symbolism – K I M .

Ego: Part III (Final)

And so it begins. In each series of panels, I actively varied the composition of each frame such that there is a fair amount of variety in wideness of the shots – cropped, wide, wider and long shots – to engage the viewer and to create a sense of dynamism in each story.

Choice of colour palette:

Primarily neutral greys and minty blue – naturalistic colours used to depict ‘city life’, convey the idea of a concrete jungle.

Pops of red and yellow for emphasis and visual interest. There is an attempt to subtly include triadic red, yellow and blue.

‘Tis me trying to find Mount Fuji in the city.

Centrally composed with a somewhat symmetrical composition to bring emphasis on the main character – me. Although there is quite a crowd in the composition, the attention is clearly on the central character as all the other faces are blank, and their bodies face away from the viewer.

The composition of figures is intentionally kept to the bottom third to emphasise the mass of tall buildings in the background – tall, foreboding, looming, like a maze.

‘Tis me travelling.

Colours here are kept to the object’s natural colours – the grey of the MRT, the blue of the character’s clothing, and the yellow caution lines between the gaps which add a nice contrasting pop of colour to the otherwise dull colour palette.

‘Tis me very lost.

Colour choices are on the neutral side here, to bring emphasis to the Google Map pin which is in a striking red.

Going for a long shot – which shows the character interacting with the larger environment. Here, I am hopelessly lost and ended up walking towards the maze even though my intended destination is right behind me.

Compositionally, the maze is kept to the bottom third and more space is given to the empty space in order to emphasise how easy it is to get the red-marked destination, yet I am carelessly walking in the opposite direction towards the maze.

Choice of colour palette:

I began with yellow and expanded from there to get analogous hues of red and maroon – naturalistic colours for the bee and beehive. As the narrative is centered upon a late-night environment, the instinctive colour choice would be navy or dark blue to depict a darker environment. However, I wanted to take the opportunity to experiment with a colour palette that I was uncomfortable with – and so chose purple as it was the complementary colour of yellow, which fits well too in depicting the dark environment.

(Purple is such a difficult colour to work with)

‘Tis me, in a bee costume.

Compositionally, I illustrated the room such that the corner of the room is positioned where the right-third and bottom-third of the frame meets, in order to create an asymmetry in the composition, according to the rule of thirds. The character, me, is also positioned near this convergence of lines in order for the lines to draw the viewer’s eye to the central character.

I also created a shelf out of the hexagonal beehive structure. ~~Much efforts very prouds.~~

‘Tis me working under the moonlight with my 8 cups of coffee

Bringing back the hexagonal frame to draw attention to the centre of the composition, this time, to the moon and me in the bee costume. There is some indication of depth via the use of one point perspective (table, chair and window frame receding to the vanishing point).

My skin starts turning green – a sleep deprived induced pallour.

‘Tis me, a beautiful creature of the night

Green swollen face, food and coffee stains, intense acne and 5 o’clock shadow. Get some sleep kids. ~~Or just don’t come to ADM.~~

Choice of colour palette:

I went for a palette that indicated contrasts in temperature in the environment, and I found that the contrast between earthy warm colours, and a lighter blue allowed me to do that. The environment, here, is warm and sunny, and so I actively employed the use of earth tones such as oranges, browns and greens to convey this idea. As I wanted to contrast warm with cold (literal temperature), I went for a soft blue, which is the popularized colour for ice, water and snow.

‘Tis me shivering on a hot sunny day

Colour-wise, there is a conscious decision to contrast warm and cold (refer to above). Even the smaller details like the shadow help to bring across the idea of cold – my shadow made blue.

Compositionally, I referenced Tania Yakunova’s Ecopark illustrations (see previous post) to create depth in composition. This was achieved through sizing and strategic placement of elements in the composition to make things seem closer and/or further away from us.

‘Tis the wind doing what wind does

A contrast again of blue against warm yellow. This time, the blue is rendered with a gradient that is parallel to the axis of the lines indicating wind (rather than a solid block of colour). I did this to imply a sense of movement and speed of the wind.

‘Tis me, frozen into an iceberg, a tourist attraction

Again, the rule of thirds is used consciously here and the main focus (me, the iceberg) is placed at the top right third of the composition. More figures are also densely placed around the ice block to draw more attention to it.

Isometric people resource pack by Gleb Tagirov: [click!]

Choice of colour palette:

There is not too much intent in the choice of colour here, mostly naturalistic colours are used. The main character’s clothing follows the last few panels – mint blue. And the secondary character is clothed in blue as well to create a sense of harmony between the two characters.

Other than that, the food and everything else is kept to reddish and mustard tones as these are the natural colours of the food depicted. The only purposeful choice of colour here, really, is the background. As the central theme of this story is food, I used red to tie each frame together as red is scientifically proven to induce hunger and increase appetite (which is why many fast food chains use red in their branding).

‘Tis me, eating very little compared to other people

Contrast between what is on their plates – a whole mountain of food + a small anchovy. Compositionally, the table is kept to the bottom third and the two figures divide the vertical space into thirds.

‘Tis the anchovy on my plate

There is an intentional contrast between the size of the plate and what is on the food. A lot of white space is left around the small anchovy to emphasise its small size.

‘Tis me and another with full bellies

A somewhat symmetrical composition of both characters with bloated bellies. Though one is full from a large amount of food, and the other with just a small anchovy.

I don’t really have any big takeaways from this project. Just a small feeling of happiness with how everything turned out and that I got the chance to illustrate like this again (not been illustrating like this for a long time).

3 more days till a final breather. Almost there.

Ego: Part I

As a designer, it is important to understand the importance
of colours in design. In particular, an understanding of colour harmonies allow designers to visually manipulate the aesthetics to produce the desired outcome.

As there is a great emphasis on colour for this project, I knew that the illustration style that I chose would need to play a big role in emphasising the colours used for each panel. As such, I chose to venture into the field of flat illustration – a popular illustration style with a heavy emphasis on shapes and solid colours.

To be more cognisant of my design and illustration process, I began by deconstructing the compositional and colour aspects of flat illustration designs by other illustrators:

2f1fdd24583343-56336a3821005 — Tom Haugomat for Protein Magazine

Interesting contrast of pink and turquoise – warm and cool. To pare it down to more recognisable colours, this could be interpreted as a red vs. green colour scheme – an opposition of complementary colours, where the green complement is used to add a touch of interest to shadowed forms.

tumblr_ntmkjqh59y1qhevr0o1_500-copy — Malika Favre for Financial Times

Interesting use again of complementary orange and blue – but to indicate a contrast in temperature. Blue is used for the external environment – indicates a lightness of being, of blue sky. Orange, here, suggests the filtering in of the sunlight – a warmth created from the light.

illustration-tom-haugomat-062 — Tom Haugomat Illustrations

Use of analogous hues of pinks and purples. Heavy emphasis on light here, weighty use of highlights and shadows to create depth and form.

655ec9da51edef3d6c94b9cf09b66643a — 1. Roman Dementev Vector Landscapes 2. Harry Nesbitt iOS Landscape Concept #3 3. Luking Illustration (Desert)

Comparing the use of colour palette across different illustrators that convey similar environmental atmospheres. Above, all 3 illustrations depict similar scenes of ‘heat’ and ‘hotness’, yet use vastly dissimilar colour palettes. No.2 and 3 emphasise on the use of analogous warm colours to depict warmth. Yet, No.1 uses a primarily cool palette, yet achieves the same effect of warmness – but it works, due to the compositional structure of the illustration. There is a dominant use of shadows in the illustration, which suggests a strong light source and suggests the presence of a warm sun, despite its use of a cooler palette.

d389d730178623-5616a5a44d4d5 — Tania Yakunova – EcoPark

A safe palette of analogous pinks and purples. What is even more striking in this illustration is the simple yet effective compositional choices. (see comments in photograph above).

Powerful compositional choices which I will actively use in my illustrations for this project.

Forrest Gump: Final

In this project, you are tasked to pick four movie quotes either from one movie or various movies that you have watched over the years. Your challenge is to create a visual narrative that expresses each quote using only symbols, pictograms, dingbats (ornaments), icons and engravings as your visual vocabulary.

I was pretty excited to start on this project, mostly because of how organic the brief is and its potential for personal input and interpretation. I started by compiling a list of quotes from movies that I enjoyed that could potentially be used for the project –

Originally, I wanted to have quotes from several genres of movies, but I found that the nature of the quotes would result in vastly different aesthetics across the 4 pieces. Therefore, I restricted myself to movies from the same director – my future husband Christopher Nolan. I am a huge fan of Nolan’s works, especially with how well he manipulates the element of time in each of his movies. And I love that every time the credits start rolling at the end of his films, I am left heart-pounding, skin tingling, wanting more. BUT enough of that. This isn’t a movie review.

We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. – Memento, 2000

In the movie, the protagonist Leonard Shelby suffers from anterograde amnesia, a disorder that prevents him from making new memories from the point that he contracts the disorder. Shelby then depends on written notes, polaroids and sometimes tattoos on his body to help him remember and generate a narrative of his own life, to give himself meaning.

The movie made me think about the idea of self-perception. Oftentimes, the way we think of ourselves may not tally with our actual state of being. Our perception is always distorted, depending on our emotional state at that point in time.

I began with exploring literal ideas of reflection and of course, the image of a person looking into a mirror came to mind.

However, this idea was immediately abandoned because I realized that a literal interpretation might not give the quote the depth that it needed. I then thought about other things with reflective qualities and came to the idea of puddles of water.

Instead of using human beings as the main subject matter of the piece, I wanted to use a rhinoceros and juxtapose it the element of wings. Rhinos are weighty, heavy creatures and one would never imagine them otherwise. Juxtaposing it with dragonfly’s wings and playing with the proportion introduces a new meaning to the rhino – airy fairy, head in the clouds, the rhino thinks dreams of dreams that could never be true. In the puddle, the rhino is reflected but intentionally cropped such that the wings do not appear in the puddle, reminding us that the rhino is, after all, a rhino and nothing more.

I then changed the wings to butterfly’s wings as I felt they were more eye-catching and I wanted to draw more attention to it. I also increased the contrast on the overall image to imitate chiaroscuro in order to bring a more dramatized energy to the overall piece.

At this point in time, I was rather stuck on what I should do with the background. I didn’t want it to be too attention-grabbing such that it would take away from the focus of the composition. I began to think about the original idea of using mirrors instead, and thought of how the mirrored rooms in circuses could also carry the same concept.

This is the final composition. Keeping the concept the same, the image of the rhino is reflected in the mirrors, but now it is more apparent that the butterfly wings have been left out intentionally, to evoke a surrealistic quality to the work.

Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space – Interstellar, 2014

From the get-go, I knew I wanted to show a contrast between the element of ‘love’ and the element of ‘time and space’. Visually, love was simple enough to portray – an image of a heart does the trick. However, to portray the idea of time and space on a still 2-dimensional image was a little more difficult. I went to look at how certain scenes in the movie sought to portray it and came across this:

In this scene where Cooper attempts and interdimensional handshake, the image is distorted to a high degree. In many films that depict time travel, the same imagery is also used. As such, I also wanted to attempt a level of distortion in my composition to bring out that idea.

To portray the idea of love, I firstly used the sparrow as the main subject matter. Unlike most animals, sparrows are monogamous and remain with their partners throughout their lives. I then distorted the image such that there would be 2 heads occupying the same body, signifying harmony and unity of two creatures. Lastly, the imagery of a heart is used to depict literal love, and this is made to stand out from the background with a negative space of a triangle, which is a shape that portrays stability.

To portray the idea of time and space, and our ‘not being able to perceive the dimensions of time and space’, I decided to distort the overall image of the birds and the clouds. I decided to use a more geometric kind of distortion (as opposed to the organic, fluid one used in the movie) because I wanted it to be as jarring as possible.

Somewhere in there I also inverted the tones on the clouds to add a more surrealistic feel to the composition.

After consultation with Shirley, she advised me to tone down the background because it was competing visually with the main subject matter and so I made it less dark.

Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange. – Inception, 2010

The main focus of this piece is subtle surrealistic elements, to portray the whole idea of ‘not realizing that something was actually strange’. After playing with animals in my previous compositions, I wanted to bring in people as the subject matter.

I first came up with this, introducing subtle strange elements like the repetition of the eyes, arms and legs. And also layering – notice how the woman is standing in front of the man, but also behind him (skirt, arms). I then wanted to incorporate the dream element, and so included the large eye in the sky. The eye and the barren landscape indicate a sense of being awake in an environment that we are not usually awake in – a dreamlike world.

However, I found that my composition was too static due to everything being centrally aligned. So I sought to make it more asymmetrical:

I tried this at first but this just made the eye look like it’s winking.

I then thought about adding another strange element to off-centre the composition. I chose the elephant because it is an animal that we associate with largeness, and instead made it to be smaller than the height of the man’s knee. Playing with proportions here add to the surrealistic element as well.

An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. – Inception, 2010

Two quotes from Inception, but that’s okay because it is an amazing movie.

I really love this quote because it speaks volumes about the way we as humans interpret information and the nature of which we receive information about the world around us. Oftentimes, we get ideas about things, but one must realize that our ideas are not always original. In the movie, ideas are artifically implanted into the minds of people via experts. In the real world, we subconsciously implant ideas into our own minds via what we see in our every day life. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always receiving information through out interactions with the world, and we are always subconsciously influenced by these ideas, whether we like to or not.

Instinctively, I went for the imagery of a chimpanzee because they are human-like, intelligent animals. But after playing with the composition for a while it didn’t really make sense to use a chimpanzee. Scrap that.

I then went literal with my interpretation (HIV virus texture) to see what I could get out of it, but that didn’t make sense either. Scrap that too.

Then I thought it all out properly and went back to my own interpretation of the quote – the idea of implanting ideas and memories into a person and came up with this:By the use of repetition, the group of men all have the same thought/idea (represented by a rubik’s cube) implanted into their minds. The large hand is made to be ambiguous. The identity of the hand is left unknown – could it be the hand of God? Could it be the hand of one of the men in the image? Either way, due to the intervention of this hand, all the men are thinking the same thing, a highly contagious idea.

Again, I found my old habits coming to play and my composition was too centrally composed. I consciously tried to break out of that by adjusting my elements:

In the end, I used the HIV virus texture as a background to give everything a little more context. And the hand has now moved to the edge of the composition to create asymmetry.

Overall, it was really fun interpreting the quotes into a visual composition, and I got to explore a different kind of aesthetic than I was used to. It was a little scary leaving aesthetic elements up to a google search, but the world wide web is such a big place that you can almost always get the picture you need.

For future generations that have to go through this project too, there is an open source photoshop action that turns your images into an ‘engraved’ image. Looks like this:

Available here

You’re welcome.

My Line is Emo

Final composition – more crowded, detailed pieces concentrated on one board & simpler, minimalist pieces on the other.

1 – Psychotic

Processed with VSCO with b1 preset — Mixture of block printing ink and white glue

Somehow, somewhen, the imagery of the Rorschach test has always been associated with issues related to the mind; of psychosis, of being unstable and unsound, so I experimented with the technique to create Psychosis. I like how it turned out in the end – circles of varying sizes juxtaposed against each other – there is a sort of movement that insinuates the spreading out of the blackness, that each circle will grow to consume the entire page, of madness, of psychosis.

Mixture of block printing ink and white glue is applied onto one side of a piece of paper

Paper is then folded to smear the paint and create a mirror image

Trying out the same effect on transparency – I actually quite like this too

2 – Gloom

I imagine Gloom as a storm cloud that hangs around a person and envelopes a person, contributing to their sadness. With this, I experimented with salt and ink to see the effect of dehydration.

3 – Arousal

Arousal is a sort of slow, fluid building of passion, that swirls then spreads; like warm tea in the tummy. I wanted to use this subtler piece, rather than a more intense kind of print (see below, art card) as I wanted to portray arousal as a more positive than a negative emotion.

After pulling away the paper, the foam creates a pretty interesting shape as well

4 – Agony

I picture Agony to be a swirling mass of intense pain; of grief. Unlike gloom, which still has a certain softness about it, agony is dirty, gritty and ugly. I used white glue as the vessel for this particular piece, and indian ink mixed with alcohol to create the gritty mixture (polar & non-polar mixtures create happy little accidents). I also tilted the surface of the table by just a tad, so that the slow movement of the glue towards one end could be captured – as of the swirling mass of grief was captured, frozen in time.

I actually really liked the circular composition in the last photo, but unfortunately, life throws you a project brief so you gotta follow that.

5 – Contentment

Puffiness represents the fullness of the heart; of tranquility. I also left a margin of negative space on the left-hand side and tapered the pattern towards the bottom of the strip to imply an outward motion, of flattening and tendency towards succumbing to gravity – absolute relenquishing of control; of feeling content.

6 – Saudade

Saudade is Portuguese for a sense of longing – specifically longing for a love that has been lost, a yearning that is underlined with grief and pain. Longing almost always evoke fluid, far reaching lines, as if hands grabbing for something. In Saudade, the lines and shakey, broken, and numerous in number to imply an unsteadiness of the heart. Shakey concentric circles also dominate the right side of the composition, to draw our attention to the centre of it all – where pain is most intense. There is a void of empty space – an emptiness that you feel (to have lost a love).

I chose white on black (as opposed to black on white) to dark the composition so as to imply a more negative overall image. In addition, I feel that pain is sometimes a selfish kind of thing too – you kind of block out everything around you, and only your pain matters, and only you matter.

7 – Bewilderment

Originally, I wanted to do a piece that represented “Unsteadiness” and in all sense of the word, I blindfolded myself and depended on another person to guide me as I created marks using my feet (by walking on paper). However, it didn’t turn out as well as I expected and the final print came out looking more steady than unsteady.

Final print looked very certain, confident

Therefore, I changed my approach and relinquished total control to the other person, and let the person guide me (this time, on my tippy toes to evoke more unsteadiness) and direct me in doing whatever he/she wanted me to. I was rather bewildered with Josiah’s commands – “And you shake it all about”, “Now do a twirl”, “Large, heavy steps” as he guided me in creating my print, but am very pleased with the result –

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Bewildered, relinquishing control of the medium to a 3rd party

Collections of close ups:

8 – Exhilaration

Exhilaration is the sort of excitement and joy that makes you want to dance; to spin, to whirl to feel the wind under your arms. I played with some mark making here, taking an inked string and spinning it around to see what marks it created on the paper.

9 – Disoriented

Disorientation is result of exhilaration – the result of dizziness. The concentric circles imply a sort of roundabout motion, and as they are spaced out, it is almost as if you are stumbling, and the variation of size suggests an ebb and flow of dizziness, as if the feeling changes in intensity as one stumbles.

10 – Darude

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Processed with VSCO with b1 preset — Needle, white thread

Spanish for – the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person. I think good art for me really impresses, be it aesthetically, conceptually or through the craftsmanship involved in creating a work. I’m almost always very taken by work that shows an immense about of tediousness and effort, but in a subtle, effortless manner (white on white).

11 – Longing

The kind of secret longing and desire that you feel for someone or something is one that is subtle and hidden (white on white). It is also soft and fluid, hence the organic lines that stretch outwards – reaching, longing, wanting.

12 – Drunk

Drunkenness comes with some sense disorientation as well, of staggering and stumbling and not being in control of your own movement, and ultimately losing all control and collapsing in a heap at the end of the path.

13 – Grouchiness

The most intense moment of grouchiness for me is when I’ve been sleep deprived and still awake at 4 in the morning. It’s really frustrating – especially when I’m trying to do work (when I need to do work) and there’s just a haze in front of my eyes, and there’s white noise buzzing in my head. But that’s the thing – it’s happening inside my head, and no one else will be able to see it. And vice versa – sometimes you can’t see that someone is sleep deprived.

14 – Wonder

Wonder plays on the sense of childhood curiosity and innocence, of purity. As such, I wanted to experiment with bubbles as a very delicate medium, to see the patterns created when the bubble lands on the paper and pops. Due to the soap and water mixture, the pattern imprinted on the paper captures nuanced swirls and makes the print look almost like a planet, which I really liked as well and plays to the idea of wonder – of the vastness of the universe, and things that are yet to be discovered.

15 – Aggravation

Aggravation doesn’t really come out of nowhere, I think. It has to build up from small intensities. It begins when small things start to frustrate you, irritation starts buzzing in your head, then the annoyance persists to become more and more intense, leading to angry, shakey, intense lines that almost represent a sort of “lashing out”, of irritation to the point of anger.

16 – Distracted

Happy little accidents. This piece was originally planned to be “Systematic” as I wanted to portray the sense of uniformity and systematicness that a sewing machine could create. However, as I was sewing, I realized that the bottom spool had run out of thread in the middle of it all, and as I was not paying attention, the main continued to run and the needle continued to oscillate without really sewing anything (just poking holes) (because there wasn’t enough thread loaded into the machine). The image itself does convey this concept very well, as we tend to be distracted in our work – while doing, we may stray into different strands of work, drift off, or even disappear altogether from what we were originally doing.

17 – Systematic

This reads “I am a product of the Singapore system” in braille, repeated many times. I wanted to create a tactile experience through this work, and so thought of poking holes into the paper – and, why not poke holes in a systematic way? I think the process too, of poking holes to create alphabets in a language you don’t understand – says something about mindlessly following the rules in a systematic way, without really knowing what it is you’re really doing.

18 – Zen

Zen has to do with inner peace amidst chaos – which, for me, was a very difficult to emotion to portray (I do not ever remember feeling zen). But what I imagine it to be, is to be strong and grounded, despite noise and disorder exists around you. As such, I wanted to create a contrast between marks – of strong, definite marks, contrasted with swift disorderly strokes and patterns (all while maintaining a clean background, to reduce the possibility of turning this into a more negative composition.

Exhausted. Finally done.

I think this project really challenged me to think beyond what I already know, and to break out of my comfort zone of trying to do too much too often – not every piece of work has to be defined by immense detail, effort and time. Sometimes, holding back and exerting control over your medium, over your own concepts and work could produce equally, if not more, powerful effects on the viewer. And that is what I strive for – to make art that makes one feel – and now, I know that intensity, immense =/= heart wrenching, soul touching art.

PEACE.

OUT.

TIME TO SLEEP.

4D: Photo Scavenger

“The Earth Observatory of Singapore has, therefore, two purposes: acquiring scientific knowledge on some of the most complex natural phenomena, and passing this knowledge on to affected populations so they can use it effectively and in a timely fashion.”

No DOF with an iPhone – send help.