Assignment 1: Say Hello

Assignment 1: Say Hello

This is the first assignment of illustration 1. It is all about telling my tutor about me with a greetings card. I had to include my: interests, inspirations, the materials I'm comfortable with and like to use and the things I want to get out of this course.

I began how I start every exercise and assignment. In my sketchbook. With this assignment, in particular, I created a spider diagram of everything about me. I was quite loose with it initially but then took everything and made a concise list. Things like my general interests were relatively easy and came to me quite quickly. What took slightly longer was my inspiration, I feel that with things that inspire us we don't necessarily recognise them straight away.

Spider Diagram

I have quite a few interests in my day to day life, I love food, and eating is one of my favourite past times, I also love technology, I'm really interested in computers and software and watch quite a lot of videos about tech even if most of the time I don't understand. Film and TV take up a lot of my time, I go to the cinema a lot less now than I used to but I still really enjoy it, I think everyone likes TV but I love Game of Thrones and currently Greys Anatomy. Whenever I drive or just at home most of the time I'm listening to music, this is where I get quite a lot of my inspiration for design, it's not just within specific design projects but I feel like music (especially Hip-Hop) is packed with creativity and is very progressive. A lot of design is reflective of the artist, usually, music is less literal with a lot of deeper meanings and you can read into the artist's lyrics, the album art and promotional material also continue this trend. I don't necessarily get inspiration for writing songs but the idea of being original and authentic is something that fuels me.

Flower Boy: Tyler the creator

Good Kid M.A.A.D City: Kendrick Lamar

Graduation: Kanye West

Lens: Frank Ocean

Daytona: Pusha T

These are just a hand full of album covers within the hip hop world that stand out to me. I'm not going to review each one of them individually however they aren't the way they are without thought and ideas. For example, Frank Ocean didn't just randomly create this cover for his single 'lens', he put time and thought into each element and what it represented.

Album cover design is an art form and the message of the whole album has to be conveyed on the cover it's much like a book. What sets it apart though is the experimentation its avoiding cliches and creating something original that's what I feel people consider 'cool'. I think this response is given to covers that are different and creative. I want to strive to be outside of the box where possible.

A big interest of mine is the world. As broad as that sounds I like to know what's going on, even if it's just a loose understanding of the worlds politics I hate being uninformed. I often read the news and watch a lot of youtube videos about current affairs. This does link to my design interests as well, like I said in the 'Getting the Gist' exercise I think design can be a powerful tool in raising awareness as its something quick and impactful, the consumer doesn't have to read through long editorials but instead receives the information/situation through an image. The more information you can convey, the stronger the design.

With this course, in particular, I want to obviously learn more about illustration however I main thing is to be able to apply these skills and knowledge to the areas of design I'm most passionate about, for example, branding.

This is the second page of sketches I completed, to begin I syphoned through the list of interests and inspirations to create a list of priorities. These are the things I want to priorities in the greetings card any extras can be placed into the greetings card after as long as they fit. I tried to explore the possibility of adding music as an inspiration to the greetings card by using coloured sound waves, this way I could tie in bold and colourful designs which is another inspiration of mine. After drawing out a thumbnail I decided against using this as the actual sound doesn't always gives me the inspiration its more of the expressionism and creative freedom to reflect the artist's message. That's why I decided to branch out (quite literally), I wanted to focus on my message, the message I wanted to convey with this card and begin to tell my tutor a bit about who I am. I had this idea of 'growth' because throughout this course I want to grow and become a better designer, ultimately I wanted to grow my illustration ability enough to be able to combine that into my existing design skills and passions. I think being able to illustrate is not always drawing still life or characters, for me, it's about taking an idea and being able to convey that with imagery, its an amazing tool for creative expression. To represent growth I created a tree, growing from the tree was the earth however I drew it to also be a brain as well, I wanted to show how much the world grows my brain and expands it. From further research though I found this to be a pretty common trend and not very original.

I then advanced on this by combining in travel, this Is a huge inspiration to me, travel expands my knowledge of the world and introduces me to culture, sometimes as well it inspires me physically, recently I took a trip to Berlin, the design trends there inspired me so much. My idea was to have a bulging suitcase, literally, it represents travel however it's bulging and about to explode because metaphorically it's my brain expanding after I return.

I also wanted to touch on the idea of being 'bigger than myself' because another thing that's important to me is how design can achieve things bigger than me. For example, it can do more than just produce a website for a client: it can help design powerful adverts to raise awareness for causes that often go overlooked, it can be used in education to produce literature that engages young children, it can help NGO and non profits to have a voice as well as so much more. That is why the hand that is pulling the suitcase has multiple outlines surrounding it, I then developed that by filling the outlines in with multiple bright and vibrant colours.

Being authentic and true to my self is very important to me, I want to have a unique style and voice and hope that through this course I can discover the materials and techniques that work best for me. Whilst exploring this I had the idea to have a brain, that brain would have motion blur and a speed limit sign of 1000 miles, it was a small idea but it represents my brain literally going 1000 miles an hour, it causes me to lose focus easily during tasks and move onto something different, I'm trying to tackles this but currently its just something I have to live with.

During my research for this, I noted down a couple of pastel artists whose work I really enjoyed, they were. Wolf Khan and Cindy Betzer. Here is an example of their work. I like both of their uses of colour, it's bold and exciting. What I really like about pastel artists is how experimental and free they are, I think this reflects largely on the physical features of pastels, they are not fine and precise and artists embrace that with large patches of colour. The way the pigment of pastels can be blended with your finger is also something that reflects in the artwork.

Cindy Betzer

Wolf Khan

Whenever you search 'authentic' you find many images like these.

It's hard to step away from this metaphor of being different from the crowd. I couldn't just ignore this imagery as it represents exactly what I want. Instead, I tried to combine that into my greetings card. The standard 'be yourself' motivational image has a bunch of one thing, be that eggs or pencils all being the same and then one of that 'thing' being different. I thought about combining two of my favourite medians within the art, digital illustrations and pastel drawings. My idea was to have several pastel trees and then layered on top of that would be one digitally illustrated tree, I then developed this idea to be more abstract, I discarded the trunk of the tree as that's brown and boring and just used the leaves, I could then create a background using them.

The next development came with adding travel into the mix. My favourite travel-related image was one from Canada of me and my girlfriend Klaudia canoeing on Lake Lousie.

Somehow I wanted to add this into my work, one thing I noticed from my tree sketches was how the wavy lines could actually become waves, angling and placing the trees in the right way could make the top be one solid continuous wavy line for the canoe to sit on. I then began to draw!

I started with an illustration of Klaudia and I in the canoe.

I used the traditional pencil to sketch, and then 0.3mm and 0.7mm fineliners to ink the outline, I also inked the solid blacks, I prefer this method than sketching and inking on the computer as I can have more control and be more precise, my definite weakness is faces and hands for sure, I'm worried about making my girlfriend look like a poorly drawn demon. That is the one thing that took the most time, I was constantly erasing and starting again

After I was happy with my sketch and inking, I took the page into Photoshop, this is my prefered software of choice as I'm most comfortable with the tools and the process is a lot more fluid and free from restrictions.

Unedited photo of the sketch in photoshop

Sketch after applying the curves layer

 To begin with, I created a curves layer, this allowed me to pick out the black and white values, this meant I could tell photoshop that the sketchbook paper that looks slightly yellow is meant to be plain white and the dark grey ink is supposed to be solid black. Already this improves the look of the drawing and helps when I come to paint it.

I then used the magic wand tool to erase all the paper inside the drawing so it just left the outlines, I then used the eraser to clear up the jagged lines. This meant I could create a colour layer below the outline layer and avoid colouring over the lines, this proved to be very accurate.

Next, I added a base layer of colour to Klaudia's coat and lifejacket and the canoe, I would later go on to add shading and texture.

One of the things I was nervous about painting was skint tones, I wanted them to be entirely natural, I found a skin tone hex palette online and it worked great. It meant I could get accurate shading with having marginally darker tones so it didn't stand out like a sore thumb.

One of the smaller things I fixed in Photoshop was her mouth, I tried to avoid any lines at all when it comes to the teeth and focused more on layer colour instead. I think it came out a lot more natural and less demonish. I also went through all the jagged lines within the sketch and smoothed them out, because I did this with a brush and in black it just made them stand out more and look uniform, before this the majority of the lines weren't pure black instead lots of different shades of grey.

Overall I'm happy how the final painting came out, I put a lot of time into making sure the lines were smooth and defined. I wanted to feel proud of my work and knew that if I rushed through it then I would resent myself, this is something I'm working on a lot within my life in general. I want to slow down and focus on specifics, I can often rush onto the next thing because I get distracted too easily.

Things did change, from the page above you can see I started experimenting with butterflies, I think they represent growth really well and this is something I want to focus on throughout this course, I want to make sure I'm learning and growing and doing everything in my power to make that happen. There is also far more experimentation available within the detail of their wings, I combined this with my previous idea, what I'm going to have is a selection of pastel coloured butterflies and then the main focus of the greetings card is going to be a vibrant digitally painted butterfly, not only does this include 2 different medians of art but it still also draws from the philosophy of being authentic and yourself. Given the freedom of colours and patterns for the wings of the butterfly I'm going to try and incorporate the colours of Lake Louise, I think the strong Aqua and turquoise will be perfect together and can form a free-flowing wave-like pattern. I can then set the drawing of the canoe on top of this.

The first thing I set out to do was make my vibrant butterfly, I searched the web for inspiration and found quite a few butterfly images, one particularly stood out to me, that was this one.

I really loved how it had a free form, and appeared quite psychedelic. When compared to a lot of other butterflies I found they all seemed to have outlines within the wings, I think when looking at real-life butterflies there are no outlines inside the wings its colour merging together. I wanted to keep the natural look with my illustration. Furthermore, this also makes my illustration resemble the flowing waters of Lake Louise which is what I would love to capture.

I began sketching out ideas

One of the very first things that came to me the moment I put pen to paper was that I should have half the butterfly off the page, not only would this be improved composition and follow the rule of thirds but It would allow me to have lots of space for the illustration of me and Klaudia in the canoe and then the pastel butterflies in the background. 

For my butterfly I want to include a few patterns that resemble flowing water, I really liked this one and loved the varying line widths and how there are lines that are stroked and then others that are filled, it just seems to be all over the place and heading in all directions, I think this is a perfect way to incorporate water in the wing of the butterfly and to better show why I'm placing the canoe on top.

I then took my sketch into illustrator

I began to piece together this pattern, I already knew given the complexity and amount of different components how long this would take, needless to say, it definitely took up most of the day. I just laid out the basics first, I didn't line up any of the strokes or make sure there weren't any overlapping elements. I'd save that fine tuning for later.

This was what it came out like, just basic flat colours, I wanted a stronger blue so I began to mix around with colours, I really wanted to incorporate the green of the water.

As you can see with the colours I went for high contrast, this deep blue is one of my favourite colours to use when designing, it just has a tendency to pop and be really vibrant. It also goes perfectly with white and this further adds to the levels of contrast.

In terms of fine tuning what I did was first make sure that all the lines lined up and weren't overlapping, I then used the anchors on my shapes to make sure the curves looked fluid and natural.

Here is the final illustration, I used different tones to create shadows amongst the pattern to really give it life and avoid it looking flat and dull. This I feel accompanied the fact that some elements were on top of others, it gave it depth and seemed as if there were layers. I also added highlights in white. One final little tweak was just to make the swirl on the far right a stroke instead of filled, I felt that the pattern needed balance and this did just that.

I had other patterns that I wanted to add to the butterfly, this was the most complicated of the 3.

I first took my sketch into illustrator, where I resized the image on an A3 artboard.

I followed the same process as with the previous pattern and laid out a flat single colour version, I did this first one quite rough but then went and tweaked all the anchor points to create smooth lines.

I then copied over the same colours as I used on the previous pattern and adjusted one of the elements of the pattern to be a stroke. To achieve this double stroke line I set the original shape to stroke to have one thick line. I then expanded this stroke so it had a path either side of the line. After that when you change it back to stroke, it strokes both lines giving a symmetrical and equally spaced shape.

After that I used a technique I discovered watching illustrator tutorials, I wanted to add shading and highlights to my drops of water. The highlight was simple I just created a curved line however with the shadow on the bottom it was a little different. I first used the path of the droplet to accurately line up my first anchor point from there I created the curved part inside to follow the outline of the droplet after I just joined up both anchor points.

What that then allowed me to do was use a tool in illustrator called interest. I first cut out the original droplet with CMD X and then pasted it in the same place with CMD F, I did this because when you press the intersect tool with both the droplet and the shadow piece selected the droplet disappears and it leaves you with the intersection, this meant that I could then just press CMD F again and my droplet reappeared

I then adjusted the colour of the shadow to a darker blue.

To finish off the piece I gave shadows and highlight to each of the droplets, this gave them a real sense of depth just allows them to pop more and stand out. With both of my completed patterns, one of my favourite aspects of them is the varying strokes and different shapes within the patterns, I think it adds quite a bit of character and in a way makes it appear quite modern.

I then created a third pattern, I won't go into much detail about how I constructed it as it used the same techniques as the previous two.

The next step was to create the actual wing of the butterfly to which I would place my patterns onto, now this is where I noticed that these patterns would look strange and out of place just on a solid colour wing. I hadn't thought that much ahead as to how I was going to fill the space around the wing. I then did a little more research and looked at more photos of butterflies and digital illustrations of them. A lot of the illustrations had almost scale looking elements to it, these parts then had a symmetrical space running through them, I love using illustrator however one of my weakest parts is making spacing equal, I knew this was going to be a challenge.

My solution is, instead of making it a space between between the 'scales' I would use a stroke, that way the thickness of the line would be accurate and equal, furthermore if I then made the stroke the same colour as the background it would mean that it would appear like it was a space anyway.

Within this whole assignment producing the wing was in the most challenging aspect. Because it was such a large surface area it was hard to make it look interesting, because I was painting it digitally there wasn't much room to add texture that would come with traditional painting. I left it for a bit and came back to my card, I had the idea of using the gradient tool to make the butterfly look less flat. Originally the gradient was a light grey into a darker grey but it was actually Klaudia who suggested using blue, I thought this may be too much blue however it worked well and made the butterfly look and feel more natural and consistent. I next added a few smaller details to the butterfly including the antenna and the second part of the wing just to fill in some more negative space and again to make the butterfly to look more natural. 

One thing I'm happy with is how I layered the canoe illustration underneath the butterfly patterns, this almost looks like waves lapping over the canoe, it all comes together really nicely in the end. 

What I had to do next to finish the whole thing off was to produce my soft pastel butterflies, this actually brings the meaning to my card and how I want to be authentic and stand out, without these in the background the meaning is lost. I first drew the butterflies out in pencil on this really textured watercolour paper. In my opinion, this paper gives an extra layer of detail just through the texture, plus the pigment of the colours sits really well on it. I tried to vary the shapes and sizes of them, from what I found there weren't as many variations as I thought. I then inked them using a 0.3mm fineliner and then with a 0.7mm fineliner filled in some solid black sections. 

Afterwards, I started to use my soft pastels, with each butterfly I began by creating a base layer with the lightest colour, I tend to find there is a lot of forgiveness with pastel, especially when it comes to staying in the lines. With the pastels, one thing I love about them is how you apply the colour, what I tend to do is just place patches of colour down on the page and use my finger to smudge it around to fill the butterfly. I love how free flowing it is, you don't have to be as precise and orderly you can experiment. I then added a darker colour on the outside of the butterfly and faded that into the lighter colour to create a gradient. To complete the butterfly I used a complimenting colour to the gradient just to mix it up a little and create a bit of contrast. To set the pastel in place I use hairspray, it was something I learnt in school and has worked for me ever since.

At this point in my mind I could see the whole thing coming together, it has been a long process but I wanted to take my time with everything and make sure my thought process was all mapped out within this learning log, that's why I chose to annotate every stage of this project as it happened, that way it was all fresh in my mind and then didn't leave me with a mammoth task of writing it all out at the end. 

In Photoshop I took my butterfly sketch and cut each of the butterflies out onto their own layer, from there I did enhance them slightly when I took the photo some of the colour was lost in the process and they didn't look the same as on paper. I just used a few adjustment layers to bring back the colour and up the contrast and vibrancy. I then went and created a pattern with the different butterflies and took it into Illustrator from there I lowered the transparency and made it the background of my card. 

After a few little additions and tweaks to the card, this was the final outcome. The 'few' tweaks where mainly just to the butterfly, I added a small shadow to him, some eyes and what I can presume is his spine. I also thought the small bit of wing I added to at the bottom to act as the 2nd wing was too plain so I added some patterns to it. 

CONCLUSION: From the very beginning of this Assignment I knew it was going to be slightly difficult to express myself with illustrations. However after some brainstorming and thought, I had a clear direction I just had to focus myself. I think in reflection the final card doesn't initially express the authenticity metaphor the way I expected to, I think you have to really look closely or have me explain it, If I was to repeat this process I would make it more obvious, however ultimately I feel like this card works and very happy with how it came out. I really love the mixture of illustration styles and this project really let me have fun with different methods.