My Various Colour Scheme

The colour scheme I chosen in the end was the celebration colours. I choose this scheme as it fit the festival well. The colours are vibrant and loud just as what I visualize a music festival would be. Also, the celebration colour postcards uses the same colour associated with tiger beer—you can’t have a music event without boozes right? However, I had a hard time deciding which final scheme I should use because the pop colour is also just as loud and vibrant and had a retro feeling towards it. I like how the cool and bright colour scheme turned out too. As I’m a rush of time I shall end of this entry with going through the illustration process. The Final Product:

Back

The message that I wish to convey to the public is the importance of maintaining strong bones. Hence, in order to achieve this, I visualize milk being pour into a bone to communicate the message.

In order to do, I need to find a photo of a bone. Below is the photo of the bone I used.

The Pork Bone

According to my mom, this is a pork bone used for pork stew. Before I used the picture for my poster, I cut the bone in to half clone it and join it back as shown below. I had done so as I was unhappy with the bone shape and also to achieve symmetry for aesthetic purpose.

Next, I need photos of milk. One photo will be a shot of milk pouring into a cup and another of milk being splash out. To create the splashing shot, we threw something light, a mineral water bottle cap, which is also white to “camouflage” when it is splash into the milk.  After numerous attempts, and making a mess out of upper deck below are the photos taken.

With the photo taken, I began the Photoshop magic. This poster perhaps is the hardest Photoshop project that I undertaken. Below is the steps I taken in summary to create the poster.

Photoshop Process

Step 1:  Insert a black background for the poster design. Under Image > Mode, I change the colour to greyscale.

Step 2: Insert the photo of the bone. Next, I use the clone tool to even out the texture of the bone and also to remove the “blood” on the bone. Also I applied to Gaussian blur at level 10, to reduce the visibility of the uneven bone texture. The result:

Step 3: Insert the milk splash. First, use the eraser tool to take away the cup leaving only the splash. I also erase part of the milk splash, which is aesthetically not pleasing. Then, I used the clone tool to blend the milk texture and the bone texture together.

Step 4: Insert the photo of milk being pour in. Similar process to step 3 applied. Erase the unnecessary parts and clone to blend the texture.

Step 5: Insert small splash droplets around the bone. Small droplet are cropped out from the photo of the milk splash and then place around the bone. The result:

Step 6: Insert the copywriting for the poster.

Step 7: Change colour back to CMYK colour and add in the logos. And the final product:

Design Principles

I used several design principles to guide the design of the poster. By doing the poster in grayscale, I applied unity to the poster, by applying a consistent colour scheme.

By using a splatter effects created by the milk splashing in the bone, I tried to make the bone attention seeking. In a way, through this simple design of linking milk and bone I hope my poster will be able to tell the story quickly.

Overall, I tried to control the audience attention by arranging how the words and milk are place.

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

Photo 4

Photo 5

The whole catch of the story is not to show that the girl in the photo is actually a man, hence I only take the back view of the “her”. The design behind my photo story is to let the audiences use their imagination to tell the story and only realise the shocking ending towards the end. I choose to make the colour black and white in the beginning to emphasis the dodgy nature of their actions and only the full colour of at the end of the story.

The biggest difficulty for this week assignment is finding willing participants. As one of my friend who is suppose to play the male lead back out last minute, I faced a bit of problem. Overall, I feel that the outcome of this assignment had not met my expectation. Here are some of my own critics:

1)      Poor story built up. I feel the guy brought the “girl” home too much.

2)      The photo in bed is not well shot.

3)      Maybe change the male lead. The first photo does not look convincing.

As such, please expect improvement for my photo story. And of course, I will be eagerly await criticism from my peers so I can add further improvement to my work =)

Design Process

The idea I had in mind in how to abstract Chinatown shophouses is to selective extract the most iconic and recognise part of Chinatown shophouses.( Similar to Hashimoto’s mobile phone example)  Upon examination, I feel the iconic part to abstract are the shophouses windows which distinctively recognisable. As such, I tried to create an indexic representation of the shophouses.

In order to create this indexic representation, I first draw a detailed illustration of the shophouse. Then I extract the windows. And finally, I minimise the details for the windows. The design process is shown in the illustration below.

Class discussion

During the class discussion, I received criticism of how the Chinatown windows resemble other shophouses’ windows in other places such as Geylang. Although, recognisable, my shop windows are not unique to Chinatown shophouses only. Based on their criticism I decided to redo my assignment 2. Since then, I had come out with several drafts on several locations, including science centre, Benjamin shears bridge and Suntec city’s Fountain of Wealth. However, the illustration and end design is not as impressive as I wanted it to be. As such, I will be trying to illustrate on my next location the Bottle Tree park and hopefully, this design will made the mark.

Meanwhile, stay tuned!

Thus, for my I HATE MATH design, I tried to replicate how my desk will look like after working hours at endless math question. Below is my sketch on how I imagine it would be like before adding the computer effects.

And below is how the image look like after coloring by illustrator

Unfortunately, from here onwards, I had forgotten to save the PSD version of the file and could not do a step-by-step illustration on how I arrive on the final product. Nevertheless, I shall explain without illustration. Following coloring using illustrator, I used Photoshop effects to create my idea of an messy desk. Using a photo of a wooden tabletop as my background I scanned in a graph paper so the “JAX” stationary can nest on it. Personally, I hope the graph paper achieve three purposes:

1) to add aesthetics to an otherwise boring wooden background,
2) to make the graph paper the focal point, as a result of colour contrast ( thus people will be attracted to my name)
3) to add a sense of “ messiness”

After forming the background, I imported the design I have from illustrator to Photoshop but soon realized that there is too much stationary drawn to fit into my tabletop background. Hence, instead of putting all the stationary in, I choose only to do put in those of nicer design. To do so, I imported the file from illustrator to another PSD file and manually magic ward in the stationary I wanted one by one. I added the JAX stationary first onto the graph paper first, with no special effect after imported from illustrator. Similarly, the process applied to the pen and pencil.

For the two triangular protractors, I applied Photoshop effects to make it look transparent. In order to do so, I first magic ward away all the colouring for the protractors. Darken the outline, the measurement lines using texture effect “Smudge stick” to make it look really dark. After which, I applied blending option to create the transparency effects. Firstly, I applied drop shadow, followed by outer and inner glow, contour and finish! To be honest, I actually quite surprise with Photoshop ability to create such an effect. At first I was unhappy with the way my projectors look—ugly and no sense of realism, so I magic ward out the colours and after series of trials and errors, I manage to get what I wanted in mind.

Lastly, I complete my work with Photoshop brushes of mathematical formulas to add increase the sense of messiness. I leverage on this to complete my “A” by placing a short math formula in between the compass.

And the final product =)

Below is my sketch of how I picture my clothes will be under the sunny weather.

As this I the first time I use illustrator, I faced many difficulties in adding computer effects and colouring. The biggest difficultly firstly was how to use live bucket to colour my sketch. After consulting Dr. Julian, he directed me how several ways on how to colour in illustrator after using live trace. He corrected me on how I need to close on my anchor points and advise me to re-draw my sketch on marker so that I will have less anchor points to close. Despite these advises, I was still unable to use live bucket to colour parts of my sketch. However, I manage to solve this issue using the pen tool to manually draw close anchor points so I could colour. The resulting illustrator effects are shown below.

I export the file from Illustrator to Photoshop after colouring. Upon importing, I magic ward away the white background and separated them away using different layer. I then created another PSD file and do up the background. To do so I used Photoshop gradient tool, diamond gradient effect to create the blue sky effect show below.

After I had my background, I added the layers that I magic ward out early into this PSD file. I then started to add Photoshop effect individually to every item. Starting with the Tree, I added “Fiber” filter effects so there a white and brown tree bark effect. I then added texture to it using “Cut out” and “Film grain” so it have a rough outlook. Next, I added texture to my clothes the following are the filter effects I added:

1. Sock: “Sponge effect” used to create a dirty and used outlook.
2. Boxer: “Diffuse Glow”
3. Vest: “Diffuse Glow” and “Texturize” to recreate the Jeans texture for the vest

The results are as shown below

Next, I added Photoshop brushes to create a lush green surrounding. Notice how I replace the leaf I drawn for the tree with Photoshop leaf brushes. This is to inject a sense of realism to my tree. Finally, I added clouds into the surrounding with Photoshop brushes.

The Final Result:

My Name is Jax and I love my clothes=)