Skip Content

SVG Self-Portrait

  ⁃  Notes

As 2022 draws to a close I have taken a few moments to look back over the last year. In doing so I realized there was work I had done and it is worth acknowledging. I had been thinking about adding an illustration to the homepage. It would be light, scalable, and adaptable to different environments or themes. An SVG would be ideal.

Dark line drawing self-portrait
Self-Portrait Light Theme. Digital/SVG. 2022.

I had been drawing and painting with Adobe Fresco but hadn't experimented much with vector brushes. They seemed like the perfect application. I had already used CSS custom properties to theme other elements, so why not an SVG?

Once I completed the illustration in Fresco I used VSCode to edit and SVGO to optimize it. Later, I realized there were further optimizations that I could make. Fresco did not merge overlapping shapes thus adding redundant paths. To optimize it I opened the illustration in Figma and merged the overlapping paths. Then I was done.

I shared the work on Twitter and was excited to see retweets from Eric Snowden and Kyle Webster. Snowden is the VP of Design at Adobe and Webster is an illustrator, digital brush creator, and product evangelist at Adobe.

Dark line drawing self-portrait
Self-Portrait Dark Theme. Digital/SVG. 2022.
Previously
The Lonely Place

Up next
2022 Year In Review