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Illustration and Visual Narrative / Task 1

26.8.2021- 16.9.2021 (Week 1 - Week 4)
Cheryl Voo Yie Qi / 0349878
Illustration and Visual Narrative / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Task 1 / Exercise

LECTURES

Week 1 (26/8/2021) - Introduction
Today is the first day of Illustration and Visual Narrative class, it was lectured by Miss Anis and Miss Jennifer. They briefly introduced the Module Information Booklet (MIB) and what we are going to do in this class: 
  • The Vormator challenge 
  • Webtoon with a horror theme
  • Mostly using Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Animate, and Adobe Photoshop 

We are going to sketch out our character design for the Vormator Challenge only using these 8 shapes:


Week 2 ( 2/9/2021) - Introduction to Character Design
Today, Miss Anis introduced us to Character design :

Stylized designs are what stands out most :
  • Iconic
  • Created easily
  • Profitable
What makes a character design unique?
  1. Shapes
    - It defines a character from one another ( This is what sets the iconic look! )
    - Explore the possibilities of interesting shapes for your designs


    Fig 2, character's shape ( Movie- Spirited away), https://www.brynnart.com/blog/tag/spirited+away


    Fig 3, character's shape ( Movie- Aladdin), https://www.animatorisland.com/character-design-practice-shapes/




  2. Colour
    - Colours play an important role at determining who are the heroes or villians.
    - Different colours give an impression on a character ( Colours have qualities that can cause certain emotions in people! )



    Fig 4, Fin and Jake, https://www.pngkey.com/detail/u2e6o0e6i1y3u2o0_finn-jake-adventure-time-hora-de-aventura-hora/


  3. Emphasis and Contrast
    - When you pick one visual element in a character and exaggerate it, it can make the character outstanding and memorable. 
    - Sometimes picking a cultural element and adding it to a design makes it uniquely authentic.


    Fig 5, Hercules and Hades, https://www.wattpad.com/782456565-ship-or-skip-hercules-x-hades




  4. Harmony 
    - All shapes, lines, colours, motifs, patterns must be put together in a tasteful manner.
    - Every element used must work together like they compliment each other.
    - A balance of visual elements that has a visual heirachy.
  5. Expressions / Poses
    - Character's behaviour / quirks / personalities that are visually shown ( Audience can interperate them)



Fig 7, Anna's expression (Movie-Frozen),https://www.pinterest.com/pin/725712927458805124/



Miss Anis also shared some good character designs like Mike and Sully from Monsters, Inc. and characters in The Incredibles. She also encouraged us to use the color wheel in Adobe Color to get more explorations when working on other forms of visual artwork in the future.



Fig 8, Color wheel in Adobe Color, https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel


After that, Miss Jennifer lectured about how to use Adobe Illustrator by learning the basics first. After learning the basics, Miss Jennifer demonstrated how to design the Vormator Challenge's character using Adobe Illustrator and we started trying to do it at the same time for easier catch-up.

Week 3 ( 9/9/2021) - Visual Techniques : Composition 1
What is composition?
- The way you position and design the elements of your illustrations 
- Composition refers to how your image is put together, and there are tricks you can keep in mind that, if used in the right way, can take your art to the next level and make a piece really grab your audience’s attention.

When composing a scene, creating an effective sense of the space is very important.  Keeping these levels in mind as you design is an easy way to establish depth and encourage strong compositional planning.

Foreground (close to the viewer), midground, and background (far away).

Fig 9, foreground, midground and background, https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/80440/student/315202?task=4


Types of shots / composition 

Fig 15, example of worm's eyeview shot, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/66780006959331835/

Composition Rules (Observation is key)
  1. A balanced distribution of positive and negative spaces


    Fig 16,example of positive and negative spaces,https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/frozen-2-generation-snowflake-disney-climate-crisis


    Fig 17, example of positive and negative spaces,https://www.shortlist.com/news/the-best-new-years-eve-scenes-in-movies

Week 4 ( 16/9/2021) - Visual Techniques : Composition 2
The first known picture to make use of linear perspective was created by the Florentine architect Fillipo Brunelleshi (1377-1446). The linear perspective system projected the illusion of depth onto a two dimensional plane by use of 'vanishing points'. 
- Form, Volume, Buildings recede into the distance, light and shadows.


Fig 18, The Tribute Money (Masaccio), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tribute_Money_(Masaccio)


Fig 19, Last Supper ( Leonardo da Vinci), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Supper


Fig 20, The School of Athens (Raphael) , https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-School-of-Athens-by-Raphael-1505-a-fine-example-of-architectural-perspective_fig4_252564519


What is "perspective" in art ?
  • To create depth
  • An illusion 
  • A representation of objects (from a 2D surface, to create a 3D optical illusion)
Types of perspectives ( more details in further reading)
  • 1 point
  • 2 point
  • 3 point 
  • 4 - 5 points (fisheye)

Fig 21, perspectives, https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-mediums/learn-to-draw-perspective/


Parallax effect (often used in comics)
- Layers to depict depth
- It makes the background move at a different speed than the foreground content.
- People use it on images, which they place between sections that have a solid background color.

Fig 26, Parallax effect, https://medium.com/@samdbeckham/css-parallax-effect-b6ce9d71c0bb

As long as they mimic "3 Dimensions" , a sense of depth is created.

Fig 27, background, middleground, foreground, https://www.photographyaxis.com/photography-articles/foreground-middleground-and-background-photography/


INSTRUCTION


Week 1 (26/8/2021)
  1. Design and create one unique character by using the given sets of shapes.
  2. Start with a rough sketch.
    - you’re allowed to rotate, flip and duplicate the shapes
    - you are not obliged to use all the shapes

Fig 35,vormator shapes

Week 2 (2/9/2021)
  1. Use Adobe Illustrator to create and digitize your design.
Week 3 ( 9/9/2021)
  1. Design our own game card using the character that we created in Vormator Challenge.
Week 4 ( 16/9/2021)
  1. Add background to the game card behind the character.
Exercises
Exercise 1
Idea exploration



Fig 36, character sketches (27/8/2021)




Fig 37, character sketches (27/8/2021)


Fig 38, character sketches (27/8/2021)



Fig 39, character sketches (27/8/2021)

I started my character design with a few sketches using the Vormator shapes, my idea was creating ailens so I created them in an unusual way.
At last, I decided to use Fig 37,the one with antlers and crab legs. My idea was a crab and a deer's hybrid.

Character story
Planet Kepler-186 is the second "earth" discovered by human. The distance between the earth and Kepler-186 is 557.7 light years. There are a group of alien species living there, and their characteristic is that every creature can survive amphibiously. This mixture of crab and deer is called "Crabdee". "Crabdee" is a member of the planet Kepler-186's army. Because the earth which human lived has been destroyed, they began to look for the second "earth" to live in. In order to prevent humans from occupying their land, they discussed a plan to protect their own homeland.

Digitization using Illustrator
At first, I'm using green and blue like the colour of Monsters, Inc but I did some experiment using the colour wheel that Miss Anis introduced us, then at last Im using the complementary colours - blue and yellow as the main colour and added a little touch of purple and green.


Fig 40, Digitization of sketch (with colours) (9/9/2021)
I added gradient and shadow into some of the elements to give it a 3D effect.

Fig 41, Applying gradient and shadow to it (9/9/2021)



Fig 42, Final character (PDF) (23/9/2021)


Exercise 2
Idea exploration
I search on the internet to find some inspirations for my game card design, and here are some of them:


Fig 43, example of game card design, https://dribbble.com/tags/cardgame 



Fig 44, example of game card design, https://www.fairway3games.com/free-poker-sized-card-templates/



Fig 45,  example of game card design,https://www.shutterstock.com/search/card+game


And here is my sketch for my game card design,


Fig 46, my sketch for game card design (back and front)(23/9/2021)

On the front of the card, I wanted to create a galaxy background with planets on it to match my theme and the back with my characters on it. For the card number, I used 2 because "Crabdee" has 2 antlers, 2 pairs of hands, and two legs so I used 2 as the card number. 
And here's the result, It is slightly different than what I sketched because I changed my mind especially the borders because I wanted to keep it simple and neat so I chose to use a white thin border but not a thick border that stick to the sides.

Fig 47, game card (back)

For the front of my card, I purposely make the top and bottom's white parts different sizes, the top ones will be smaller than the bottom ones. Because I think that if they were in the same size it will be sufficient space for the other things.


Fig 48, game card (front)
At last, I did some changes by adding gradient to the planet Kepler-186 at the back of my card. For the front, I also added two ufos to make it more like an alien, because I think that aliens should have ufos so I added in.


Fig 49, Final PDF(25/9/2021)

REFLECTIONS
The process of creating our own character and game card is interesting and fun, and I learned a lot from Miss Anis and Miss Jennifer in the use of Adobe Illustrator. Through this exercise, I'm started to get familiar with Adobe Illustrator because I'm actually first time using it and I'm still learning, hope I will master it very soon in the coming exercises. On the other hand, creating the character is a little hard for me because I don't really have a lot of ideas using these Vormator shapes but I did come out with a few ideas and that's really fun that you can randomly arrange them into different characters. 

Colors are also a very important factor when creating characters and game cards. The match of the colors will affect our design's look. It is interesting to match different colors to the character that I create but I didn't show it out but it was fun to experiment using colors. 
FURTHER READINGS
Miss Anis gave us some notes on composition and perspective, here are some of them:

Fig 50, "Six composition" written by Jazza 

One-point perspective
- Here a single vanishing point establishes the guide lines. All objects recede toward this one point. 

Fig 22, One point perspective, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/107101297361685108/


Two-point perspective
- Place two vanishing points on the horizon and establish two sets of overlapping perspective lines fanning out from them

Fig 23, Two point perspective, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/624944885784421809/


Three-point perspective
- A third vanishing point on the vertical axis gives you a far broader range of angles, and really allows your viewers to “look down” into your city.

Fig 24, Three-point perspective, https://www.craftsy.com/post/three-point-perspective/#


Isometric view
- The previous three forms of perspective are invaluable for rendering dynamic views of your city, but they aren’t always the best choice when actually designing individual elements. Creating detailed concepts of individual buildings, it’s more beneficial to use a simple isometric view, since it allows you to clearly present three sides of your design without distorting perspective or obscuring details.


Fig 25, Isometric grid, https://pixlr.com/stock/details/1211106496-isometric-graph-paper-background-with-plotting-tri/
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