2D Foundation II – G1

Zine final

Here is my final print for my zine! Minimalism at its best.

Actually I had trouble coming up with a common theme for my zine because the main topic for it was alcohol. I wanted to do something similar to my research, such as the pop ups or the different shapes layout for my zine, but it was hard to implement them in the context of alcohol. There wasn’t any inspiration for the cut outs.

I came across this image, and I thought about illustrating in the same way the ingredients of different alcohol, but given that mine was more towards beer rather than cocktails, it seems a bit out of context plus I did not know the ingredients of Jack Daniel’s alcohol.

Given I did not want to make it too complicated, I decided to settle for alcohol spills as my overall theme. It easily conveys the idea that my zine would be about alcohol as when people see the marks of red circles, they would relate it to alcohol spills made by glass cups.

Zine research

I was pretty clueless about what’s a zine and how it looked like and how to go about doing it, so I went to pinterest to hopefully clear my doubts and pretty much, I found some zines that were interesting to me.

What interested me in this bee design was that while most zines were basically rectangular in shape, this was designed in the shape of honeycombs. It led me to think that the zine could be shaped in a certain way to better covey or complement the idea.

For the second one, I liked how blue and orange were constant themes in the zine, and also the interactivity of it. There were pop ups, layouts and paper art that I found were really lovely and how these were also able to better explain or make an idea more interesting.

For the last design, I really loved the intricate paper cut outs and how each page was cut in consideration to the adjacent pages. I thought I could do something like this but sadly my paper cutting skills are of novice levels so I kinda did not go with the idea.

Point Of View Final

These are my final six A5 works for Point Of View for alcohol.

Alcohol from the point of view of troubled people is escape. How I chose to portray this point of view was that the bottle of the alcohol would be a shelter or hideout from the problems of the outside world, such as stress, anxiety and other issues. These problems are depicted by the dark spirits circling the bottle, while inside the bottle is a little village, being protected by the alcohol. Hence, it shows that alcohol is an escape from all these troubles.

Alcohol from the point of view of alcoholics is a necessity. We see an alcohol bottle being wrapped around by leaves and vines. I wanted to show the addiction through the leaves and vines because over time, they would grow like how addiction to alcohol would become more serious after awhile. Hence, I decided to draw the vines slowly growing and being more attached to the alcohol, similar to how alcoholics need more alcohol as if alcohol is becoming a part of them now as their addiction becomes worse. Also, this work was inspired by Alex Konahin’s flora and fauna ideas.

Alcohol from the point of view of criminals is a window of opportunity. There has been many cases of crime, especially rape, because these criminals take advantage of alcohol and use it as their weapon to target their victims. Thus, I wanted to show this by drawing lots of windows and these windows would form the shape of the alcohol bottle, like how alcohol presented these criminals the chance to commit such acts.

Alcohol from the point of view of the body is poison. This was the last change to my list of point of views I wanted to show. From the picture, we can see bubbles with the skull and crossbones inside them. I wanted to show that alcohol may not seem harmful to us, hence the bubbles were small and scarce. A lot of people have basic knowledge of what alcohol can do to the body, but they still continue to drink due to social gatherings, stress or habit. And from all these sessions of drinking they may not feel any different or sick, but to the body, there may have been a lot of damage done. The body views alcohol as something it does not want inside of it, but people still continue to consume them, and slowly, they are killing themselves and poisoning their own bodies.

Alcohol from the point of view of recyclists is art. Alcohol bottles are actually very pretty and have a lot of uses for it beside storing alcohol, but they are just usually thrown away after its content has been consumed. For recyclists, they see many potential and ideas from these bottles, and through their ideas comes out art. Hence, I combined the paintbrush with the alcohol bottle. It may seem like an ordinary alcohol bottle but if you look closely, you can see the handle and bristles of the paintbrush. This work is inspired by Redmer Hoekstra’s combination of different objects.

Alcohol from the point of view of churches are weddings. During weddings, it is common to find alcohol as one of the drink options. For this point of view, I decided to combine the architecture of the church with the alcohol bottle. You can see the different features of the church, such as the cross and the rose window, and the features of the alcohol bottle such as the brand and the label sleeve of the bottle. This work is also inspired by Redmer Hoekstra’s combination works.

Point Of View Process

How I went about with this project was that I started brainstorming for objects I wish to use, keeping in mind selecting objects that would have a variety of point of views. Some objects that I was keen on doing were alcohol, books and handphones, as these objects carried with them a wide selection of point of views for me to choose.

However, I got stuck on how to portray these point of views as I had a problem of making things too literal. I came up with a few sketches for my different objects to see which would come out the best, and to be honest, I wasn’t satisfied with any of them.

Choosing handphones would be the easiest as there are a lot of things to talk about, its apps, its features. However, after consultation, it seemed that alcohol would be the best option as not a lot of people would think of using it and it can portray kind of a dark side. So, I decided to stick to alcohol and try my best to portray in a unique way.

These were the latest point of views I had for alcohol.

Point Of View Research

For this project, I have referenced from two artists. The first would be Alex Konahin. I particularly liked how the artist used flora and fauna to compose an insect and I think that the technique used is very detailed and hence I wished to replicate the same idea for my work.

The second artist would be Redmer Hoekstra. I was amazed at how the artist used features of animals, such as the horns, to combine with parts of machinery and objects, and why he chose certain objects for certain animals is very apt. For example, the horns of the rhinoceros had been morphed into the train’s chimneys.

I find these combinations very fascinating and hence I have tried my best to display this in my work.

2D TYPOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT FINAL

These are my finalised works!

This is an overall view of all my four pieces.

My name is… and I am a triplet.

An introduction to myself would be a fun fact, and that is that I am a triplet. Hence, the number three is drawn. In the number, there are words from movies, games, traits, activities and names that are used to form up the number three. This was done to show the different personalities of my sisters and myself and the words that are slightly bigger were the things we used to do together or liked very much.

My name is… and I wish to inspire others.

To show more about myself, I decided to use an owl to portray what I wish to do in the future with my artwork. An owl is usually associated with wisdom and is also seen as a messenger. Furthermore, the owl is carrying a matchstick and lighting unlit lamps. Through this drawing, I wanted to show that I wish to inspire others (lighting of lamps) or raise awareness for good causes through my artwork (matchstick) in the future.

My name is… and I wish to be behind the scenes.

This piece shows masks of different characters found in different movies. I drew masks because for every mask, there is someone behind it. Hence, I wanted to show that I wanted to be behind the scenes of some of my favourite films such as Transformers, Deadpool, to help in the making of these movies. I wish to be on the film set for movies, especially action movies, as there would be explosives and lots of exciting things to do and I thought it would be fun and thrilling to be able to be part of it.

My name is… and I went for Hair for Hope.

For the last piece, I drew my hairstyles from 2012 to 2016, and in the middle is an empty space. What I wished to show was my participation in Hair for Hope 2015. Why I wished to show this was because it had a huge impact on me as I really felt how the cancer patients would feel when they lose all their hair. People would say it is just hair but hair makes a lot of difference and plays a huge role in appearance and confidence. When I shaved my head, I felt insecure and lacked confidence. I could not look people in the eye and avoided outings so as not to reveal my shaved head. Of course, I got mistaken a lot for a boy, even my grandpa thought I was his grandson. Overall, this was one of the major events in my life and I felt that it would be meaningful to share my experience with others so that they would know one of the difficulties faced by these cancer patients.

2D TYPOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PROCESS

To start off this project, I decided to write about myself in terms of characteristics and personalities and likes and dislikes so that I would have a selection of attributes to choose from to present for this project.

Initially, I wanted to draw my own face and use words that describe my personality to form the image like what Sean Williams did. However, I thought that would be too boring and hence I did not stick with the idea.

With reference to Fran Efless, I wanted to draw objects that showed what I liked and use words in that category to form the image, similar to the inspiration from Sean Williams. However, after the first review, it was said to be too literal and needed to be more metaphoric. Hence, I scraped the idea as I would agree that if its too straightforward it would not be as intriguing as it should be.

These are some doodles that were inspired from what I liked. The last design on the page was with reference to Drew Europeo. I loved his works as his works are simple yet beautiful and I wanted to try to replicate the technique. Basically, the design was to have my name be in the middle and surrounding my name would be little drawings of what I wanted to do or liked. However, it did not turn out to be as nice as I thought so I did not stick to that idea.

The first design was inspired by an artist on instagram called Kerby Rosanes, where I drew the logo of Disney to show my ambitions. However, given the problem of it being too literal, I decided to trash it as well. After one of the presentations on how we could go about doing our typographic portraits, I decided to do something similar as one of the slides talked about showing part of something instead of everything and from there came about the idea of showing my hairstyles (also cause the slides used hair as an example as well). It was simple yet I thought it conveyed the idea very well and hence became one of my finalised designs.

These are works from Fran Efless. I thought doing a drawing of an animal with similar traits as me would be interesting but I could not find one that was really apt for my personality and so I did not use this idea at all in my project.

After a lot of thought (that was not penned down), I decided to use Sean Williams works as one of my inspiration for the finalised works. Also, I really wanted to incorporate the things I loved into my work, thus I tried to do it in a not so literal way and also by just showing part of it instead of the whole object.

HELLO

These are my three designs for HELLO. (I do not have the actual template so I drew out the template myself.)

The first design is just my name in my normal handwriting and a few fauna around it. I do love designs with nature as I find them to be very simple yet elegant at the same time, that was why I chose to draw leaves for decoration.

The second design is a person with a cap (me) and the clock shows 4am. It basically portrays my attitude towards work accurately and all the time: last minute. I have a severe problem of procrastination and no matter how long the duration of a project is given, it would 70% of the time be last minute work.

The last design was done by adding a lot of water to black ink and letting it flow to the sides by tilting the paper. I wanted to show that I am an anything person, like I like to go with the flow and decision making isn’t really my thing as I do not really care about a lot of stuff.

All these are done in black and white as these are my favourite choices of colours to work with.

2D TYPOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT RESEARCH

For my research, I came across 3 artists which I drew my inspiration from. The first one was Sean Williams. He used words to form an image of a person which I thought was quite creative and apt for this project.

The second artist I referred to was Fran Efless. I thought it would be cool to draw my favourite animals and write words in it that would be related to the animal, such as personalities or traits.

The last artist reference was Drew Europeo. I really loved these works as they are really elegant and pretty. Also, I am in favour of using watercolour techniques so it was an incentive for me to try out his works.

Category: 2D Foundation II – G1