My work focuses on bringing the familiar aspects of the ordinary Singapore heartland to the hospital, providing comfort to the patients and staff who spend most of their time away from home. The windows into a more homely environment elsewhere, shape the sterile and stressful environment of the hospital into something warmer. At the same time, it provides a Singapore flavour which is unique only to Singapore hospitals.
Stray cats are often found around the heartland, in environment close to people. The presence of the cats in my illustrations hopefully act as a bridge for the viewers to be drawn in, like how anyone would stop and slow down to watch the cats resting or moving around at their void decks.
The illustrations were done on Photoshop, with more organic strokes and bright colours to bring a less rigid and restrictive feeling to the images.
After the first task, I decided to focus on the themes/subjects of local flavour and animals, and came up with an idea to merge them together.
People tend to find comfort in familiarity. Even though we may find the common daily scenes of the Singapore neighbourhood extremely ordinary and nothing out of the special – like HDB void decks, wet marketplaces, kopitiam, etc., they seem to be out of reach in that sterile and prosaic space of the link bridge. Yet, they are often closest to, or feels like a symbol of home. Every corner of the void deck or the daily scene of a busy morning wet market could invoke a sense of familiarity in all (if not most) Singaporeans.
Other than familiarity, I had suggestions from friends before that they thought travelling in another country is something therapeutic, which is agreeable as those are the rare few times we can take our minds away from our work in Singapore and purely have fun. Additionally, we find stories therapeutic as they let us escape into another world. Essentially, the idea of being able to transport your mind somewhere else tends to be therapeutic.
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By installing images of the heartland environment, I wish to bring an ordinary piece of the heartland, inserting them in the hospital environment, bringing an out-of-ordinary sentiment to the patients, and even staff, who are away from their familiar environment. If they can’t be there, it could be here. Even if one weren’t that familiar with these scenes, I hope that they could find something comfortable in the down-to-earth subjects.
My initial intention of adding animals into the picture was how adorable animals tend to be therapeutic universally. Adorable animals can melt the hardest of hearts and people bond over pets, which were proved to me by the presence of a pet rabbit in my family. Presence of animals can help to soften the environment too.
I also wanted to add a sense of whimsicality to the scenes by adding (domesticated) animals which normally wouldn’t appear in such places. Being surrounded by cute animals sound like a moodlifting experience, like the idea of Okunoshima (Rabbit Island) and the cat islands in Japan. Thus I tried incorporating rabbits into my drafts at first.
second drafts:
with cats
with rabbits
I did the piece with the cats first which wasn’t my initial intention to do so, but eventually I garnered feedback that the presence of the rabbits were not as compatible with the context as compared to the cats. Corresponding to my goal of achieving familiarity, cats would be a comparatively good choice. In this case, I learnt that it would be more important to adhere to what is more logical for the sake of clarity of my intention than what I actually personally want.
During the second round of critique, Michael had suggested that I could focus more on the activities of the cat, how people interact with them and how they possibly interact with the environment. There were also good feedback on the choices of human figures presented.
I snapped this photo at the void deck on my way home during that week, which served as inspiration for my development thereafter.
When I chose to focus on the cat, I realised that even with close-ups, the environment of the void deck are still recognisable. Furthermore, the only time we would watch the stray cats at our void decks up close is when we slow down and go closer, which is the kind of perspective I find suitable for invoking therapeutic sentiments.
sketches
I tried doing it on Illustration instead of Photoshop, where a went for a more organic kind of illustration, but it felt more rigid even though it definitely looks neater.
The two scenes I ended up with were simply examples of the look and feel it should involved. I picked the mosaic communal chess table as it is easily identifiable even when closed up. Expanding into a series, I hope I could make a series of images in which we could follow the same cat travelling around the void deck.
As Michael said, I could have considered more into how my image is going to work with the view outside of the windows if the background would be transparent. This would certainly enrich the quality of my art, and was something I regrettably didn’t managed to incorporate in my final.
It was also certainly different from our year 1 projects, that we now make design with the consideration of a context and particular audience to serve.
With this, I hope that I will continue to improve in my design thinking and technical skills! I’ve always been interested in cultures, finding it most meaningful to incorporate local culture in my work some way or another. Therefore hopefully, I would also be able to continue exploring more into the local culture or cultures in general.
[Note to future self: This post was entirely written after the crit.]
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Finally, I was able to do illustrations for this assignment, after meaning to do so since last semester’s Ego project.
Creative direction
Even though I listed out numerous concepts in my previous post, the concept I concentrated on is the one on mythologies across space. (I guess it’s pretty apparent haha)
At first my intention was merely to extend on my idea from assignment to do a collection of illustrations of mythologies and fictional stories I know of related to ghost. (Yes if anyone bothered to read and remembered my previous posts, it’s the one I said I would rather not post here. I guess I have to do it anyway.) I don’t think I would elaborate on each of them, but as you might have already noticed, it spans across different time eras.
(Chang’e and Hou Yi have been here from the start, yeah!)
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As a (ex-)Geography student, I’ve always awed at the idea that many things could be considered on the scale of time and space. (Quoting my JC Geography tutors, Geography is the study of everything under the sun, and including the sun.) So I had considered the same concept across space instead, which is how I ended up with the three mythologies: Echo & Narcissus from the Greek myths, Chang’e & Hou Yi from the Chinese, and finally, Izanami & Izanagi from the Shinto myths.
Tracing back to my assignment 2 as well, I unified the three stories with the concept from the Chinese folk beliefs on the afterlife. One of the concepts I had come across during my research was 三生石 (the stone of three lives). It was something I had vaguely knew of before but only from my research, I knew what exactly it is. Furthermore, it ties in with the mythical nature of the mythologies really well, especially as a setting/background.
三生石
As I’ve mentioned, the myths all ended as different kinds of tragedies/didn’t end well. The whole concept eventually developed and matured into a representation of my cynicalrealist + hopeless romantic face. (I know I said cynical during the crit but that was sort of inaccurate, and it had bugged me on the way home.) They’re kinda two conflicting/contradictory traits (but I believe we are all contradictions) but I feel like my concept could embody both perspectives relatively succinctly as it touches on a realistic truth to human condition yet by lending the poetic/romantic nature of mythologies to convey it.
I’m a big fan of romance genre stories. (Important: Not the Western sort of romance stories, it’s the Asian ones. I find them vastly different. Western values differ way too much from my taste/preference more often than not.) But quite selectively. I enjoy the well-written convincing ones (by my own standards), and can get swept away by them completely. But on a lot of times, as a fundamentally rational person, I find myself seriously doubting hella mushy lines like “I will love you forever.” (For realz bruh?)Of course, this is a hint of a not-so-good written romance story (suspension of disbelief, you know) but regrettably, there are more not-so-good ones than the good ones.
Some people may protest like: There are loving old couples I still see holding hands while walking together! Yeah, but I’m quite a skeptic, from my current perspective, towards the possibility of “eternal love/romance”, especially when it extends into marriage. I’m more inclined to believe that love/romance evolves into a habitual companionship. I don’t know if anything is going to change my mind in the future, but I’m sure I will get to know in time.
Well, my point is that, change is the only constant. Everything changes in the face of time, even love and feelings. Even though I concentrated on romantic love in my subject presented, but my message was not restricted to it, but also applies to any form of love – friendships or whatnots.
Thus I wrapped up this concept with these phrases in Chinese which I had particularly liked for some time: 时移世易 and 物是人非. They generally lament about the fleeting, transient, impermanent nature of the world with regards to time; and that things are never the same as it used to be. And I’ve ultimately included it in my work as part of my illustration.
On a related note, many other related things surfaced to my mind when I was doing this project. I don’t know whether there are people who may be against the film, The Theory of Everything, for its Oscar-bait nature or alleged incongruity with the facts (but one has to admit that its cinematography is simply gorgeous. It was one of the very main motivation behind why I got myself to catch in the cinemas.) If you’ve watched the film too, you’ll understand how it aligns very well with the concept and spirit of my work.
At the same time, it was also because of that film that I was acquainted with the phrase 没有永恒 只有不朽 from a review on it I read somewhere. Similarly, it encapsulates the spirit pretty well too. x
As much as I wanted to try the string binding methods since assignment 2, I settled on accordion fold despite the technical difficulties of making one because:
Expansive spread. I already had a visualisation of my illustration in this particular fashion so the three stories would be represented in a monoscenic image.
The traditional Chinese feel to it. It sort of reminds me of a 奏折, you know? Once you put hard covers to the ends. Yup.
奏折
Also an article featuring a number of cool ideas/examples of accordion folds: x
Content
Echo & Narcissus
Narcissus (flower) symbolises rebirth and new beginnings.
Chang’e & Hou Yi
((There are many many illustrative portraits of Chang’e, which is good, but there are not as many of Hou Yi’s which is not-as-good.))
Willow trees symbolise immortality, grief, death [x], resonance and harmony [x].
Izanami & Izanagi
Sakura symbolises time for renewal, fleeting nature of life
The Chinese style clouds can also be defined as Japanese style clouds but I chose this one as it’s more unique to Japan.
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Character designs + layout planning
The prototype I brought to group consultation:
Revised illustration:
During the group consultation, Joy had advised that I made stylistic distinction and references for each of the stories to their origin cultures. Thus despite it being monoscenic and drawn in a neutral/modern art style, there could be subtle hints to tell that they’re of different mythologies.
Therefore, I included the elements of different flora/fauna and the styles of clouds drawn which are iconic/representative to each of the cultures. What made them better was each of the flora/fauna depicted carries symbolism which were pretty related to the concept as well, so it helped to bring another layer of meaning to my work. (Flower/plants symbolism brings us back to my sem 1 Ego project!)
Greek – Narcissus flower: rebirth and new beginnings. (Reincarnations = 三生)
Chinese – Willow trees: immortality, grief, death [x], resonance and harmony [x]. (Encapsulates Chang’e and Hou Yi’s stories and feelings.)
Japanese – Sakura: time for renewal, fleeting nature of life. (The overall claim of my work.)
I went with the method of scanning the illustration and making some clean-ups on the digital copy, changing to red and then printing it.
Original scan
Edited and finalised version
Since I drew on tracing paper with pencil, there were a lot of smudges. But I chose to retain a bit of them to add texture to the illustration. A bit of a ghostly feel. Haha.
Joy had also addressed the possible issue from the translucency of the tracing paper, and as suggested by a friend, it would be good to include the stories, given the heavily contextualised nature of my concept. Thus, I made use of the alternate side of the accordion fold to include more contextual info to the work.
I’ve included:
1) a pocket containing three pieces papers, each including the respective featured mythologies
If anyone actually noticed, the line patterns for each of the mythological couples differ, and they actually do have some significance behind them.
Echo & Narcissus = parallel lines = travels alongside but never meets = parallels/mirrors each other in their fates of being plagued by the grief of unrequited love, and never managed to share mutual affections
Chang’e & Hou Yi = intersecting lines = meets at a point but never to meet again = how they shared mutual affections but then were forced to separate forever
Izanami & Izanagi = zig zag lines / oscillating waves with peaks and dips / (sine curve? hahaha) = a bumpy relationship; their union didn’t succeed the first time (because sexist reasons ugh) then Izanami died and Izanagi abandoned her, and then they engage in a never-ending marital spat
2) the “poem”. It’s so cheesy I cringe because of my inability to write in general. Trust me, I’m not a big fan of poems. But I thought it’s definitely helpful to understand the concept so I had to add it in.
In one life,
I longed for you to love me back but you did not.
In another, you finally loved me
as I had always loved you
but we were taken worlds apart.
Finally, in another
we were creating legends
it seemed like nothing could come between us
but little did we know
things would drift apart
feelings would fade
along with the stream of time.
3) a background of Japanese-inspired wave pattern
As a decorative purpose to fill up the space, and simply because I love Japanese patterns + since it’s sorta fits the theme, I wanted to try creating a Japanese pattern, and so I did. I chose the motif of waves, corresponding to the “poem” about “stream of time” which occurs a lot in Japanese patterns as well. (orz)
References:
My (failed) attempt (but I’m glad I tried):
It failed because of the misalignment which didn’t allow it to become a seamless repeated pattern. I tried, really. Even though I tried to Google for tutorials to make a pattern, most of the tutorials weren’t exactly what I was looking for or were helping too much…so now I’m just orz-ing that now I found this. But okay nevermind. The misalignment wasn’t extremely jarring unless you really blow the image up. I think.
I edited it to include the red streaks so to sort of make up for the misalignment and also to go with the reds in the alternate side.
This was actually the part which I finalised last in this project.
At first I wanted to go with something minimalist and abstract, with like embroidery of three long simple vertical rectangles in red or stuff like three hearts, to represent the three lives. And there were a lot of playing around with making the threads interact with the opening of the pages… unrealistic. Exactly why I had the most probably with the conceptualisation of the cover even though what I had in mind was supposedly the most minimalist out of all.
Eventually, I settled on making a really minimalist cover with just the words: 解三生. 解三生 literally means to unravel/untie/understand the three lives, which went hand in hand with my concept of incorporating the red string of fate motif. It’s there as a standalone to act as kind of an invitation to untie the red ribbon, and as the title of the zine.
Actually, the title was inspired by the title of this reaaaaally old local drama by the name of《解连环》. Imagine you’re just chilling, working on your 2D project about 三生三世 past midnight, and this super old local drama comes on TV, you’ve literally never knew about its existence, and just from a few minutes of it and a good Google search, you found out that it’s a mystery/suspense story about the entanglement of fates over the span of three lives. What a coincidence, right? What do you do? ….nothing actually.
Of course I did nothing except made a mental note that it seems interesting, until one day it suddenly surfaced to my mind again. So it kinda inspired the title for my zine and also became the subject of its cover, and solved a headache for me. Moral of the story? Don’t get too wary about being distracted, especially when you’re an art student.
A technical concern which lingered on from the beginning was that you can’t actually conveniently print on hard covers. Some of the possible solutions I had conceived are: image transfer printing, hand-drawing, embroidering, or dealing with an outer layer of tracing paper or something…
My original plan was to hand-write 解 in white ink and sew 三生 in red thread…….but time constraints. Uh yeah. Sometimes you got to compromise, but I guess it still turned out acceptable.
Printing + assembly process
This part of the entire process was what gave me the most headache, to be honest.
In order to avoid having to reprint, out of time constraints and economic efficiency reasons, I’ve been cracking my head over the planning of the prints like what to print on what sort of papers, the consideration of colours and textures, and what could be feasible for printing – thus having to come up with alternative. Good riddance, now that it’s done. (But I know there’s more to come.)
I knew all along that I want to print my line art layer on tracing paper, and have several layers. But given that it is an accordion fold, the dimensions of the paper which I can attain are limited and technical restrictions of printing exists.
The biggest size of tracing paper I could acquire at Fancy Paper was A2. And so I bought two, each of different gsm… still naively thinking that I could print them all on A2 since the most desirable outcome was that having a single piece of accordion fold. However, I was advised by the printing shop that you would need an A1 to print an A2 since the margin would be a massive 10cm. I knew that there would be margin… but not a flippin’ 10cm… so okay I resorted to the next best alternative of printing on and piecing two A3 together. Thankfully I had visited Fancy Paper again right before going to print, and bought papers in excess. (This is how I’m spending so much money on more paper than I need.)
And the feeling when you get all the printing done after all those difficulties and worries….!!!!!!!!!! Simply liberating!!!1
Ta-dah~
Great, now you have to do the assembling, which is no joke as well, as I’ve been proven. Even though it wasn’t pointed out during my crit, my workmanship wasn’t totally desirable since the gluing wasn’t evenly done, kinda due to the multiple layers as well, even though I had been really careful. Um. But alright, I used normal Uhu glue and double-sided tape… haha… *sweats profusely*
Other than that, it was also a bit of a difficult to cut the stuff to exact dimension cleanly by hand. So there were a bit offs here and there. Kinda bothered by it.
Top tracing layer done.
Middle layer done after killing my fingers with paper cut. Somehow I keep going back to paper cut. Tsk.
Sticking the top-middle-bottom layers together.
It’s also interesting how you can see the pattern through from the tracing layer in the light. I like the effect which shows since it’s supposed to represent the “stream of time”.
Attaching the covers.
(Double-sided tape. )
Making the pocket.
I used an orange-red for the pocket also to go with the motif of reds. The gold translucent paper wasn’t part of my plan at all until I visited Fancy Paper the second time right before I sent the stuff for printing. I just thought it looks really nice, and it turned out to complement the pages wonderfully.
As commented by Joy, the pieces of papers with the mythologies written on could have been of a thicker material.
Final
This zine project was an extremely fruitful one. I actually had many other ideas, and was excited to try it out. But anyway, I’m happy for my own work given the time limit, and for everyone else too. These were things I didn’t know I could do before. And most importantly, I wish to express a big thanks to Joy for being an incredibly encouraging tutor who always provides us with helpful feedback, and also giving her best in everything. For real. It was super important for us as it really gave us the freedom and spur to develop any ideas we had, and allowing us to realise our potential, so it helped a great deal. Thank you, Joy!
I was pretty nervous during the presentation, I don’t know why. Despite my weakness with public speaking, I’ve always believed that I don’t really have to excessively prepare for presentation on my work. Since we are the ones you know it the best, it will make you a natural orator. But I found that my concept this time was slightly more abstract that I had to write out a sort of a guideline script. Especially when I realised I tend to miss out quite a few points in my previous presentations. I didn’t want to miss out anything so in the end I was fumbling over my script and stumbling over my words. Oh public speaking.
Thank you for all the kind comments!
My OSS posts have evolved to become ridiculously wordy as I attempt to pen down every single detail of thought which had gone through my mind (I attempt). As much as I value every 2D project and my work, I thought it’s worth for me to document every worthy thought process and any stray ideas I had. Who knew they could be of help in the future? Or even if it were simply for future me to look in retrospective on myself in this moment. (Probably laugh/cringe at myself for being so ignorant or whatever.)
I had taken way too much time for these OSS posts, and it has become quite a personal space for me, as you can see, throwing in song references and all. (Funny how despite that I’m the kind of person who absolutely fails to keep a journal. I think it’s precisely because I’m pretty stubborn on recording literally everything which is why my lazy perfectionist ass can’t do it.)
For my O-level coursework back then, we were given one-word prompts as questions. The words were completely opened for any form of interpretations, and it is very often that one word could hold multiple definitions or nuances. It’s okay even if the interpretation one derived with doesn’t have a very apparent direct link to the word. (For example, my coursework was an installation about people’s relationship with the Internet, which was a response to the word “Instruments”. Gosh, this all feels really nostalgic. I could go on and ramble fondly about O-level Art days. Have been acquainted with Fancy Paper since then thanks to my paper cuts. I used to call it paper haven but honestly now it has been taking my money more than I like.)
As someone who is bound to get a creative block when being thrown at ambiguous instructions, like “you can do anything you like” prompts (hearing that already makes me nervous), it’s really important to me that I had a scope I could narrow down and focus on. So it seems like I had applied the O-level approach to the word “ghost”, and really, it ended up helping immensely with my development of ideas.
I didn’t consciously employ the whole framework, but somehow I just kept going back to the word, which had so much potential for exploration and interpretation. Even after four assignments (including the name tag exercise), I still had many more ideas I derived from the word “ghost” which I have yet to execute. This could be one of my biggest takeaway for this semester, I believe it will serve to aid in my creative processes in the future!
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