First time using illustrator, made this little guy as an exercise
First time using illustrator, made this little guy as an exercise
If you pros have tips and tricks on how to improve next time, I'm glad to hear it. (Like, if you see that I have comited a sin)
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That's nice!
Nitpick: The shrank reflection looks strange, I think it would be the same size as the original duck in real life
Thanks!
Are reflections always the same size as the object itself ???
I shrank it because it felt more natural, then I shrank it more to make the reflection fit in the circle, so maybe I've over-done it...
I plan on making it into some stickers. I left the real nose of the duck outside the circle to improve the feel that the duck isn't flat, hopefully that won't cause issues with the stickers :p
If it helps, think of the water first like a perfect mirror. If itâs a perfectly flat mirror then it would look like thereâs another duck upside down below this duck. If you want to be extra precise, itâs mirrored across the plane where the duck meets the water.
But water isnât usually perfectly flat mirror, and here you have little nods to there being ripples or waves. The choppier the wave, the less it reflects, so youâll often see people break up the mirrored reflection at the choppiest parts of the wave. Similarly, waves arenât flat, depending on the part of the wave/ripple youâre at, youâd be reflecting higher or lower as though the mirror is tilted to the angle of the surface.
The last tricky part is that most surfaces are more reflective at a glancing angle than head on, so often reflections are stronger further in the distance and closer up youâll just be looking down into the water. On a more technical note, you can look up the index of refraction to learn more about this phenomenon.
To tie it all together, this is why those long shots of sunsets have a sun reflection that is really long (much longer than the size of the sun in the distance) - because itâs at a distance itâs a strong reflection and because all the waves are reflecting at different angles youâre getting all the glancing reflections of the sun on the top of each wave. It typically being dark at sunset also means the bright sun reflection blooms to make it look brighter and larger than just the tip of the wave.
Conversely, in water sports like wakeboarding, you might not see much of a reflection at all because all the water is choppy and non-reflective.
Looking down into a pond, you might not see a reflection either because the angle is too steep to reflect.
In short, yes, in this case the reflection should probably be roughly the same size.
I tested with the reflection of things on my cook-top while making pancakes (TMI) and the reflections were definetly shorter the more I looked from above. I believe it is because the things in the reflection are "further away" hence smaller. The reflection of my duck is definetly too small tho, I'll be more carefull next time :D
Thanks for the explanation it really helped wraping my head around the thing.
Oh! Awesome experiment! Yes, theyâre shorter because of perspective (foreshortening). With a mirror surface itâs better to think of a duplicate of the object flipped across the mirror plane, then you can apply the same tricks to draw in perspective, which may make it look shorter.
In your example here, since weâre viewing from the side the perspective is not going to factor in as much, so we land at âroughly the same sizeâ
I think so, but my optics courses date back to a long time ago...
It will look really nice on stickers!