroke and to make it taper off at the points. To do this I just need to select it with the Move tool (V) and up at the top of Illustrator just below the drop down menus and select the one called stroke. I then adjusted the point rating up to around about 6. Next to that is a box with uniform in it. If you click the drop down box to the right of it you get a list of different stroke types and the one directly below uniform is the one we are looking for. Now when I have selected both of these I get something like below.
I then carried on with this technique all around the template till I was left with this.
With the basic outline done I moved the underlying template over to the other artboard to just leave the black outline. As this will be a Logo I also wanted to enclose it so I gave it a black box with slightly rounded corners. I used the Rectangle tool and then in the stroke panel I selected the Round Join Corner.
To add colour I added a new layer and called this one Colour and placed it below the Outline layer. I no longer needed the template layer anymore. The reason to add this below the outline layer is so that if I slightly go over the outline it won't matter as the outline will appear on top. This allows me to go slightly over the outline to ensure good colour coverage and not have it show over the black.
I wanted to change the colours from the template somewhat as I wanted to make the eyes red and have a grey cloud at the bottom.
I used a large paint brush size to fill in the bulk of the areas and then a smaller one to reach into any cracks / crevices. You can easily adjust the brush size using the [ and ] keys.
Once I was done my logo looked like this.
I'm not 100% sure on the colouring yet. I'll have to see how it looks on the DVD label. I might have to adjust it to make it stand out more. However I am relatively happy with how it turned out and think it fits in nicely with the theme I was going for.
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