Just a little warm-up exercise: do an image search for “basketball news”, find a photo I like, work over it.
I wanted to see how well this would work with Image Trace doing half of the work for me so I fooled around with that first:
Not so great, really. Lots of messy shapes.
Separately tracing the head with different settings was interesting, though. I fooled around with trying to use the magic wand to select shapes and change them to better colors but ultimately decided that wasn’t working out. It ended up being useful for giving me an idea of the overall abstract shapes, if I was gonna do this again I’d still probably start with a greyscale trace.
Above: image trace. Below: the shapes I scribbled out with the Pencil tool. The ball and his number were the only things I did with the Pen.
I’m not entirely happy with it as a likeness but I think it’s decent otherwise. His left arm’s too chonky though. His right arm was too chonky at first too but I used Puppet Warp to push it around and slim it down some, that’s always a useful tool.
Illustrator, 2h. Now it’s time to go play phone tag with a plumber about a minor issue that came up last week.