Ideation

Initially, I wanted to do illustrations inspired by songs. However the idea wasn’t very concrete, and the visuals would be all over the place. So I thought about including a narrative. In the end, I decided to do an illustration series depicting snapshots of a dog’s life/emotion, which is inspired by my friend’s pet that recently died. I wanted to portray moments of an animal’s life and its emotions felt in different situations.

The emotions that I picked are happiness, saddness, fear and surprise.

I started off by doing sketches of whatever imagery that came to mind relating to the 4 emotions.

Mood boards / references

I researched into the relation between colours and emotions, then created mood boards to guide my illustrations. Surprise was the most difficult emotion to give a specific colour. I decided to use pink in the end, because I interpret it as a positive child-like emotion.

Yellow — Associated with happiness, energy and warmth.

Blue — Coldness, sadness.

Pink — Cheery, surprise.

Purple — Fear, mystery.

 

Final work

The illustrations express human emotions portrayed by a non-human character— a dog. Other than colour choice, I took composition, facial expressions and gestures into consideration.

For happiness, I opted for a low angle camera view slanting upwards to give the impression of energy and cheerfulness. I made sure that the gestures convey the emotion even without the aid of facial expression as it is a long shot.

 

My interpretation of surprise in this illustration resembles a child-like surprise. I portray the energy of the emotion through the motion blur of the butterflies.

 

 

Fear is a very overwelming emotion, which is why I included harsh lighting in the illustration. The light creates a drama — a reflection of the dog’s emotions — and at the same time frames the characters.

 

 

Here, I wanted to suggest that the dog was either abandoned, or lost. I use a train going away into the distance as a visual representation of abandonment. Rain is another visual cue for sadness. I attempted to convey sadness without showing the facial expression of the dog.