Assignment 1: Reflection

Let's just start by saying, I loved this Assignment. It's really helped to harness my creativity, submitting 3 postcards that expressed my personality and interests wasn't easy, it's like when someone asks what you want to eat, your mind just goes blank. But what I started was just brainstorming what represented me. As a budding designer, I can say that some sort of planning is one of the best things you can do when being creative, I find that as I'm sketching, ideas come to me faster than If I opened photoshop. For me, this is because I can get ideas onto paper with a pencil so much faster and because my mind literally spews out ideas (some terrible) once I get going, it's important to be able to record. Another thing I wanted to address before getting into each piece was how I struggled to be creative. At times I would be sat at my desk and literally have a block, no ideas would flow and I would end up just getting frustrated, now this may sound cheesy (like In a film) but I went for a shower and a walk in the park. By the time I got home I had so many ideas. Now It's not as if I can't be creative when sat at my desk because this is where I do all my work and I kind of need to be. But the change of scenery defiantly helped and if anything cleared my stress.

Postcard 1: For my first postcard I wanted to show what interests me in graphic design, and one thing I want to achieve was putting a subliminal message behind a piece of work. So I'm not just creating something beautiful but something with a meaning and also speaks about an issue that I believe is important in the world. I wanted to express how people want to post a completely different version of themselves online to make themselves look 'better'. To do this I sketched out a less attractive woman and had her moulding out a completely different version of herself like clay.
I then inked and coloured this image with

markers. The first problem I encountered was that my markers bled and smudged ( I think I'm in need of an upgrade). I went with it though as it could be corrected in photoshop. Something I wanted to try was using mixed media and include photos alongside my illustration that reflected the message. I also really liked the phrase, smile you're on camera, I chose to include this phrase mirrored, as firstly it expresses the overall idea of self reflection and when you take a selfie it literally mirrors the image.                                          
      

After reflection
the placement of the images and the colours made the whole thing just look muddy and cluttered. My tutor pointed out something that will stay with me for the whole course I'm sure, and that is to remove every element until you're not compromising the message of the image just trimming it down. I did exactly that, I removed all of the background images and just left the woman holding the camera, which was an image I loved because of how vintage and retro it felt.

The second thing I noticed was that it just looked like the woman was holding the face not moulding it, so I used that and put a Polaroid background around the girl and called it a selfie. That seemed to work a lot better in my mind. The camera image gave off the idea that she was being filmed and I liked the look that having two mediums inside one piece felt, however, the first image had too many photos so my illustration just looked out of place so trimming it down so the message was still visible made it look cleaner, I angled the image to give the piece a bit more movement and life, making it seem less static, I also chose to angle Vanity to follow, this gave the piece some flow and made the word fit more into the scene.

Postcard 2: Inside this postcard, I wanted to express my interests in Game of Thrones (I'm actually obsessed). Initially, I wanted to include characters from the show but reflecting on this idea it seemed

too plain and uninspired because it seems too obvious. I then decided that what I would do- to show off some design skills- would be to create my very own game of thrones scene, without using pictures from the show, I just used stock photography and photoshop to piece together this landscape. My initial idea was having a river, that at its mouth was wine red and then as it ran down would turn into more of a blood red. When I mocked it up it didn't look right, instead, it just looked like there was a light shining on the water and not actually changing colour. I then decided to change it to blue to make the water look frozen. This worked really well.                                                                          

This was the first image I created it, I removed some of the trees to make a clearing where I placed mountains to make the landscape more exciting and improve the illusion of this epic icy world. However there were a few problems I didn't like with this 1st draft, the big one was the trees felt too closed in, and I was trying to imply this vast icy land but closing the viewer in with shrubs. The second thing I didn't like was the fact that the text looked too bold and took away from the landscape. In this second draft, I got rid of

the trees altogether and just had the mountains in the background. I also upped the contrast of the mountains to balance out with the bold white text. I also added some more flames to the Targaryen banner, as the whole story is called A Song of Ice and Fire, and this adds imagery to the postcard. I also added a blue overlay to the mountains to enhance the deep blues. The 3rd and final draft all I did was change the font of the "winter is here" to Helvetica which is a gorgeous simple Sans serif. I did this because it acted as a 

contrast to the epic nature of the scene I have created.

Postcard 3: For this postcard, I finally wanted to make it based on me as a person. Obviously family is a massively important thing to me. However, I class the friends I have as an extension to my family. The image I used here was when all my mates when paintballing for my birthday.

One of the main reasons I chose this group photo was because it looked cool. Also, it was very tightly packed in and not spread out. But more the fact it looked cool. I cut the image out from the background and put into onto a sky scene. I applied both a hue and saturation and colour correction layer to the sky as the original colours didn't work when I added the group photo as it looked too harsh and clashed with the plain tans and greens of our overalls. The next thing I wanted to tackle was how plain the image looked. I had an idea to combine my love for the aesthetic of VHS film. I wanted to recreate that style. So I duplicated my photo 3 times and altered the RGB levels. After that I moved the layers slightly to the right or left so it came together to create this VHS glitch aesthetic, I also adjusted the hue and saturaiton. I wanted to include my favourite quote -which Is in fact also from my favourite person, Kanye West- "nothing in life is promised except death', I live by this quote because life can be whatever you make it, as the only inevitable thing is you'll die. So live a life you're happy with. I used a gothic font, as it is a font Kanye uses in some of his merch and also looks cool and also works nicely with the VHS look as it's an old style font. The last thing I did to complete this minimal postcard was to include my name. I chose to use white and blue, the blue is, in fact, the same blue used in the sunset, I then applied a gradient overlay to give life to the text and make it look less static. The text actually goes over the image, but what I did was reduce the opacity of any part of the text that touches the picture which created this really interesting effect and prevented the postcard from looking plain. I also decentralised the whole picture to work with the rule of thirds, which I know is a photography technique but worked well here and did what it needed to do and that was to make it look better to the eye.