Illustrator Trials

Today I've mostly been in the mac suites trying to translate the drawings I did yesterday onto illustrator. This has proven pretty bloody hard, not even in terms of getting Illustrator to work, I think I've got that down now, its just getting things to actually look good compositionally that I'm struggling with. These are the final outcomes of today:

First attempt:

• This was actually my favourite drawing I did yesterday so I was massively disappointed when I tried to trace it and THIS was the outcome. It looks so rubbish, but I guess it was the first try of today so maybe thats why it turned out so badly. 
• I tried to experiment with the different thicknesses and line qualities you can use with the pen tool but now I'm looking at it thats actually just turned out quite tacky, maybe simple, more clean lines look better on Ai?
• Also for this first try I didn't stick to any colour scheme which I think makes it look pretty messy

Second attempt:

• After that absolute failure I tried the next drawing I'd done and surprisingly this turned out so much better! I think what worked here was the minimal composition to start with, with one very simple thing in the middle of the page it draws the focus in
• I also was able to remind myself to take a lot of the detail out of this one as well which is something I've kept trying to replicate after watching the Netflix documentary on Christoph Niemann the other day. I didn't feel like this needed the pool lines the other one had or any of the smaller details because you can see from the wider angle that this one takes place in a pool, so it immediately makes sense
• I also stuck to quite a simple colour scheme here which I think is something that translates much better on Ai than in paintings, it makes you focus less on the small detail and more on whats actually happening in the picture

Third attempt:

• This is a massive improvement in my opinion, still not as good as I'd like but better. I got the hang of using the pen tool and the charcoal effect to make the drawings look a bit more organic, and I think the simple colour scheme makes this look so much better
• Still not sure if its easy to understand whats going on here though, if it wasn't just me looking at this and you had no context I think it would be a struggle. 
• I think maybe my next step in this kind of work is too look at how I can compose this image a bit better and also look at how I can effectively give the feeling of being underwater in these images? cause at the moment I'm thinking they look a bit flat