Process – awkwardst

Zine Progress

From the last post, i think it was really quite beneficial to have the art direction quite set from the start. So i full out went for the sketchy look and referred quite a bit to Megan Nicole Dong.

Sketches, hardcopies and test prints are all in the Visual Journal.

Methodology wise, I started off with a few options, the ones on sketchbook being: draw traditionally > scan in. But I thought that that wouldn’t work out very well because of the troubles I foresee when it comes to cropping and trying various layouts and arrangements.

So I made the decision to draw and colour on the iPad, then export them onto Photoshop to try various arrangements. Later on, after coming up with a suitable arrangement, I save the file as jpeg and then export them it into procreate to make additional drawings.

The above are various variations i tried for the digital method. The last two i tried with scans of handmade papers but they didn’t really work out probably because of the clash in colors and it doesn’t look clean either.

I started off with drawing elements for each of the pages. I also drew some characters separately but unfortunately, i didn’t get to include most of them in the zine because of the limited space ):

I was quite excited to do this spread hahaha

I started off with finding sexy legs and did some preliminary sketches to fit the anatomy of the tree.

I gave the scanned paper another shot. But nahaaaaaah. The colors don’t play well together and they don’t stand out against the toned background color. It also dilutes the overall theme and feel.

Also tried some background colors but I think the full white one was the simplest and conveys the look and feel best. Having the page white also helped the other colors stand out – also a reason why the entire tree was not colored. An accident happened but i thought it looked quite interesting. But it probably doesn’t go that well with the light hearted concept of my book. It looks more spacey while Kranji is more… Grounded.
Also tried different placement for Kranji because the title didn’t stand out very well as a title. Decided to go against the placement below anyway because I wanted it to be more like a parody of magazines and all magazines seem to have their titles on the top of the page. Though readers may not notice, but I’m sure subconsciously the placement of the title is a convention that can trigger a certain sort of familiarity to interest readers. I also noticed that their variations of the titles are mostly using colors so that’s what i tried next.

What would stand out better than neon colors? Neon colors! As inspired by the highlighter part of my Part 1 infographic. CMYK is not able to print neon but still, the title would stand out better as one single color that is different from the other colors from the page – after seeing it in CMYK mode instead of RGB mode. As seen in the visual journal, I also thought of printing blank pages and highlighting them but unfortunately this is a digital project.

CMYK ^RGB^

Also attempted increasing the saturation for the colors to make them brighter but the colors didn’t fit very well.
Yellow highlighter anyone? Not me. Though yellow is really a bright color, green stood out more and using green is also in relation to Kranji’s grassy grounds and jungles. Green fit better both looks and concept wise.

Started off my content page like this, wanted it to look more like a map that has the elements of Kranji in a more circular manner. But eventually I was struggling really hard with this layout ^Test print, which was pretty much fine, but I adjusted the size of certain elements and also changed the text “Thirsty Kranji Tree” to something that is easier to understand. ^Final print

So I came up with something else. Instead of being stuck with a spread, I thought of experimenting layouts in pages and breaking the elements up. This can help with readability and hierarchy and it will overall also look neater. The next few pictures shows the process of how i tried different layouts:

Experimenting with different placements: I varied the background for each of the page to separate them more so they won’t look like they’re coming out together all at once. The left page is basically writing a repetition of the word ‘KRANJI’. Initially, the images were on their own without any background and I thought it looked quite messy. I referred back to Megan Nicole Dong’s comic strips and tried out color blocking each element and I thought it worked out nicely. It’s neater, segregates each element and it enforces some sort of grid system in the zine. Overall readability is improved.

^ Test printed spread for consultation

The focal point is clearly the Kranji MRT – emphasised by the circular shape and orangey color that stands out from the other design elements from the page. I have also experimented with different copywriting to go with the Kranji MRT page.

However, on the right spread, it was apparently confusing to the viewers because there were too many things going on and the text also didn’t seemed to have made much of a difference, so I simplified it much more in the next variations.

Eventually, I decided to remove the bus and walking time from this spread as it was getting too cluttered and the organisation of information is quite messy. I explored putting them in their respective spreads instead so this page gives a nice overview of the stuff that can be found in Kranji.

^Final Print

Had the title of this spread more related to the front cover’s “COOL SHIT IN” text – the same yellow highlight and words.

Added some lines around the Kranji MRT circle to fill up negative space and further emphasising it as the focal point and at the same time tying the colors with the rest of the page. Halfway through, I also changed the colors of the text from black to white as I felt white was less harsh and I liked how it goes with the turquoise. Having the text a different color from the line art perhaps also helped it stand out.

The very initial spread for the war memorial spread, but i figure this meant that i didn’t have space to include anything much at all so i changed it. There’s also too much going on in the page – too much big words that is in the reader’s face and confuses the reader on where to look / what is the title of this page.

So I revised my method a bit and instead drew the war memorial (the focus of this spread) out first and trying different types and placement instead of diving into the rest of the page layout first. I removed the blue in the right side background so the entire spread will fit in better together.

^Test Print

Eventually managed to fill up the whole page but after printing it, the text was just all too overwhelming and I removed some content, came up with better jokes and rearranged it. Also remove the “This is the next page” to reduce confusion.

Minimalising the entire page to the simplest elements that I know I want to have, then filling it up with title and body text: ^Final Print

For the last page, it was quite set from the start. I knew I wanted a comic strip to help fill up one of the pages and also have it as one of the jokes instead of just having text content. I had another variation for the comic (in the sketchbook) but I came up with another that was more related to Kranji. More specifically the crocodile sightings in Kranji, which I found surprising and amusing. I used the same method of blocking out squares using colors – which maintains consistency and it works. Also shifted the bus information to fill the farm page.
During consultation, it was suggested that i swapped the pages because in the previous layout, it was illustration heavy page after illustration heavy page. This layout also worked much better content wise as the farm was stated in the content page while the crocodile was just something more like a surprise fun fact inserted at the end. ^Final Print

Same process, putting in the main elements, and then filling up with title and text. Also tried to make the title stand out a bit more and with a different type. Credit to the jokes for the first paragraph goes to http://www.jokes4us.com/peoplejokes/farmerjokes.html. I tried to include the experiences that was most interesting to me from the site visit into the rest of the text.

Last but not least, this zine was inspired by Clara’s quote of “Good but not sexy” as mentioned in one of my previous OSS posts. Also, a special mention of my friend Haoran who sort of contributed to the jokes. I went to him for his bad one liners, and ended up coming with better ones myself in the process.

Soooo that’s it for the digital process! Test prints, sketches and more weird jokes can be found in the visual journal.

The color for the school printer at NorthSpine was quite bad. It made my yellow man turn greenish yellow and the background stood out too much. Though the ink and paper combi came out not glossy at all. The printer at Out de Box was much better, color wise. It took one additional go of test printing as I had to adjust some background colors to make them stand out a bit more. I would have actually preferred a more matte look for the whole zine to go along with the texture that i printed out, but unfortunately that isn’t open in the specifications of this project and the printer ink was quite glossy. But I am fine with that!

After printing, there was also feedback about the texture that I used – people kept trying to brush away the ‘hair’ that was part of the dust and scratches texture. Which.. I thought was quite an interesting unintended interaction that came with my zine. It was another layer of interaction on top of the reading and laughing. It also adds to the whole sleaziness – well, what hair could that be, may readers wonder.

Links to:
Final Zine Images
Zine Research

Links to Part 1 Infographic:
Final
Process
Area Research 1 / 2 / 3

Reflection

All in all, this was quite a fun project that I feel was really quite flexible and it was fully up to us to make the decisions on what we want to do, as long as there was concept, art direction and content. Which thankfully, I had most of it nailed from the start and knowing what direction I was going towards was really helpful. I knew I wanted a sketchy look, I had a main reference artist, I wanted it to be a quirky / parodical tone, and my content was about Kranji. In the other projects, I probably struggled more because they felt more abstract to me as they were a lot about transferring ideas and concept into visuals. Perhaps along the way I’ve grown to become better at that so dealing with the zine seemed to be easier. Overall, I believe that I grew in conceptualisation – thumb nailing more, coming up with more compositions, as well as exploration.

I think my biggest struggle for this zine is with the content. It was a little bit of a barrier because I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to include / what i can include in eight pages. I knew how it was going to look like, but I did not know exactly what was going to be in it. Plus, I intended for a quirky tone so I needed to have jokes. It was quite difficult to find a balance between jokes / offensive jokes (especially for the war memorial one. There was so many undocumented offensive jokes.) and jokes / information. There had to be a balance because I didn’t want to just come up with wisecracks and throw away the topic of Kranji totally. I wanted it to be somewhat informative but still interesting and weird, to read. I think i probably really needed to curate the content a bit more from the start, perhaps by coming up with a ranked list of points I wanted to include, then making the jokes from there instead of having super broad topics like war memorial / farm that I wanted to address.

For instance, it was helpful when it was suggested that i should base the war memorial information on the target audience and the whole idea of ‘horny youths’ I was mentioning a few times in the same spread initially. And eventually, i am quite happy with the subtle innuendos on that page. (Not that my mom sent me to school to make sexual innuendos.)

It was interesting to see everyone’s zine. I thought that everyone else’s zine is a little piece of themselves and it’s somewhat reflective of their personalities (not that i should be associated with sexual innuendos). It may not be the perfect work, but I am happy to have achieved what I started out to achieve, especially as the final project of foundation year. It was most wonderful when my friends specifically told me that they really liked my zine in terms of both content and look. It’s a good satisfaction to know that I’ve hit my target audiences and that people were interested to read on as they found the jokes funny and that I’ve made them smile. The most feedback I have received was probably regarding the entire messiness of the zine and text hierarchy. I agree that these things could be improved on and it was probably because of my persistence in consistency that I probably could have explored more if I knew what titles / subheaders I wanted to include – again, going back to the content. But only because of this imperfection, I was able to receive extra nice comments as people were backing me up by telling me that they thought the messiness went well with the art direction in spite of other feedback.

It’s been a joyful journey the past semester and I’m glad to have ended up in this class. I believe I found a bit more of myself through each project, especially with the help of my friends and teachers. Hopefully, all the inspiration I’ve gathered from the people around me were transferred well into the final project and that my own improvement is reflected. Looking back, my previous projects seemed to be really controlled, in contrast with the final project, and I feel that this ties in with my objective of this semester to ‘let it go’. It’s always nice to be able to come up with something that I’m happy with, and I am happiest with the final project as compared with the previous ones, which I always felt have something lacking.

So, we’re done. All is cool and all is well. It’s a good ending to foundation 2D. This letting go feels like a good start to animation life and I hope it’ll bring forth even better things. (:

Infographic: Kranji War Series Process

Hi there!

It’s been an interesting journey from site visit to jumping back into illustrator and creating my first infographic, something I never thought I’d do. On top of that, it’s slightly stats based and numbers are just never my thing.

Firstly, it was about sieving out the subject that I wanted to present, and eventually I settled on the war memorial which I had the most feels and observations from the trip there. I think in my end presentation, I was able to present my thoughts and feels gathered from the trip and I’m happy with that!

But, I also feel like my work is kinda basic. I mean I like it, I am happy with it, but just basic in the sense that it just looks like a common infographic. As mentioned in my research post, it seemed to me like infographics all look kinda the same, so it was difficult to do something outstanding. The most special part of my infographic was probably the highlighter, which I thought was slightly genius (concept wise) but unfortunately could be executed better hahaha.

Initially, I was going to opt for a more sketchy look by drawing out the whole infographic. Going for the whole Megan Nicole Dong feel + the sketchy infographic look as written in my research post. However, as I set out to experiment on how I was going to do it, I felt that it wouldn’t work out because of the various structures and different aspects of the cemeteries, and it just wasn’t the look I envisioned.

Some miserable attempts that I almost forgot about:

So, I settled for Illustrator. The moment I decided this, I knew it was going to look some sort of basic. But good thing is, I also knew the kind of look I was going for.

Much of my infographic was created in references to these:

Very very nice London map, simple and great colour. — your-travelling-collections.blogspot.com

Sticktown by Paula Rusu, via Behance add some simple drawings to hang on the wall — behance.net

In The Electronic Afterlife, we revealed the impact of electronic waste: 20–50 tonnes each year flow through a global supply chain, mostly ending in landfills and informal recycling villages. As we embed electronics in more of our products, how can designers keep the product lifetime in mind? Makeshift teamed up with Autodesk, Core77, and iFixit, to launch the student design competition Design for (Your) Product Lifetime. — mkshft.org

The simple, thin, clean lines on a subtle greyish background. In reference to the first and second image, I had also planned to do a splash of colour in my infographic which didn’t turn out that well (shown later).

I set off to drawing out the memorial in illustrator, with the use of some reference images such as

Really not sure what I was doing with life with the indecision on perspective. My 4D teacher coincidentally saw this and commented on it and I came to epiphany that everything should be in isometric perspective and it all made sense.

Slowly started populating the graphic, which made it look way better. I’m glad I trusted myself as I told myself that it’s going to look okay when it’s finished despite how plain it looked at the beginning.

Tried adding the splashes of color I wanted to do initially. I wanted the cemetery to remain colorless, with a splash of the blue sky to bring across the ‘solemn but not sad’ feel I was going for. A beautiful blue sky with some birds was gonna do the job, I thought. But apparently not. I also wanted to try like a more saturated, cyan kind of color in reference to the river map image posted above, but it was too bright in this context.
Because of the way I drew it, there were gaps across all the memorial columns… But hey that kinda looks like shadow / sun thing let’s try if it would work if I added some orange. After all, I was quite for the blue/orange/pink color scheme (as posted in research post) even if they looked quite common. So I tried it out and, “No,” I thought, after rearranging some of the lines and colors and stuff. It also didn’t feel right because I felt like in between the columns should show the blue sky for clarity in visuals instead of the whole block being yellow. It was also getting too bright and happy. Initially, the idea was to include some background knowledge of how the Japanese came from the North instead the South in a whatsapp / text format.

Something like this ^ And at the same time introducing some other elements of Kranji.

But eventually I decided to scrape it and focus on the graves and memorials. On hindsight, I felt it is quite helpful.

Even after deciding on the war cemetery, I had to sieve out what exactly of the war cemetery as there was quite a bit of information. I wanted to present a little about the war as background/context, the other aspects of Kranji that I had visited, or focus the whole thing on the cemetery manager (which I decided not to as it wasn’t data I collected from my site visit) – and maybe that was just too much.

Anyway, I continued with what I had and eventually also stuck to one type of labelling that would stick better with icons which would make majority of the infographic work, as advised by Joy, “to ensure that the text and imagery are integrated well such that the imagery provides information as well. [T]he last thing we want is information in text and just a “background” image of the memorial – making it look like a PowerPoint presentation slide. A good tip would be to imagine if one didn’t understand the language of your text (in this case, English) would he/she be able to tell some, if not most, of the information you are conveying?” rather than just point and put words. The advise was super helpful.

A big part of this project was the information that I wanted to convey. I ended up with stats eventually and was grateful that I found easier ways to calculate them and that there were sufficient information available online (albeit the discrepancies). Data and numbers are dry information and I hope in my end product, I was able to convey them more visually.

Some progress images:

Oh yes, I also stuck with three of my go-to fonts, Courier, Helvetica, and Avenir light. With a wee bit of reference to

mariahalthoff.com

All in all, I think the eventual outcome was not bad, I’m happy with it, but maybe I could experiment with colors more. Quoting, it is

“Good but not sexy” – Clara Lim, 2017

More importantly, I think I have somewhat achieved the goals I set for myself from the last project – to sketch more / come up with more compositions / layouts – as seen in my visual journal. (Yay small improvement steps).

So from this project to the next, I aim to push the boundaries, explore with colors more, let loose, and get sexy.

Hahaha bye.

Infographic: Kranji War Series Research Links

Neo Tiew Estate

Neo Tiew – Abandoned Housing Estate

Kranji Army Barracks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kranji

Kranji Heritage Trail (part 2)

Woodlands Camps/Kranji Army Barracks

WWII Landing Site

A lost world in Lim Chu Kang

War Memorial

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kranji_War_Memorial

http://www.cwgc.org/

http://www.cwgc.org/news-events/news/2017/2/cwgc-cemetery-manager-features-in-singapore-75th-anniversary-video.aspx

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/kannaya-somu-guardian-of-the-war-dead-150223531.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kranji

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Singapore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dobbie#Dobbie.27s_hypothesis_regarding_the_capture_of_Singapore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

Project 1 Progress

brilliant-fighting-montage — Me vs Project 1. Me as Mulan.

My four jobs:
Coursing River, Great Typhoon, Raging Fire, Mysterious Moon

Since the last consultation, it has been concluded that I needed to tie my visuals more to the message I was trying to convey.

I started off with re-looking at my message, “Women can be these things too” and rephrased it to become “It doesn’t matter man or women” which I found resonated with my neutral stand better as I wouldn’t consider myself a passionate feminist, and gender roles is such a grey area to me.

From here, it was coming up with new designs that would convey the message.

With my previous female-centric stand, I found it tricky to not fall into the confines of gender bias as I thought usage of colours or body forms stereotyped to genders would become a oxymoron with my message.

I preferred the neutral stand as the usage of colours would simply be a representation of the genders instead of a stereotype. Typing “feminist” into the search bar and seeing a variety of designs being pink also helped realign my thinking.

screen-shot-2017-02-04-at-3-55-38-pm — http://amyspalding.tumblr.com/post/123298737557/soleuna-proud-to-be-a-feminist

screen-shot-2017-02-04-at-3-57-06-pm — http://educated-baetch.tumblr.com/post/131947945381/source-buzzfeed-news-on-snapchat

screen-shot-2017-02-04-at-3-59-39-pm — http://amyspalding.tumblr.com/post/123298737557/soleuna-proud-to-be-a-feminist

In the above designs, pink was used as colour to help convey the message better and I found that designs with the pink help the feminist message stand out better as compared to the designs in other colours.

Instead of a ‘stereotype’, colours can be used as a signifier, a semiotic mechanic to drive the message as blue and pink could be considered indexes that connects the message – pink commonly represents females and blue commonly represent males.

Secondary Research
(Brainstorming has been documented in sketchbook)

2d-cooking — Saw this during research / brainstorming for the visuals and thought it might be helpful

Let’s get down to business ?

Relooked at the Mulan video for some inspiration!

Like most animations, Mulan’s face is rather minimal and I think that influenced my style.

Also, I really like artist, Henn Kimm’s minimal lines and colours.

Image result for henn kim Related image

I love how despite the restricted (but strong and contrasting) flat, solid colours and clean lines, she could deliver her illustrations minimalistic-cally. I also like how clean and solid the backgrounds look with no textures, just one flat color.

Redesigning:

After brainstorming, I came to using faces of a man and a woman. They provide a focal point, and are straightforward, effective and obvious enough to carry my message, rather than using hands or the whole body which could end up in things being unnecessarily complex.

I started off with sketching some composition ideas, and then coming up with the faces, the new main attraction of this series, tracing the carefully deliberated and handpicked side views of a male and female faces.

processtest

I traced the images instead of drawing them from scratch because I felt like the forms and contours matter. Despite the fact that there are some very pretty Korean boys, men generally have different facial features and structures as compared to women.

I snuck in the differences using minute variations in angles in the brows, lips and blusher.

I thought thick and straight eyebrows would be cute and would stand out, instead of basic and legit eyebrows, since they’re stylised drawings anyway. I feel like they complementing the equally outstanding blushers and help make the design more stylised. Plus, Mulan has thick eyebrows too. (And as everybody already know, thick eyebrows are in trend)

Image result for mulan

I love including blushers in my works. They’re cute. Especially as seen in local artist Lyyeow’s works:

Image result for lyyeow

From here, I guess it is pretty obvious that the overall style for these pieces would be more graphical and stylised – fitting to my major in animation, as well as the origins of the concept, an animation feature.

And with my previous design as a base, I fit in the faces

Drew blobs of water for hair because the imagery of ‘swift as a coursing river’ reminds me of hair gloriously flowing in the water.

(It always does, just like in this piece from my Ego project:)

But I used blobby hair this time to match the flat, vector look, and also…

Since the last update, I have decided that the lasso tool is my go-to for this series. It is a secretly powerful tool that if often overlooked as I try very hard to digitally draw smooth flowing shapes. I first came across it while I was watching one of Feng Zhu’s (a concept artist) digital painting videos. Look at what it can achieve!!! It is a secret weapon and I was going to try and make use of it more.

screen-shot-2017-02-07-at-2-15-35-am

In the compositions above, the type wasn’t working out yet, and the background was still messy – I received some suggestions to try using the bubbles to spell out my name.

Also considered using different kind of foam / bubbles but nope, just nope.

Though there is rather rhythmic movements in the above composition (it was intended for the bubbles to look like it was flowing down the hair to suggest action), I thought the negative space on the right side seemed awkward so I tried to switch it around.

Adjusted the layout, then tried to remove some elements of the original designs (Brush strokes in the background and testing out different colour schemes and opacity).

Eventually the brush strokes were removed to achieve a flatter and cleaner look, taking into consideration that brush strokes /textures might not fit in the other designs as the they were placed initially to help mimic the gradience of water.

So there, swift as a coursing river, the swiftness is demonstrated in the flowing hair, bubbles and blobs of water in the background.

Originally, I wasn’t going to use dark grey for my all the background, but figured that it was fitting as it helped make the faces stand out as I was working on the Typhoon design:

In the first draft, I used Green and Blues because that’s how a typhoon is seen from outer space (as researched last post). I also thought that the contours formed by the faces made the middle section look like a continent.

Image result for typhoon

But the colours didn’t work out and black worked much better, especially in promoting a style and unity between the four pieces and breaking the predictability of the colours used for my four jobs.

Tried to use the concept of random neon colours (from the previous designs) again but it didn’t seem to work out. Then, I drew my name instead of using a commercial font and attempted for it to look like it was being sucked into the middle.

Played around with different ways to signify the typhoon as I thought the first one really looked quite like people smoking.

Force of a great typhoon, straightforwardly signified by the circle of people around, as typhoons are just rotating and rotating and rotating and rotating….

Using the idea of covered fonts form my previous designs, here’s mysterious moon.

I didn’t mention in the previous post, but how the name was hidden (in this version) was inspired by the moon phases.

? ? ? ? ? ? ?

I didn’t realise, but feedback said that it looks like solar eclipses!
Image result for moon eclipse

The side profiles were fitting to dark side of the moon. Even more so because the colour scheme is near black and the type being backed by shadows. Researching mysterious men/women, I came across these pieces which stood out to me:

https-//www.pinterest.com/jealouscurator/.jpg

Wellllll I couldn’t smudge a minimalistic illustration like this and it wouldn’t fit into the look and feel of the series, so the eyes were removed to help exude mysteriousness.

Lastly, raging fire was really quite challenging.

My attempts at taking elements from my previous designs like the other pieces were no good as it didn’t fit in with the other three visuals and they had too much red in them:

How to represent fire with faces????

I remembered that the sun is a ball of raging fire

So why not give it a shot:

Which didn’t work out. There are waaay to many faces and it doesn’t show any signs of a fire.

I looked at the three other visuals as a whole and came up with a composition for the faces that is different from the other pieces.

I also thought of using smoke and silhouettes to help signify fire. A raging fire would mean lots and lots of smoke.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/540854236470674870/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/464081936576180290/

Initially I collected this as a reference to write out my name:

But I wanted a flatter layout to resonate with the other designs.

Since there are some colours in the coursing river piece as compared to the other designs, I thought of similarly including colours in this piece to help balance the pieces out as a whole.

Tried different colour combinations and eventually decided to include the lines for the faces to help read them clearer and also harmonise more with the other pieces.

Still rather unhappy with the design, I explored with drawing my name differently, this time making use of Photoshop’s liquify tool.

After Liquify and color changes / additions

How the name was drawn was inspired / referring to animation of flames that I have encountered before (while doing research on another project):

Related image Image result for fire animation Image result for flame animation gif tutorial

Image result for 2d fire animation

Also ended up using orange because it made that fact that this piece is about fire, obvious. Tried out other colours in the process and they just didn’t work out.

The GIF below also shows the process of trying to integrate the type more into the design. Within the composition, I also tried placing the name in different places but they didn’t work well. Eventually, I found that varying the opacity of the smoke in the background helped a lot. It also gave a better impression of a raging fire, or an impression of smoke in varying distances.

I also switched the male and female faces around so that in the combined presentation, the gender of the faces will mostly be alternated.

Reflection

Initially, I really found it a struggle to have to include a message within my visuals. It was tough for me and really something I thought I was quite bad at. In hindsight, I think it was a good struggle to have to have meaning in my design. After all, I came up with a message I thought was quite special, and I think the end product speaks.

I also found that in my end products, there was a sub message that really resonated with me. With both the faces of men and women, other than genders not playing a part, it could be seen as men and women working together, just like eventually in the video of the sound track. After all, they were all coming together to defeat the Huns, so why would genders matter as long as they are willing?

Because I am so neutral (or some say indecisive) person, more often than not I find myself not being able to pick a side, I often fall back onto the solution of people working together. I love it when people work well together. Half way through designing I realised this sub message in my designs and felt like it really worked out. Despite my works usually not being personal and being more general, I like how the end product was still mine in the end because of it’s neutral tonality and sub message about working together.

Image result for working together meme

In last semester, I mostly tried to use traditional mediums and methods which were mostly very time consuming. Using a digital medium was in contrast much more effective. Butttt, I thought I should be more particular at the beginning especially if I was going to use the same illustration for all four pieces. Because I was not so particular then (I thought I was just testing compositions), I duplicated the illustrations into other designs though the strokes were uneven and not clean. I had to go back to each design and touch up afterwards.

Also, with the digital medium, it was convenient to explore minor tweaks but I think I might have fell into the trap of easily settling on a composition. My usual work process was – find something to start with (in this case the faces and my previous design), lay them around, find something good, and work on it. I thought I could really have explored more compositions by sketching first before diving in digitally. When I explore digitally, the compositions would usually differ much less.

Tying in with exploring more compositions, I would also like to build up a better habit of doing more research, especially according to specific artists instead of related words. When I get too excited, I tend to come up with my own ideas and work from there. I find that this results in limitations in my designs, especially since the visual library in my head can in no way compare to the multitude of resources and references, I can find out there. I could probably have pushed my research more, and earlier, instead of being too anxious and diving into test designs – which I ended up settling on (too) quickly. This was evident when I was stuck on my raging fire composition. By then, I was already more or less done with the other three designs and searching related words (like fire, fire typography) wasn’t able to help much. If I had researched more and explored more compositions in the beginning, maybe I could have come up with something better.

Additional research according to the style I was going for could have been more beneficial, though the research in the beginning did help as I was so inspired by David Carson. I really enjoyed his style and tried to use some of his methods, though eventually I veered away because of the change in design concept. Despite that, David Carson’s interview inspired me to be more personal about my designs, which I felt at least this pulled through because this series was something related to animation, and the concept and design were still things that were in my style. It feels/seems like something I would do, and I am happy with that, especially since I almost just gave up with my stand when people suggested that a female-centric message would be easier to convey.

So there, in this assignment, I overcame the great barrier of marrying the message with the visuals. I think the compositions could have been better, but I am happy with how the end product speaks, is united, and the main colour scheme.

Project 1 Updates

My first consultation concluded that I was off track as my initial concepts had no messages behind it. I came up with a few other ideas, and am going ahead with idea A!

A:
Concept: What makes a man
The four jobs: Coursing river, Great Typhoon, Raging Fire, Mysterious Moon
Message: Women can have these qualities too!
Tone: Parody of Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”

B:
Concept: What makes a housewife
The four jobs: Caregiver, Chef, Housekeeper, Teacher
Message: Housewives / mothers are everything. They are multi-talented, and they seem to be able to juggle everything.
Tone: Cheerful / appreciative?

C:
Concept: Shortcuts to be rich
The four jobs: Tai tai, Bank Robber, Drug Lord, A Rich Character
Message: Everybody wants to be rich, but is there really a shortcut to it?
Tone: Satirical

D:
Concept: The hidden work behind an animation
The four jobs: Producer, Pre-Production Artist, Production Artist, Post Production Artist
Message: People so easily enjoy the work they see on screen, but most don’t know how much work and time is put into it.
Tone: More serious?
– I am also considering adding a twist to make the above concept more ‘me’ by using ‘Jack’ as my name (ironically). Because of the phrase, ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’, because I am a generalist.

Since this project was more typography based, I thought about how I could make use of types to express the various verbs (swift, force, strength, mysterious). I decided to experiment with using the formatting of the fonts, such as bold, italics, and stuff like that.

Swift as a Coursing River

Hmmmm how to express coursing river? Italics was used in hopes to express movement, like swoosh. I started off with the imagery of river contours in mind, using blue as a base colour, and eventually delving more into using hints of turquoise and teal.

I also experimented with moving the alphabets around, as if they were carried by the water current. However, I thought that it wasn’t expressing ‘swift’ and ‘coursing’ enough as the visuals seemed calm instead of quick.

Eventually, I tried to overlay various images of water, and drew some bubbles, attempting to make it seem more like a coursing river, at the same time complementing the alphabets and filling some negative space to make the visuals more interesting and less plain.

As I was working on this, I also saw this video: https://www.facebook.com/culturacolectivaplus/videos/1583477421669715/

and super loved it. Went back again in hopes of finding some references and inspiration and noticed how effective the use of the oil/ink/soap videos was. Yyyyes, oil, ink, soap imagery is bae.

screen-shot-2017-01-23-at-11-21-01-pm

So I grabbed this one and overlaid it on the existing design, experimenting with different blending options.

ink-oil-soap-experiment-9_zpsd428eda5

More experiments with the movement of the alphabets. coursingriver-pg2s

This one is my favourite so far. I thought the ink helped to represent movement as they looked like the bubbles you would see in the movement of water.

Force of a Great Typhoon

Don’t have much for this yet, except some possibly relevant imagery.

Thought of using trippy neon colors coming into blend because typhoons remind me of a huge blender that blends everything (represented by a mish mash of random colors) up. The base colours blue and green would represent the sea and land in this case. This is still a mess, have yet to be developed!

Strength of a Raging Fire

The text is in bold because well, strength of a raging fire. Didn’t want to use a typical fire imagery for this and used bold and expressive brush strokes as inspired by the ruggedy-ness in David Carson’s works. Half way through, I thought of how the brush strokes reminded me of Red Indians’ face paint and I did some research and experimenting with that, as Red Indians are commonly known to be fierce and strong warriors.
redindianpaint

Mysterious as the Dark Side of the Moon

Experimented with hiding the type for this, because, mysterious means not revealing everything easily. Also tried different ways I could hide the types. The drawing of the moon was from an old work. Played around with using different colors and I preferred a dark moon because of the contrast it gives plus it could better represent the dark side of the moon better. The cropping around was again inspired by David Carson’s works.

moon-pg1

Tried to use an image of the moon like this one but it didn’t really work out.

Moving forward after the group consultation, I am going to try to think of other possible messages these four ‘jobs’ can indicate as well as how I can better tie my visuals to my message.

I should also be thinking more about helping the type fit in with the designs instead of looking like it’s overlaid.

If all goes well, I can start test printing soon!