Exploring Character Traits
1.I am a… Book worm
Personally, I am someone who really loves reading so I decided to pick this as my first personality trait to portray. Instead of using the imagery of books, I decided to portray the ‘book’ part of bookworm in the form of letters as I thought it would be interesting to use varying letter forms to see what effect I could get.
I cut out different letter forms of the letters A, M and Y that make up my name and scanned them in, and manipulated them on Photoshop to turn them into grey scale half-tone – so as to provide the contrast with the colourful gummy worms that were going to be used in the composition.
Try to find the letters A M and Y!
Where my name is hidden in the maze (gif)
To portray the idea of a ‘bookworm’ visually, I decided to create a maze of letters spelling my name and to have colourful gummy worms (depicting me) travel through it, as if they were eating up the words. It was hard to manipulate the gummy worms and make them stay the way I wanted them to on the paper but I think the irregularity adds to the fun spontaneity of the composition.
Final composition
2.I am a… music junkie
To show the kind of music junkie that I am, I decided to form my name using my favourite (and my best) pair of headphones, with a variety of album covers in the background, sorted by colour to showcase the variety of music that I listen to.
3.I am a… wanderer
I find myself a person filled with wanderlust, often filled with the urge to find and explore new places. I also love to wander around and just observe.
My initial concept for this composition was to recreate a vintage cartography (maps) and let my name be spelled out by the trade routes. However, I found this idea to be too flat and not really fitting in with the other 3 pieces hence I decided to try something different.
Real Life Where’s Waldo
As I’m quite short, I always find myself getting lost in crowds when I wander around, making it hard for other people to find me – hence I decided to go in this direction to explore this character trait. I hid myself within the crowds of my friends in a way such that it would spell out my name when it’s all joined together
4.I am a… daydreamer
For the concept of daydreamer,my second trait, I decided to draw smoke to depict my name as it was dreamy and it was something that I liked to doodle when my mind was wandering. To add in the fantastical, whimsical element, I decided to add a photo of a fish to juxtapose with the hand-drawn, unreal feel of the smoke. The smoke was also depicted in bright colours to contrast with the black and white of the fish and the background.
Initially, I tried out gouache on paper but I didn’t like the result – it was hard to get a smooth layer of colour and the entire image seemed flat and dull. Some colours like the yellow also didn’t show very well on the grey background.
So I tried a different approach – paper cut. I layered the image of the fish with the cutting of the smoke on top of a piece of watercolour paper painted with watercolours and silver ink in various hues. Although I had to sacrifice some details in the smoke, I was able to vary the hue and saturation of the colours more to bring about more depth.
Overarching Concept
To link all the different concepts together, I decided to play on colour – I received feedback that all my traits had something to do with my introverted nature, hence I tried to juxtapose the black and white/ colour to show the difference between my outer and inner world. For example, the black and white letter maze in the first composition represented the words/ books I like to read, while the colourful gummy worms represent me happily immersing myself in the books.
For this project, I also stuck to a more photographic/ collage style as I wanted to try something a little out of my comfort zone.
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