The Assignment: A common exercise in design school, take typographical elements (perhaps even the words of a story) and bring them to life.

The results:

The process:

This was done in Adobe Illustrator with parenthesis symbols, the letter C and the letter O from a font called Ignite the Light.  I started by scanning in a quick outline sketch of an octupus.  From there, I typed in strings of the letter O of varying lengths and arranged them along the general form of the octopus (the first layer I made is the leftmost bottom picture). I then copied everything on that layer and pasted that form as several new layers with slightly darker coloring and varying opacity levels (second image).  Then I made a new layers with lighter colored and darker colored fonts respectively to get at the appearance of light and shadow (the third and fourth pictures).  The outline is made of many parentheses, stretched and rotated and warped to fit the sketch lines I started with.  The eyes and spots were similarly done with the letter O again.  The background is 4 differently rotated layers of O’s.