2D Assignment 3: Ego – Final

I think that it has not quite hit me yet that this is my last submission and that we are at the end of our first semester in university. 

Overview

This project has been an interesting one because it makes one reflect on themselves: what makes them who they are, what makes them unique, how do people perceive them. The list of question goes on. While I may perceive myself as reserved and timid and therefore represent myself as a rabbit, my friends see the rabbit and link it to me being a generally gentle person but when forced to fight for what I want or to protect the things I cherish, I will fight and fiercely so. Through this assignment, we get to explore our own perceptions of ourselves as well as the perceptions that others have of us and from there learn to communicate these perceptions through visuals: the subject matter in the illustrations, the colours used etc. It’s been an exciting few weeks bugging my friends with questions to try to figure out their perception of me and doing quite a bit of self-reflection to try to figure myself out as a person. 

This module has been really interesting and honestly, it is my favourite because it is most similar to graphic design. To Shirley, it has been a fun semester with you. Thank you so much for your guidance this entire semester and omigosh, I hope to take typography under you in year 2 woohoo.
Peace out. 

2D Assignment 3: Ego – Process

I roughly know what kind of art style I am going for, let’s now talk about the subject of my illustrations as well as the colour scheme. 

Out of all the illustrators mentioned in my previous post, I find that my current style of (attempting to) illustrate matches Elda Broglio’s in her series The Rest. I like how the bodies are not exactly rendered realistically and are round, lending it a very soft edge. I decided that I wanted to go with her particular art style: the usage of blobs of colours that come together to form a coherent picture. So no usage of outlines woohoo. 

One of my attempts at making vector illustrations, done as part of the 100 days challenge on Instagram

I knew in my heart I wanted to include rabbits somewhere for one of the squares. I have always liked animals, rabbits included, and especially so now because I am a proud owner of a (rather dumb but adorable) rabbit. In any case, this was validated when during consults when Shirley asked my fellow consultation groupmates what animal they think could represent me and they all answered rabbits 😀

In a sense, I do think that rabbits are a suitable representation of a particular aspect of my personality. I am usually the reserved and shy one in the group, especially so when I have to face a group of strangers, which then my awkwardness comes out full force. Which is why for the first row, my idea was to showcase that. Me in my bunny form, goes to a party and instantly becomes an awkward potato. 

Me + Party = Awkward Potato

Initially I wanted to include like a crying face for the potato, to further show my misery at being stuck in an awkward situation. However, I decided to do away with the face because I was kind of afraid people might not get that I was trying to depict a potato in the last frame. 

Me+Navigating=Lost

I am terrible with directions and I feel the need to tell everyone that. Just in case, y’know, I have to meet you and I am awfully late because I get lost :’)
Why the coffee? I have absolutely no idea. My friends in the consultation group said that I could be represented by coffee because they always see me drinking coffee and/or buying coffee. Or it could also be because I am dark and bitter just like coffee HAHAHAHA okies I hope not :’) I do admit to drinking too much coffee for my own good so I guess coffee it is. Since I am not exactly sure how to explain how or why the coffee represents me, I guess I could control what kind of container the coffee came in. I am a little old-skool at heart so I decided to draw the coffee as coming in those old-school plastic takeaway bags from the coffee shops. The navigation portion is pretty self-explanatory. The last square is the one that may need a little bit of explanation. The brown splotches are actually coffee stains and represent my trail. So basically while trying to navigate from Point A to Point B, I end up going all over the place and even off the map in the end, signifying me getting hopelessly lost and wandering to god knows where else instead of Point B :’)

Me+Swearing=ROFL

Mushroom popped up as another suggestion from my friends. I have no idea why. Maybe because of my bangs??? In any case, this is my favourite out of all of the sequences because I basically YOLO-ed and used the pen tool to freehand instead of using a combination of shapes and pathfinder tool. And I really like the colour scheme as well so yeah 🙂 ALSO, this sequence describes one of the most retarded habits I have. Whenever I hear people cursing, especially so in dialect or in other languages other than English, I have this uncontrollable urge to laugh. And this is terrible because it results in me laughing at some of the most inappropriate times. As we were not allowed to use words I decided to go ahead to use symbols to represent the cursing. In the last frame, I was trying to depict mushroom form me on the floor, laughing till tears came out, which is a pretty common sight if you hang out with me long enough. I have a pretty crap sense of humour which means I laugh at almost any and everything.

Me+Knitting=Disaster

Once again, I have no idea why I am a butterfly. WHY FRIENDS WHY? EXPLAIN YOURSELVES????
So yeah. I did mention earlier that I am a little old-skool. To some of my friends, I am not merely “old-skool”, I am practically a granny in my own right. An ideal Friday night would be me curled up in my (non-existent) rocking chair, reading a book with chill music in the background or maybe catching up on my favourite tv series. This, in addition to my liking of music from the 70s and 80s and my appreciation for old-fashioned handicraft like cross-stitching, embroidery and crocheting does not really help my case. BUT, the one granny-like thing that I cannot really do is knitting. So yeah. Pretty self-explanatory as it is. I attempt to knit, I make a huge mess 🙂 That is always the case when I try something new but that does not really stop me woohoo. Maybe some other day I will give knitting a try again. 

An overview

Now let’s talk about colours.
For the backgrounds for all the sequences, I went with a monochromatic colour scheme, with all of them being some variation of blue. This was because I wanted to ensure that the entire A0 poster would still look cohesive. Blue and green happen to be my favourite colours and when I asked my friends for colours to describe me, a lot of them said blue, green or brown. Which is why these colours are used in the illustrations. See below for the colour chart for the illustrations:

Colour Breakdown

The colours used are mainly muted but with a couple of bright colours thrown into the mix. This, I feel, accurately portrays how I am as a person. I am generally quiet but when I am with my friends or just people that I am comfortable or can click with, I become loud, sometimes maybe even teetering on the edge of obnoxious.

And this concludes my thought process on this assignment. For my reflection, please head on over to the final posting! 

2D Assignment 3: Ego – Let the research begin!

WE FINALLY GET TO WORK WITH COLOUR???

And I just figured out how to change the font on OSS. Good job Louisa. After 13 weeks of school and only now you find out you are able to change the font. Still not able to change the really wide leading though hmm. 

In any case, let’s talk about the research done for Assignment 3: Ego!
I was quite excited to start on this project because it seemed like such an interesting project. And finally, we have to use colour in this project, which makes it both easier and a little bit tougher at the same time. This assignment started off with a little bit of self-reflection: What could I possibly use to represent myself? Then I went on to think about the colours I could potentially use to further emphasise my point. More about the thought process on that in my process posting. For this research posting, I will be talking about my adventures on Pinterest. 

Ah Pinterest, how easy it is for one to get lost in the wormhole that is this community-based platform. I started off my research process by going on to find the type of illustration style I would like to adopt for this assignment. I know that I am not able to produce very realistic drawings or illustrations. I tend to go for flat vectors: simple and minimal, bordering on the edge of being too simple and minimalistic. I wanted to go for something with very simple lines but with textures to make it more interesting. Or since we were able to use colours this time around, maybe playing around with different coloured lines. Below are some of the inspiration I found off Pinterest.

http://nimuradaisuke.tumblr.com/post/114382237058/lovers-hymn-2

http://nimuradaisuke.tumblr.com/post/95748917948/neck-n-neck

http://nimuradaisuke.tumblr.com/post/71783616647/あけましておめでとうございます-2014-①

The above illustrations is from Japanese illustrator Nimura Daisuke. I like the fact that his illustrations are clean and minimal yet have so much character to them. #goals
His illustrations uses a limited colour palette, usually sticking to mainly black and white or at most, two to three colours. This is something I can think about and could possibly try to apply in this assignment. As someone once mentioned to me, it is always easier when you are given complete creative freedom to do whatever you want. However, true creativity is when you are given a set of restrictions and yet be able to find a way to create something that fits or even go beyond the client’s expectations and satisfy you as a creative individual at the same time. Or something like that. [Shoutout to Ms Eve Loh at this point, thank you for giving us the opportunity to go to DDB for your module. It was really fun and I really did learnt a lot from all the mentors that you had assigned to us but the McDonald’s assignments kind of scarred me for life :’)]

 

https://dribbble.com/shots/2987172-Our-Team. Illustration done by Alberto Saenz, Art director and Animator based in Mexico City.

An example of what I meant when I mentioned the use of coloured lines to introduce colour into the illustrations. Once again, the illustrations are not the most detailed but each illustration captures the essence of each of the people he was illustrating. The colours that he used is interesting as well, with the red contrasting with the green but both colours working well together with the blue. 

“The warmth of my body”, a part of The Rest series by Elda Broglio

Her illustrations in this series is beautiful. Especially so in this particular illustration. I love the minimal use of lines and just how she uses colours and textures to differentiate the different objects in the piece. 

Current state of my inspiration board on Illustrator

There are so many other illustrators that I really admire but for now, these 3 works (or technically 2 works and 1 illustrator) are the ones that I feel the most inspired by for this particular assignment. It is time to move on to the drawing of my illustrations woohoo.