Patterns: Motif Sketching and Illustrating

The next step in our pattern development was to sketch and doodle ideas to create possible designs, motifs or illustrations to put into our banner. I was really inspired by the colourful illustrative style by Luan Brombim and wanted to do something slightly similar in terms of using bold outlines, bright colours and very wacky imagery.

 

Work by Luan Brombim

 

A little recap of the previous sketches that I did while exploring the theme in the initial stages:

Initial mindmapping sketches

 

After this I tried exploring the style I wanted to incorporate into my design and drew a random weird creepy thing:

Illustration style testing

 

I decided to exaggerate and make things more wacky and crazy after this. Here goes.

Following my chosen theme of Teen Spirit, I started exploring possible characters that could go into my design, characters that were inspired by the millennial generation. I focused a little more on the face and head to represent their personas, adding props to their look to further emphasize the character’s nature. Here are some possible characters:

 

The Selfie Monster

The selfie Monster is everything narcissistic about the kids these days who can’t seem to stop taking pictures of themselves. (Translation: “So chio!” means very pretty in local Millennial slang)

 

Social Media Influenza

A ghoulish take on the local Singapore YouTube scene, dominated by youths who are extremely opinionated and sometimes quite toxic. (After doing this I realised he actually looks like a local YouTuber… That very annoying one who keeps promoting a stupid game called Coin Master which keeps spamming everyone’s notifications with game requests. I shan’t name who…)

 

Make Up Zombie

Another take on the narcissistic nature of the youths. (I also realised she looks like the most famous blogger in Singapore, the one with sometimes very loud and controversial opinions that she’s not afraid at all to express online… Again, I shan’t name who…)

 

Smartphone Generation

Millennials are the smartphone generation, constantly browsing the interwebs and feeding off the latest memes, trends and slangs used online.

(Translation: “This is lit” just means that something is really good and is used to express satisfaction or a sense that something is impressive. “Bojio” is used when you realised the whole squad went out but didn’t invite you along so you get that FOMO feeling. Also, squad means group of friends, your gang. FOMO stands for “Fear of Missing Out”. Damn, we really do have a lot of weird lingo. Who comes up with this shit haha)

 

Talking Shade

A little more wordy but can be read up close on the banner if I really decide to add words in the end (probably not). This just represents the constant gossiping we love to do and the content of our conversations always seem so shallow.

 

After exploring the “heads” and possible characters I doodled some more and see how I could play around with the idea of using them and incorporating a the 7th month feel as they are supposed to be dead after all. But at this point, it’s just experimenting and playing around with the style still.

 

 

I also tried playing with some rough compositions to get a little bit of how the feeling of designing on a narrow space would feel like (of course this is not to scale). Each “head” in each of the compositions is just a rough placing of the personas and characters that I would be illustrating and putting inside.

 

That’s all for now! I will be continuing this exploration some more and I’ll be seeing which direction these monsters take me in my work eventually 🙂

Leave a Reply

Skip to toolbar