This week, I find myself mulling over my designs. Whether they fall under the category of ‘Japanese Aesthetics’ so to speak. Whilst making them, I do feel so, but when comparing against my reference materials, I start to get unsure. I’m not sure if this is due to actual faltering from the aesthetic, or unsatisfactory feelings when compared to the pros. (I’m guessing/hoping it’s the latter)
Internal struggles aside, It’s also been a bit of a bummer when certain ideas don’t seem to come to fruition and I scramble for an alternative. Like for example, for my ‘Psychedelics’ square, I couldn’t handle the messy psychedelic collage mediums, nor could I juggle my own variation of it. Fortunately though, whatever I’ve come up with subsequently, I’ve quite liked.
Been listening to a lot of music that I associate with with the look I’m going for, to get into the headspace as well.
Just a couple of the designs W.I.Ps (the colours look WAY different here, in fact, pretty awful on this site, once uploaded, hopefully this is just the site compression + forced rgb?)
And for one complete line (some W.I.Ps)
Been thinking of the advice of keeping relative scale in check as well, the line seems to have worked! Still worried that the most photorealistic heavy designs might not fit in with the rest :/
Also mentioned rather early on, was the element of typography in Japanese Graphic Design, something I find to be missing from most of my squares.
But debating between whether use of Japanese text is a clutch in making the aesthetics count as “Japanese”. I guess it’s made me stray away from putting them in blatantly. (There’s actually some in 2 of the squares posted here). But I do want to make more use of it as well, but without relying on it for the design entirely. Making sure that the design is solid on it’s own before I add the typographic elements in.