YCN - Childline
“Produce illustrations or animations for Childline to help 13-18 year olds going through a tough time.”
This brief explores an area that I am particularly fascinated in - my own mental health has been challenged before, so I felt as if this brief would be perfect for me.
Young adults find it difficult to talk about mental health.
Mental health and the change for mental health is becoming more mainstream. The stigma around mental health, finding it embarrassing or shameful is ever so slowly diminishing.
The brief specifies to not show anything harmful or negative as this could be potentially triggering to those who are currently experiencing hardship.
Inspiration/research for the brief
Focusing on the positivity side, I came up with three styles I have chosen to illustrate and transferred the sketches through Office-lens to begin making them through illustrator.
- First sketch showing Childline are available however your feeling.
- Second sketch is showing how there are cleaner, happier times ahead
- Third sketch is demonstrating how talking to childlike can be nourishing your mind and mental wellbeing
Once the sketch was in Illustrator. I traced the image and converted them into shapes, because my skills in Illustrator are almost none, I found this difficult but was able to get assistance from my colleagues. I wanted the shape of the faces to be spherical and the found the alignment of the nose and hair were especially challenging. Once I was happy with the outline, I expanded the shapes and duplicated them to another artboard.
Applying the same techniques from the development onto each draft was straight forward however, the third draft became very difficult as I wasn’t pleased with any of the outcomes. I tried vectoring the leafs and stems but nothing felt right.
I have personified these shapes to resemble a person so I decided to have continuity within these outcomes and make use the same face for all the designs.
Close ups of the final adjustments made to the final outcomes, highlighting the arrangement of shapes and details.
Final illustrations for the Childline brief.
