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.
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.
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.
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 :’)
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.
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.
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:
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!