Project Brief:
In my final project for Digital Illustration my classmates and I created five different illustrations for a research project called Dyslexia Research Project of the Center for No Boundary Thinking. This project was a big group project because each student had to create illustrations for five different words. The research project was close to my heart because I want to give children who have the same diagnosis as me a chance to make their reading better or easier. I have felt the frustrations involved with reading personally and loved the idea of creating something that would make reading easier and more beneficial for the children. Some of the parameters I had to follow was the illustrations cannot be boxed in, no words or letters could be placed on the images, we must use the approved color palette, and everything has to be cohesive. As a class, we discussed what we all agreed to include in all of our images. For example, if I drew a red car, I had to share that red car file to make sure the person next to me is using it in their image. A big characteristic we all agreed was to make the heads and eyes big with minimum sizes for the mouth and body. Everyone had to download two different brush palettes to make it more cohesive.
Sketches:
After discussing ideas and how to make everything cohesive, I picked a list of what images I would be creating. I picked list seventeen and the words included were: last, car, game, old, and ride. After I received the list I wanted, my professor wanted us to do more research about the artist chosen and their particular style. What I learned from my research about my artist’s style was she used very big characteristics for the head and the eyes, minimum on the mouth, and tiny bodies that outlined shape and shadows with lines. It was difficult to follow this particular style because it was another artist’s style and I am so used to drawing with my style so I had to take a step back and figure what I wanted to do on each of my images and incorporate her specific techniques within the illustrations. When sketching out the different images, I created a minimum of ten sketches for each word. Before I could sketch different ideas I used the idea technique of a spider web where one idea connects to another idea to another idea, and etc. This technique was helpful for me because I came up with more ideas then I did when starting out and it helped me determine if the ideas corresponded together cohesively. For example, when coming up with ideas for ride I thought of riding a bike, horse, or riding with your best friend.
Refined Sketches:
A lot of my classmates loved the idea of riding with your best friend because that concept was very child friendly. Before picking out the idea of the many sketches I created for each word, my professor told the class to pick something that was child friendly and where a child will understand without getting lost or confused. After picking the ideas I loved with the help of my classmates, I went into Procreate and defined the sketch to build
in Adobe Illustrator.
Color Palette:
This is the color palette my class, and I had to follow. Later, my professor added two different shades of green, gray, and white.
Process:
When defining the concept into a better idea, I learned how to use Procreate better by adding imported different images from the web to make my idea come to life. After drawing the concept, I imported the image into Adobe Illustrator and learned more tricks on how to use Illustrator better. A good example is using the Creative Cloud Libraires, if you are a designer and familiar with CC Libraires, your will discover that your job will be faster and easier with this wonderful program that is available. Creative Cloud Libraires gives you the chance to put everything and anything into this big file and drag and drop it into your main file. This was such a big time saving move and I think I will love using Creative Cloud Libraires for freelance or company work later on. Another big thing I learned was how to import brushes because we all needed to use the same brushes and after discussing the specific brushes with the class we all realized that we needed to pick what brushes we all could use to make the illustrations cohesive. This method was kind of like Creative Cloud Libraries, but the only difference was you had to open the file and add files into your brushes panel.
Work in Process to Final:
From the work in progress to the final, some of the comments from my peers were that I needed to add in shading or texture onto each image to make it appear more cohesive, which I agreed with them on. A good point someone mentioned to make was making sure that I included different color shapes on the card games to make it appear more like a actual game then kids just holding cards. I received a lot of positive comments on all of my images. I was relieved that my professor’s method about adding in one dark and one light shade of green added the perfect texture composition for shadowing and composition. She saw my grass and road were orange and wanted to change that to make it not as confusing for the children and appear more realistic for them. I wasn’t the only one who had illustrated with orange roads and was joyful that she included green into the color palette.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In summary, I am happy I was included in this project because not only was I changing children’ lives and making it easier for them to read better but the gentlemen who oversaw this project method said that I can include this project into my portfolio. That makes me so happy because I want to have a lot of things in my portfolio to help educate me and prepare me for when I take a harder class called Professional Practice and Portfolio Capstone. The more experience and knowledge I can obtain just helps to prepare me for more advanced skills and techniques to come. This project helped me learn to ask questions at the beginning and taught me how to ask enough questions so I could get a better idea of what I was doing as the designer. This project helped me become a better designer because it helped me create my first design contract and understand the deadlines illustrators and designers have to make in order to become successful and create and finish their projects
in a timely manner.
