Final Exam

The very first, preliminary part of the pattern before being messed with to become a scatter pattern. The background is black to see the pattern, otherwise you wouldn't be able to because it is white. 

The background pattern, which I made snow. This was made by using the one small circle and turning it into a scatter brush, randomizing everything. After that I randomly changed the circles to have different opacity, and blurs.

This is my final product of my Christmas Card for the Final Exam. The live trace for the wreath was a little time consuming, to remove the background but it turned out well. I like the snowy theme I went with, making most things shades of blue as the ideal Christmas scenery is. The tree took a large amount of time as well, and became frustrating with how jagged and awkward it looked sometimes, but I fixed it as best I could. In this project I used scatter brushes a lot, art brushes, gradients, effects such as roughen and Gaussian blur, Extrude and Bevel for 3D, live trace, type on a path, and typography. I made the holly berries and small bulbs by hand. The presents and larger ornaments were things I made in earlier tutorials. I used this tutorial for the Christmas tree shape:
http://ndesign-studio.com/tutorials/christmas-tree
This final was a little stressful with the time restriction because I usually spend large amounts of time making sure it looks just right, but I feel I did exceptionally well under the time given.