That pretty much sums it up. Vector art is generally considered to be in the style of Art Vandalays recent images, tho it is possible to create paintings etc in vector that still look 'hand-painted'. the Liverbanner for example was originally a vector image due to the size of its reproduction, but i decided to raster it and finish it as a 300dpi RAM busting image and export it as a 3gb Jpeg. even at 20 something metres, you cant really see any pixelation. Working at that size takes a serious amount of computer power tho, and i had to upgrade to a seriously powerful computer to finish it.
Is right. I've found that while vectored images can look very nice and clean, you are seriously limited to what you can do as far as detail is concerned. Not only that, if you are to draw detail, it's seriously time consuming. I take it you used a combination of both techniques. A 3gb jpeg? Fuck me! I don't think I've ever seen anything that size. My computer would just simply go into a coma and not recover. My PC struggles to produce stuff at over say 5000x5000 and lags like a bastard if I were to do broad strokes or add a anisotropic filter or something like that. It's seriously a piece of shit, and in order to get stuff looking clear photo realistic in a piece of art, you need those high resolutions to work with.
As for the vectoring, and vexel thing, a lot of people confuse the two. They are both similar, but one has a major difference in that a vector is infinitely scalable so that it doesn't really loose it's fidelity and is perfect format for print should you choose to upscale. With a vexel, it's not ideal to work with should you be working for a advertising company or whatnot. You'll just run into issues and probably end up wasting your time.
Still, Illustrator is a very, very nice program. It's just not that user friendly IMO. It took me a while to suss out that pen tool, which was a complete bollox, and worst of all, the selection tools, which are absolutely essential which I didn't have a scooby's clue about in the beginning and found myself swearing like a maniac all over my work place when I was trying to produce certain results, notably with the "pathfinder" functions. It's also a great package to use because your files can be made compatible with Photoshop and be converted to PSD. format and vice versa. Now I can hand draw stuff and go to Illustrator and create some really nice special effects that can't be done in PS and add them in, which is great because it now allows me to produce some really nice looking stuff.
