Briefly share your experience going through Dialogue in the Dark. What were some of the feelings, thoughts, challenges and insights gained while role playing a blind person?

At first I wasn’t very anxious since I had the walls to actually rely on, but I was a little worried when we had to let go of the wall and just rely on our other senses (i.e. hearing) to guide us. Once I let go of the wall, I lost all sense of space and directions, and it made me anxious. I was scared of bumping into people or things. I felt a little panicked, too, since I couldn’t make out my surroundings at all.

It was a challenge just to trust myself and my friends, and I realized how much I actually doubt my other senses once I can’t see. I also realized that I depend on my sight so much that I take it for granted. I felt better remembering that it was a controlled environment, but when I think that there are people who actually live outside like that, I tried to imagine being in that situation—and that made me feel panic. I realized that it must be tough to adjust to that situation.

It makes me want to take care of my own sight more (especially since I already have a pretty high degree) and be kinder to others—not just people who need help, but others in general. Experiencing that also made me realize that we will never fully understand others no matter how much we learn, and that we have to be kind since we don’t know what others are going through.

 

Drawing on your experience, can you think and list some of the benefits inherent in the design research technique of role playing?

Putting the audience in the shoes of others can help them understand the unfamiliar situation a little better. When there is understanding, people will naturally care more about an issue, since they have experienced a similar situation in the role playing setting. Hopefully that concern will stir the audience into action to actually do something that will benefit the issue.

In addition, it also teaches gratefulness for what we have right now, which will make the audience reflect more on their own lives and make them better people.

 

Can you think of some contexts where role playing can be useful to help discover and definition of design challenges or contribute to the development of design solutions?

I think role playing will be useful to help people understand more about disabilities (i.e. visual or audio impairment, or even physical disabilities) and mental health (i.e. anxiety or panic attacks). While design is a useful tool to inform, help, and evoke emotions, I think it has its limits. There are things that only experience alone can offer. Role playing really puts you in perspective, which is more effective than making you imagine the “what if”s. In addition, people (especially young children) may be more open to the idea of role playing because it’s highly interactive. The interactivity is something we should try to incorporate to our design since interactivity, not only is highly effective, but it also appeals to masses more.

What are some of the current issues confronting our world today? Amongst them, what is of interest and a cause of concern to you?

 

  • Social Media/Technology

News: Social-media use ‘disrupting teen sleep and exercise’Instagram is worst for mental health?

The prevalence of social media is, and has always been, a double-edged sword. It does help connecting people all over the world—but because of the vast amount of information, a lot of people are trying too hard to absorb everything, hence spending too much time in social media. Moreover, the ease of access causes various messages to be posted in the Internet, including negative or harmful messages.

 

  • Bullying

News: US university sued over Malaysian PhD student’s suicide after months of racist abuse

Bullying has been an issue for a long time that is constantly addressed, but never really solved because it’s considered a minor problem. A lot of people are unaware of recognizing what line shouldn’t be crossed when making jokes or conveying your personal opinions, and not only will that reflect badly on themselves, it can affect other people’s lives more than they know.

 

  • Mental Health

News: In charts: Report into children’s mental healthChild mental health referrals up 26% in five years, says reportAdolescent health: Teens ‘more depressed and sleeping less’The Dark Side Of Harajuku You Haven’t Seen Yet

In a lot of countries, especially Asian countries, mental illnesses are still considered kind of a taboo. While the openness to the topic has increased over time, that doesn’t mean people are aware of what mental illnesses are about, what causes them, or even how serious it actually is.

 

  • Extinction

News: The animals that will survive climate change, How brain biases prevent climate action

One in every four species currently faces extinction. While it is a great problem, cognitive biases (e.g. bystander effect and hyperbolic discounting) prevent real, significant changes from happening in the world.

 

Most of my issues gravitates more towards the social implications, which is what I’m more interested in exploring further. I would like to discuss more about mental health issues.

 

Why is the issue important? Who does it affect and how?

 

Aside from my personal interest in this issue, mental health problems keep on becoming more prevalent while the lack of information doesn’t change. World Health Organization (WHO) had predicted that depression will be the leading cause of disease burden by 2030 (WHO, 2011).

A lot of people seem to be unaware still that mental illnesses can be as life-threatening as some physical illnesses. That lack of awareness influences the way people see and treat others with mental illnesses. It discourages sufferers of mental illnesses to actually ask for help due to fear of being judged by society or perception that no one will understand how they feel.

In addition, people experience mental illnesses differently, so a testimony from one person may not be applicable to another. This causes people who suffer from mental illnesses to be unable to effectively express themselves sometimes because they can’t exactly pinpoint how they feel and the descriptions from others may not match their emotions. That can be frustrating for both them and people around them—family, friends, therapists—and it also doesn’t help the healing process.

 

Who do you need to communicate to, and why?

 

There are a lot of issues under this “mental health” umbrella, but I would like to focus more on the people with mental illnesses, specifically depression (which is considered the most prevalent mental illness currently). I would also focus more on young adults in Singapore. Depression develops frequently during adolescence, between the ages of 18 to 25 (Eaton et al., 2008), and the number of young adults with depression is increasing (Mojtabai, Olfson, & Han, 2016). Moreover, according to the Singapore Mental Health Study conducted in 2010, 5.8% of the adult population in Singapore suffered from Major Depressive Disorder at some time in their lifetime. Since in Singapore depression is still somewhat considered a taboo, I think it would help people with depression if there is something that can help them express their emotions to make people around them understand that depression shouldn’t be a taboo, but an issue to be discussed together.

 

How has visual communication contributed to address the cause?

 

DDW: Tools for therapy

 

This was the example shown in class that really captured my interest. The so-called tools are supposed to help people visualize their feelings. I like how Bodewes created different shapes and used different materials to provide a wider range of emotions to be visualized, and how she chose more affordable materials to make her entire toolkit more affordable for people. I think it’s a simple yet effective idea to help people visualize their feelings to others, but it may be prone to misinterpretation since people may understand a tool slightly differently from others. I also like how Bodewes also provide a board and workbook with the tools; the board to set up the tools and the workbook for the therapist to write on. The tools were clearly made for two people to work together and discuss.

 

 

  • Olive (Indiegogo, Digital/Interactive, 2014)

 

 

Olive is a bracelet that can detect your heart rate, motion, skin temperature, and skin conductance—and through those, be able to identify if you’re stressed. After that, you can connect it to an app which will track your daily stress levels and provide ways to calm down, e.g. breathing exercises. While it’s not directly connected to my topic, I like this invention because it’s able to identify stress without you needing to realize it first. It can help you notice when you’re actually stressed and not just feeling “a little off”, so I think in a way, it helps you to express yourself. The company made it to be fashionable with different choices of colors and textures because they want the wearers to feel that the bracelet “express” themselves. While it’s not a big point, I think it’s nice because it will encourage people to actually wear them with pride instead of hiding it.

 

 

  • Mindnosis (Sara Lopez Ibanez, Graphic/Publication, 2017)

 

Mindnosis by Sara Lopez Ibanez

 

Mindnosis is a self-assessment kit, made with the intentions to make people identify what area they need help with, and where they can get it from. The whole design looks minimalistic and spacious. The box doesn’t have any patterns or colors, which made the colored triangles and cards stand out, making them look like a fun game instead of a procedure to go through. The designer used a clean, easy-to-read sans serif font, complemented with symbols and icons which made the kit look welcoming and interactive.

 

 

  • Replika (Eugenia Kuyda (Luka, Inc.), Application/Interactive, 2018)

Replika is an application which allowed you to chat with a bot who will act as your friend and therapist. It will ask you questions about your day and condition and respond accordingly (to the limits of a bot, of course) to your responses. They will also prompt you questions, ask casual questions like a friend would, and offer you mind exercises to make you feel better. I tried it myself because I was skeptical of how interactive a chat-bot can be, and to be honest, I was impressed. While the bot is clearly a bot, it’s much friendlier and conversational than I expect it to be. It even uses emoji and slangs to enhance the feeling of talking to a real person. I find it easier for people to open up in that case, and the application can then ask you more questions to help you identify your feelings better. The application has a pretty simple interface, with a customizable chat background. The main page has classified different topics that you can easily choose to be your topic of conversation, if you want to. You can also customize your bot’s profile picture, gender, and voice.

 

For this project, we’re supposed to make a poster for Singapore Design Week. I took out some keywords from the event description like design, innovation, engaging, etc and brainstormed them, finding phrases or words that are short and simple to be made into a slogan.

As for the art style, I am more inclined towards the flat illustration styles instead of something realistic.

So with the basic ideas and style somehow “settled”, I started out with a few concepts:

 

1. Design as innovation

So my first idea is something along the line that conveys the idea that design is something innovative, and that design is something everybody can think of or produce.

When I think of innovation, I think of new ideas, so I thought of a light bulb to represent the innovative part. As for the slogan, I thought of something simple like “Think Design” since it captures attention immediately and encourages people to consciously think of design.

However, I think it turned out very ordinary; there’s nothing special or exciting about it. It doesn’t really convey the idea of being innovative, and it doesn’t have personality.

2. Design as a bridge through time

I was thinking of something that could get through the gap of generations, so I wanted to use something that represented the past, combined with something that represented the future. I chose Peranakan patterns to represent the past and something technology-like for the future. (I wanted to make it look like there are branches of lights coming out of the screen.)

I had a lot of troubles coming up with the slogan; I was thinking something like “The Past and The Future”, or “Design Through Time”, but nothing really catches my attention. Besides, I wasn’t sure about the layout and color as well. I think this draft looks awful.

 

3. Design as connection

For this last one, I was looking for inspiration from the past SDW poster slogan. Their slogan is “A March of Design” (which, I think, is really smart since SDW is held in March). I wanted “connection” to be the concept; so I want it to be something that everybody knows and can relate to, something that everybody shares. Then I thought of the word “anthem” (by accident) and I liked it, hence the slogan: “An Anthem of Design”.

Since it’s about anthem, I wanted to create something shaped like a tone at first, but using geometric shapes (like Bauhaus). But it turned out very stiff and didn’t convey the excitement and energy of an anthem.

 

In the end, I decided to work on the third idea: An Anthem of Design.

Based on Lev Manovich, there are five principles of New Media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. Now I will talk about how they can be applied to my group’s project, the Door.

 

Numerical Representation

Basically, a principle of new media that distinguish it from old media is that new media is programmable. New media objects are essentially composed from digital code, and hence can be manipulated via algorithms. In my group’s project, the numerical representation comes from the codes that are embedded into photoresistors. We set a certain numerical value based on the level of brightness that is required to “trigger” the photoresistors, which will result in recordings being played.

 

Modularity

Modularity reflects the presence of separate elements or parts, which can be modified or used independently, that create a whole new media object. In my group’s project, I think it can be seen from the separate recordings that we are going to play; we can edit the contents of the recordings without affecting the main code, for example. Moreover, in the code that we made, there are also separate elements—for example, we can edit the timing delays or the brightness trigger for one photoresistor without affecting the other photoresistors.

 

Automation

Automation involves the computer programme to produce a response using template or algorithms by itself, without direct human interference. An example is web-based search engine. For my group’s project, I think there’s not much automated response as an audience has to come and trigger the photoresistors; in a sense, interaction from audience is constantly required for something to happen.

 

Variability

Another principle that differentiates new from old media is variability, which means something that is not fixed or possibilities that can be explored. In a sense, I think my group’s project doesn’t possess a great variability; the final outcome is fixed, no matter how many times an audience interacts with it, or who interacts with it. We do give the audience the flexibility of interpreting the story itself before revealing the actual story, but the storyline is more or less fixed which doesn’t allow broad interpretations; it’s more of a selection rather than variability, since the possibilities are finite.

 

Transcoding

Technically, transcoding refers to the translation of an object from one format to another, or from one platform to another. I think it could be related to my project in a sense that the movement of the audience will be “translated” into the recordings that will be played due to the trigger from the audience, but I’m not really sure because it’s not exactly a translation like a change from text to image.

 

In conclusion, I do think my group’s project possesses some of the principles of new media, but some of them are not very strongly reflected as there are limitations to how much they can be applied to our project.

This time, we attached the circuit into our cardboard prototype.

We did write the codes, but they didn’t work the way we wanted to, so for the presentation, we just tested out the sensitivity of the photoresistors. At first I was a bit worried that the photoresistors wouldn’t be a very good sensor, but they turned out to be more sensitive than I expected.

Feedback received from the presentation:

  • Use backlight instead of LEDs on the gap so it won’t interfere with the photoresistors
  • Add ambience noise (e.g. whispers) to attract audience
  • Play around with the volume

So now, the things that we need to focus on are:

  • Think of the materials we need and the exact amount of each of those
  • Start making the story: think of how many recordings to make and the length for each one
  • Settle the code

Video of the class presentation:

 

After that, I went back and tried to fix the code. We need to make a circuit where when the light that falls on the photoresistors is on the minimum (darkest), the sound will start playing. Since we don’t have ethernet shield to read SD card (is that what we need?), for now the sounds are just from the buzzer. Here’s the working circuit.

However, I’m still not sure whether we need the sounds to overlap each other when both of them are triggered or not, but for now there will only be one sound played regardless of the number of sensors activated.

As for now, I think we’ll need to just try the different things first and make sure the electrical component works.

 

Group: Vania, Dan Ning

The theme for this project is hope. I started out by searching for keywords that symbolize hope; stars, candle, fire, dove, flower, butterfly, sun, rainbow, fish…

In the end, there are a lot of keywords that can be used to describe hope. Hope is different for everyone, after all.

I started by looking for some themes. I came up with two major ideas.

 

Yin and Yang

I want to represent that life is always balanced; in goodness, there is always something bad – but conversely, in badness, there is always something good as well.

My plan is to make koi fish and arrange them differently; one school of fish will be “swimming” upwards, but one fish in that school of fish would be going against the flow (going downwards). Another school of fish will be doing the reverse, “swimming” downwards with one fish going upwards. Their colors can work inversely, or maybe complementary colors. But with that idea, I actually hadn’t really though about the positive-negative form (which is the whole idea of the project), so I thought I should scrap the idea off.

(Unfortunately, I lost my sketch for this one.)

 

Early Spring

This idea came from when I was looking at snowflakes cut-out tutorials from Pinterest.

I was thinking that the shapes of snowflakes are really interesting and unique, since they are all different from one another. At first I was thinking of making the snowflakes flower-shaped, but then after the first presentation I realized that I could make use of the negative space instead of just leaving them meaningless.

In the end I chose to work with the “early spring” idea. At first I wasn’t sure if I should go with the idea since my others smaller ideas, which I haven’t really thought through, were said to have some potentials as well. Like the birds and propeller idea, or the tortoise idea, which could be developed following the story of the hare and the tortoise.

I was debating between the tortoise and the snowflake in the end, but I couldn’t really think of an original, exciting story for the hare and the tortoise, as well as the positive-negative space.

I didn’t think that it would be so difficult to play and make use of a form. Whenever someone makes use of positive-negative space – for example, when I see posters or advertisements that use those, I would notice them, but never think much about it. In the end, when I tried making it myself, I spent myself stressing about it. How do I make a form that is subtle, but noticeable, yet interesting and can convey my idea as well?

I finally chose the snowflake idea – “early spring”, simply because its form is the one that I can picture the clearest (and also because it’s the one I like the most). See my final post for the end result of my idea!

Our idea is to portray a gap in people’s understanding by portraying them using physical gaps on a door.

Our prototype was kind of a miniature of what the actual thing is going to be. Our whole idea is revolved around a story that would be revealed after “exploring” around the door, but we didn’t have a story yet. We put earphones behind the cardboard door and played some e-book as substitute.

For the set of actions we required the participant to do, we only told the participant to approach the door and just try to listen carefully. At first she looked unsure of what to do since the sound from the earphone was very soft, but then she could still catch the sound. She began exploring different spots on the door and I tried to match that by playing different recordings as she moved, but I couldn’t keep up and she didn’t get what the recordings were about either, so it just confused her. But she did think that she felt like eavesdropping (which is kind of our idea) due to the low volume, so that’s good. She also said that the concept is interesting, and if the gaps do play different recordings or sounds, she would be interested to test all of them to find out. She also added that at first she wasn’t sure of what to do because the door was a plain piece of cardboard with no handle or keyhole, but if there is a handle and keyhole, she would know naturally that the participants are expected to open the door.

Feedback we received:

  • The door may not have to be real-life size, it can just be something like a dollhouse
  • The concept of revealing a story is interesting; maybe we can make the door have several screens inside, so you can open it up like pages of a book to fit in the concept
  • We can make use of the gaps between door and door frame to put in speakers, but we can also put in a lot of keyholes instead so participants will have to continuously find keys to progress with the story. Moreover, it will be visually intriguing.
  • We can also make use of different heights of people; so maybe in one big door, there are smaller doors. The different gaps will play different people’s sounds, e.g. a small door will play a child’s sound and a big door will play an adult’s door. So we can make a story but through different perspectives.
  • One-person experience would be better. If the door is placed in an empty room, people will definitely be compelled to approach the door and find out more about it.

As for now, what we have to do based on the feedback is to focus on what we want to do first. Now we received a lot of feedback because we still have a lot of things we can play around with, and we still haven’t decided which idea to use exactly. After we decided on one idea, only then we can move forward with the project.

I do think this bodystorming helped a lot because the feedback we received are really valuable. They provide objective opinions and point out the strength and weaknesses we didn’t see in the beginning. At first I was really worried that people won’t be interested to find out about the door, but the participant told me she would be interested and even gave her idea on how to improve on that. Moreover, I can see other people’s works and learn from their troubleshooting as well.

Group members: Vania, Dan Ning

Watch our bodystorming process here:

My final jobs are thief, barista, gamer, and watchmaker.

To be honest I was pretty disappointed after printing because:

1. The printing person stretched the image to fit A3, so the images are not A4 anymore (and I just noticed it when I was arranging them)

2. Some of the colors didn’t turn out like I hoped they would or didn’t even turn out at all. For example, my thief job supposedly has a different color for the hole on the wall and some shadow, but they’re not there.

And the worst is,

3. The barista job did not turn out well at all. The wood grain is lost and replaced by super dark brown, making it impossible to see the coffee beans. The shadows on the coffee beans are lost too.

I’ll show you the image comparisons later.

Printing aside, the images turn out pretty well for me, in a sense that I enjoyed the process of creating them and they all pretty much turned out like I had pictured them to be. I learned a lot about Illustrator and Photoshop about this project.

Without further ado, here are the end products:

1. Thief

Compared to the first draft, I made the letters three-dimensional to give more depth and added some sort of “action” to emphasize the idea of “stealing” something. I used clipping mask to make the surroundings all black to give the idea of thieves being caught in action by a flashlight.

 

Printed version

Although it’s not very obvious, the color of the hole on the wall is different from the printed version, and the opacity of the shadow is not shown. (To be fair, I put 95% opacity so maybe that’s why it turned out really close.)

 

2. Gamer

To emphasize the idea of gaming, I added the start button, the mouse, and a character (to make it look like the starting of a game). I didn’t want to add too many clouds since I thought it would be too messy, but without clouds it was too plain so I just added a few. As for the character, I made it up myself to represent “me”.

 

Printed version

 

3. Barista

Making the latte art is so. Hard. I played around with the effects and I think this quite resembles real latte art, although I have to admit the letters are not very obvious. I added coffee beans to emphasize the “coffee” idea, and I also added a wood grain texture at the back. At first I just wanted to trace a ready image of wood grain texture but apparently they’re pretty simple to make, so I just tried although it may not be THAT good.

 

Printed version

 

The printed image is… really bad. You can’t see anything in the background at all; it just looks like a dark brown background.

 

Zoom in to the background and coffee beans

 

It’s very different from the image I created. I tried re-printing it but the result is more or less the same.

 

4. Watchmaker

For this one, I tried to find a sort of vintage font and traced it. After that it’s just creating some different gears and putting things together. It was pretty simple actually. I chose not to add colors to emphasize the “mechanical” feel. There’s also some contrast between the letter V, which contained a wrist watch, and the letter J, which resembles a pocket watch. Both of them are watches so they still fall under the watchmaker’s expertise, but they sort of represent “modern” watch and “vintage” watch so I want to put them both.

 

Printed version

 

Some shades didn’t turn out exactly right (like the chains) but it’s still okay.

Reflection

I’m the type of person who usually jumps into things before thoroughly thinking about it first (doing before thinking), that’s why I tend to go backwards when generating ideas but I realized I have to redo a lot of steps that way and it’s not very efficient.

As for techniques, I really learned a lot about digital drawing. I realized that I encountered a lot of problems because I didn’t arrange my layers nicely. Another point: I need to be tidier while working.

Lastly: I shouldn’t print in north spine again.

The four jobs that I (tentatively) chose are barista, gamer, thief, and electrician.

 

Initial Sketches

Those are two of my earliest sketches. As you can see, they’re heavily image-driven; so I scrapped all of them off.

I made other sketches, but this time they’re too simple (see below). But somehow I have a better view of what my idea has to be; they have to be manipulated to show the techniques, but they can’t be too picture-driven as it will take the attention away from the letters.

 

 

Final Sketches

1. Barista

Keywords: coffee, latte art, coffee cups, steam, coffee beans, coffee grinder, cafe (usually associated with wood / warm colors)

I intentionally made the latte art as simple as I could because I wanted the attention to be purely on the letters, but then it looked pretty boring and didn’t really reflect latte “art”, so I will edit the latte art. I was thinking of using a wood-colored background and add some shadow, so maybe I will try it out to see if it’s too much.

 

2. Gamer

Keywords: characters, start / play button, consoles, pixels

I always associate “games” with “pixels” since it reminds me of the earlier games (actually I get the inspiration from Mario Bros), so I really, really want to do pixel art for this idea. It took me pretty long but I managed to make this (thank goodness).

However just from the interface, you can’t really tell of the “gamer” idea. It can be game designer or developer as well. So I plan to add a character and a “start” button underneath to emphasize the idea that someone is playing.

 

3. Thief

Keywords: illegal, getting caught, shady / dark atmosphere, guns, stolen goods (money), mafia, action

I know it’s very hard to tell that it’s criminal. It kind of looks like magicians performing onstage.

My idea is to make it look like they “get caught” (hence, the spotlight) when doing something bad. I used the striped pattern to replicate the image of a prisoner (which is related to something illegal), but I think the idea is not conveyed very well and it can be a lot of things instead (people may see criminal, or prisoner, or magician probably). So I need to edit it to make it more specific.

 

4. Electrician

Keywords: light, circuits, battery, electricity, switch, cables, transformers, light bulb, LED, resistor

To be honest, that is a bad one.

I wanted to make out the letters using cables, but they didn’t turn out nice so I added the “glow” effect to make them like neon lights instead, but now the whole thing didn’t look like electrician at all. This one needs a lot of changes.

 

Takeaways

For most of my sketches, you can’t really tell what the exact occupation is, although you can guess something close to it. So the problem is I don’t make the pictures specific enough; I’ll have to research more about symbolism and semiotics related to the occupations I want to use.

I’ve never been very good at digital art (actually, I just learned Illustrator recently) so this is a challenge as well as a good learning experience for me. I learned more about Illustrator such as how to make glow effects, how to make clipping mask, how to unite two different things, etc. However due to this lack of knowledge I’m doing this project slower, as when there are things I don’t know how to do effectively, I still try to make them–and they either turn out bad or I wasted a lot of time doing them… or both. So I’ll have to do more research and learning about this platform I’m using as well.

 

UPDATE!

After I wasted a lot of my sleeping time to think, I decided to change a few ideas of mine.

For thief, I fixed it so it looked more like “in action” by adding gold coins and a hole on the brick wall, suggesting that they’re in the middle of stealing.

Gamer and barista will stay the same; the only difference is that I’m adding background to both of them.

For barista, the latte art will be much, much softer than my process illustration since after I did some research, latte art doesn’t really have sharp edges.

 

My reference picture [taken from https://makezine.com/2016/01/03/skill-builder-steam-milk/]

I also made the art more “fancy” and although (to me) it sort of takes the attention away from the letter, I think the letters are still recognizable so it should be fine.

As for the electrician, I think I’m completely scrapping the idea. I realized that from the beginning I was going backwards with the electrician job; I thought of what to make first rather than what job I want to convey, which makes me confused in the end. Because of that I couldn’t make good progress with my electrician, so I decided to just stop and start a new one. It’s probably a bit late, but I think I could manage it since now I have better idea on what to create. So,

4. Watchmaker

[from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/300896818830991738/?lp=true]

My idea is to simply put the letters of my name and fill in the letters with the gears of a watch. I won’t use much colors, probably just black and white and some grey.

I’m thinking of making one of the letters look like a pocket watch.

 

I just realized that all my four jobs have different style (kind of) of illustrations. I don’t know whether it is a good thing because it can mean that I’m flexible, but that can also show that I haven’t found my own style yet. That’s true, though–I haven’t really had my own style yet, so I think this is a good opportunity too to explore various styles for me.

For this final project, I think I have a lot of difficulties trying to figure out what style I should go for. There are so many choices, but of course I have to choose rationally, considering the amount of time I have and my skills as well.

Research: Style

As for the style, at first I was thinking of doing some “watercolor”-ish style because I like soft colors and lines, but then I realized that it might be difficult (especially since I don’t really use watercolor).

Image result for watercolor styles

Something like this. [taken from https://watercolorblast.wordpress.com/styles-of-rapid-watercolor-sketch/]

 

So I turned to other simpler styles and from Instagram, I found some comic artists whose style I really enjoy because they’re simple, yet they can convey the intended messages effectively. Here are some of my references;

 

Image result for dorrismccomics

instagram.com/dorrismccomics (Artist: Alex Norris)

 

Image result for thesquarecomics

instagram.com/thesquarecomics (Artist: Alvin Juano)

 

Image result for safely endangered comic

instagram.com/safely_endangered (Artist: Chris McCoy)

 

In general, the three artists use thick outlines, simple art style, and bright colors. I’ll need some time, but I think I can make something with that style using Adobe Illustrator.

I’m also thinking of combining “realistic” photos and plain digital color background. That idea is inspired by movies that mix animation and real actors in one frame, like Space Jam.

 

Image result for space jam

A scene from the movie Space Jam (1996)

 

Research: Color

I found a website where they provide color palettes to download, and from there I found a lot of analogous color palettes that I think can work, like this one:

Image result for analogous color palettes

[taken from http://www.color-hex.com/color-palettes/?keyword=analogous]

But I will look at other types of color palettes as well, like the triadic color scheme, for example. I’ll see which one can bring out my ideas best.
Image result for triadic color palettes

[taken from https://shannon-brinkley.com/blogs/shannon-brinkley-studio-1/color-confidence-for-quilters-part-4-triadic-color-palettes]

 

Experiment

Here are my concepts.

 

In the end, since I couldn’t decide on one style, I ended up using four different styles.

The first one I did is just a combination of various things, such as colored pencil and copic marker.

 

Colored pencil, pen, and marker

 

I wanted it to have a cartoon-ish, childish look. I also didn’t give an outline because I think it will look less cute if I did. I used the markers only for the important figures, such as the cheese, the mouse, and the cross. For the wings, I used gold pen (which I used for the “shiny” effects as well). I used minimal coloring for the background because I feel that too much color would distract viewers from the actual point.

For the second one, I used Photoshop to merge pictures.

 

Photoshop trial

 

I showed that one to my friend and he said that my “contemporary art is on point”. I feel like the end result is interesting, although it is plainer than I expected. I chose purple background to complement the yellow banana.

The third style that I tried is watercolor.

 

Watercolor experiment

End results (mirrored image)

 

They actually turned out better than I expected. I never really tried watercolor before, so I watched a couple of YouTube videos before trying it out. It was messy and there was some smudges, but overall, I actually love the end result. I think I would do more watercolor in the future. I especially like how the background turned out. I used mainly calm colors like green and blue, which made the color black stood out even more.

Lastly, I used Illustrator.

 

Illustrator trial

 

This is my first time actually using Adobe Illustrator, so I needed a really long time just to create those three panels. I used blue elephant because blue is my favorite color, and pale blue background to emphasize the idea of “blending in”. The sofa and floor are orange and yellow to complement the blue.

 

All in all, I actually enjoy making all of those. Although they take a lot of time to create, I had fun experimenting with different tools and styles. I just hope they turn out well in the end.