stage 1: mood board

I envisioned the final outcome to focus on landscape and be heavy on details. I wanted to attempt illustrating from an isometric perspective so that the elements can be seen with more depth and angles.

stage 2: brainstorm + experimentation

A brain fart of the type of composition and elements I’d want for my panels. My initial idea was to have “S H” as a central focal point in all my panels.

I also had another idea of arranging the letters of my name in braille, represented on the employees in each of my occupations. Coincidentally, my braille name also had the same number of characters as “hello my name is”, which opens up a lot of possibilities for exploration as well.

stage 3: composition

Something was lacking about the composition in my previous ideas. When I compared them with the artist references in my mood board, I figured it could be the lack of layers and how rigid my elements were placed. To fix that, I felt that my composition needed to be more like a hamburger, having many layers and elements overlap each other.

stage 4: line work

stage 5: colouring

I thought about how to make sure the letter forms could be seen clearly. Would it be clearer to group the colours by “SIHUI” or by individual alphabets e.g. SSS, III, HHH, etc. In the end, I decided to go with setting 3 different colour schemes for the 3 vertical columns of “SIHUI”.

Using too many colours would make it hard to see the letter forms. Using only one colour would be too boring and flat. So I decided to do pair 3 different sets of colours.

Touching up the artwork in the taxi on the way to crit HAHA. These highlighters are brand new but they’re already on the brink of running out of ink D: