Vector Portrait
Toronto Film SchoolProject Overview
A vector portrait of artist Joana Choumali, built from a reference photo after researching her work. Choumali embroiders directly onto her photographs, so the portrait borrows her language: dashed lines stand in for stitching, giving the piece the same depth and hand-worked meaning.
Every major tool in the file was made for this piece: custom dashed brushes, custom hair brushes, and a background pattern drawn from West African motifs.
My Contributions
Research: Studied Choumali's embroidery-on-photography style, plus West African motifs from Côte d'Ivoire, her country of origin, for the background.
Tracing: Outlined the main features first — eyes, nose, mouth, hair, face shape — then the minute lines, with a thin paintbrush weight that keeps a messy, hand-drawn feel. Mapped shadows, highlights, lowlights, and midtones as a guide for colour.
Brushmaking: Built a custom dashed-line brush (three stacked lines, grouped, with tuned dash/gap stroke settings) for the facial shadows and sweater detailing, after presets fell short.
Colour: Sampled shades straight from the reference photo with the eyedropper and laid them in with the blob brush.
Hair: Created a series of scatter brushes from tight loops in varied sizes and lengths, with opacity shifts per strand, so the hair reads textured and layered rather than one flat colour.
Outcome: A digital portrait that carries some of her method without copying a single piece.
Design Notes
The background is a repeating pattern of West African motifs, drawn with the line, rectangle, and ellipse tools, then reflected vertically and horizontally into place. Each shape was converted to a brush stroke — the dashed line and a heavier weight of the original outline brush — with single watercolour strokes for colour.
A simple, quiet background tone keeps the whole piece cohesive without competing with the portrait itself.