The next thing on the list of deliverables once the banners went up for was to design a horizontal digital composition for the Media Art Nexus at North Spine!! For those who had abstract/paint-looking banner designs were abstract, it was easier for them to come up with their compositions for the media wall – Simply just by rotating their banner design to a horizontal layout.

On the other hand, it was quite a struggle for mine as I was working with a really vertical design composition initially. But I eventually figured my composition layout eventually so all’s good 🙂

Keeping the consistency of my vertical banner design with this horizontal digital composition, the central motif remains as the One-Eyed Goblin with the other Food Monsters motifs flanking its sides. The composition I went for took on an almost symmetrical look and it was a rather spontaneous decision. For the arrangement and placement of these motifs. With the most bit being just a reflected side of the other thus the symmetry. The organic wavy linework in the background that mimics the noodle strands of the Ramyeon (Korean instant noodles) similarly suggest and provide movement and flow in this composition while somewhat creating a cohesive, connected composition altogether.  The composition for this turned out unexpectedly well and I was satisfied with it! 🙂 For the colours, I kept it exactly the same with the banner’s for consistency.

Version 1 (used for the preview)

The week after in-class viewing of these compositions for the Media Art Nexus, we head down to the actual place for the preview of it on the actual screens and below was how it looked like: BAM, another surprise!! I guess there’s always this wow factor when your work gets blown up and viewed across various types of medium. On the LED screen it was really another kind of beauty with all that illumination :’)

The only qualm that I had when the preview for my composition came up on the screen was that compared to others, mine came out slightly dull. The same problem I had for my banner composition initially during test prints. Hence I went with increasing its saturation and contrast just like what I did for my banner eventually! Hope it turns out better!!

Version 2 (with increased brightness and saturation)

 

 

After an insane but exciting four months working on this Dokkaebi design, the time has finally come for it to be printed into a banner and displayed for the annual end of semester showcase!! Here’s a breakdown of the process leading up to exhibition day starting with the printing process:

Time to print our banners and I couldn’t be more thankful to have paired up with Yi Ling as my printing partner! It was such a sight seeing the banner slowly coming to “life” bit by bit from the printer and it was HUGE. We were obviously really excited but unfortunately met with printing mishaps – The colour of our banner didn’t turn out like we wanted it to / as seen in our test prints a week earlier. Turned out the printer had colour calibration problems but luckily we could reprint our banners! Below, pictures of behind-the-scenes to getting the banner up. We had to trim the edges on our own and surprisingly Yi Ling and I complemented each other’s cutting styles well haha. One more reckless and one slightly way too OCD so eventually we balanced out our styles by trimming each other’s banner and eventually working together on trimming each side of one banner simultaneously.

Thanks for a fun printing experience, partner-in-crime 😉

 

Below was the disparity in the banner colours from the first print vs the second. The very first print that we did when my colours came out wrong, the background became more dark navy rather than a teal colour and the motifs came out very neon. As quoted by some of my peers “the food looks uncooked”  haha (as I was working with motifs that were created based on Korean food)

Showed Ina the banner of the first round of printing and surprisingly she was okay with it! However I would’ve liked the colour saturation of several motifs to come out more saturated as intended especially for the One-Eyed Goblin as the intention was to have it be like the ‘central figure/motif’ of the banner thus we concluded that a reprint should be done and YES!!! IT WAS SO MUCH BETTER THE SECOND TIME ROUND. Both of our banners (Yi Ling’s and mine) turned out GREAT 😀

 

More cutting again, but this time round with the better final banners!


Set-up Day

The following week was set-up day; super exciting times. We laid out our test prints in class first to get a sense of which banner should go where for the exhibition set-up. But at the end of the day I really think that no matter how the banners were arranged, all turned out really pretty and complemented each other’s so well!!

More documentation to come in the next post!

Yes progress! Moving on, more about the banner layout. As mentioned previously, I wanted to have a central one-eyed goblin figure in the largest scale whilst the rest of the background be just repeated motifs of the various Korean food monsters and food randomly placed around the central goblin motif. I went ahead with this arrangement in mind and surprisingly it was turning out well until… consultations/peer review week happened before recess break. Ina gave feedback on how the inverted goblin motif at the bottom came off as a little distracting and confusing, that I could perhaps do something about it:

Suggestion by my peers was to have it tilted a little/change its colour/add a bit more elements to it to distinguish the motif from the one above  so that the idea of having a central motif is still shown. Those were really valuable feedback!! In the end I went ahead with just having one of the one-eyed goblin motif placed in the centre and upped its scale to further bring out the idea as seen in the following images in the media gallery below.

Another issue that came about for the banner was that since it was rather carefully planned (in terms of which motif should be placed where) the remaining fillers for the background proved to be a problem as I did not know what else to add. To which Ina suggested that I could try overlapping my layers to see if I could figure out a way to have a more integrated background on the whole rather than just following my initial idea of having the bowl of noodles joined to the goblin and it’s noodles spilling out to just flow everywhere across the banner; the wavy organic lines of the noodle spilling about I felt would help create a feel of movement throughout the banner as well rather than it looking too stiff and rigid.

Here are two variations I came up with – One with more of the noodle waves as the fillers and one with less. Eventually I went ahead with the one with less noodle waves (right image) as fillers as I found the one with more (left image) to be more messy:

Subsequently, I played around with the colours of the background. To give it a background little dimension I added a filter/texture of sorts:

 

 


FINAL CHOSEN BANNER LAYOUT

Below is the final composition and background colour that i went for reason being that I felt the dark teal background colour acts as a good contrast to the pastel-coloured motifs in the banner composition. The dark blue background came out way too contrasted, the teal way too subtle. I stuck with blue hues for as the background as I somehow felt it was a cool colour that complemented the vibrant pastel-coloured motifs.

Also, rather than having the organic waves of the noodle fill the background and make it look messy and distracting, I opted to use the egg bread motif  instead as fillers rotated and scaled in various angles and sizes which I think worked out better:

Now to bring the file over to Illustrator, vectorise and refine it so that resolution and file size for printing wouldn’t be a problem! But if all else fails… I suppose the Photoshop file still works as all these motifs were kept as its original quality with no merging of layers/flattening of image. We shall see! Finally, I’m back on track 🙂