Hello! This is one of the last few projects of our semester and I elated to receive it because I can finally touch on purely creating illustration, which I have always wanted to do but don’t got the time to.

We are tasked to create 4 rows of Me + Social setting = imagined outcome.

First steps: Inspirations

Currently, I am really into a particular style. Which is playful, bright, and kind of pop art style. I am also having a phase where I am in love with pink, purple, and blue hues.

Therefore, certain illustrators like Martina Paukova, Rachel Denti and Henn Kim really appeal to me. I also snooped through Pinterest.com to give me more ideas to creatively express myself. Here is my Pinterest board of illustrations that really helped me formulate my final product:

Loving how the colours are in these pins, and how the artists manage to convey their messages through very quirky and interesting ways.

I especially like her series in the first row, where the style is very bold and in your face.  Loving how she worked with different shades of purple as well!

Love the way he expresses in the illustrations! I also enjoyed its simplicity with its black and white colour scheme.

These are where I got my inspirations for my self portraits, I like the way the body is drawn with its lengthy arms and legs. I combined it with Rachel Denti’s style of facial features and of course referenced it with my own face!

Colour scheme:

Then went on to explore my colour schemes. After trying various combinations, I picked 3 colours came from Martina Paukova’s work. Then, used https://coolors.co/ to generate more. It is a very good site that helps you generate colours easily and is my personal favourite as it is so simple. You can check it out if you want to! This is the colour combination that I confirmed and stuck through for my entire project:

From the beginning, I was already in love with this colour set and stuck with it all the way. Though you can tell in my final piece that I do favour certain colours over the rest, and used some as complimentary colours.

The planning stage

 

Then I came up with a set of titles for my specific Artboards and drew it out on paper in class:

After that, I started to illustrate some of it!

However, there was a problem. After doing a few more boards (which I did not manage to capture much to my dismay), I realised that my work is quite direct and not as interesting as it could be. As you can see from the images above, I initially plan for holiday = plane, relax = beach, dog = dog. Which was rather plain in my opinion.

On top of it, I was very unsatisfied because it really looks too much like the works of the artists I referenced, and I felt that I had no originality and creativity.

I decided to stop what I was doing and reformulate the boards and titles. I decided to make it more visually funny and have a double meaning. This process took me quite long and I put this project at the back of my mind to marinate and formulate as I completed the other assignments.

My illustration workspace, messy as I was experimenting and throwing/adding ideas into the boards.

But I think all the second guessing and time spent to improve is worth it! Next post is my finalized boards and how I can improve on it!