Illustration and Visual Narrative Task 1

Illustration and Visual Narrative

|| 23/09/2024 - 28/10/2024 (week 1 - week 6)

|| Leong Hui Xuan / 0365793 / Bachelor of design (Honours) in creative media

|| Illustration and Visual Narrative

|| Task 1 : Exercise (20%)

Table of Content:

1. Instruction

2. Process Work

3. Reflection

INSTRUCTION

Process Work

Task 1: Vormator 

Basically, for this task we were required to use the 8 shapes given to create a unique character through combining and manipulating those shapes and without streching adn squishing the shape.

Figure 2.0, 8 shapes

First, we need to create out these shapes with the tools in Adobe Illustrator, then based on the shape to create our charater.

Figure 2.1, practice with the shapes

In the first practice, I tried to use different shapes combined together and see how the overall looks would turn out. I mostly use the drop shape and the badge shape as the eyes and body; beside that, I use some zerk shapes and bar shapes as details of the body to assist in forming the body silhouette.

Figure 2.2, 1st Design

I had the mermaid idea when i saw the tentacle shape, it look like a tail which let me related to mermaid. For this idea, i use tentacle shape combined and 2 drop shape to create the mermaid tail and the shell top. The zerk and tentacle as the hand, the badge shapes and one up-side-down to create the body part and show the waist. Additionaly, i use many drop shapes and wurst shape to create the jewelry. The color part, I use green and blue color mix to show the gradient effect and yellow-white color for the jewelry. 

After the character has been created, I feel that the character is missing something, but I have no idea how to change it. Besides, I realised that there were so many students who created sea creatures and looked so perfect, so I decided to create a new character.

Figure 2.3, Final character Silhouette

Figure 2.4, shapes extraction

Figure 2.5, Final Character with color, gradient and shadow

For this final deisgn, the inspiration also came from the tentacle shape, but besides mermaid it reminds me of the nine-tailed fox mentioned in mythology, so I create a young nine-tailed fox as my character. As usual the tentacle shapes as the tails, I used drop shapes as the ears, the mark on forehead and the pupil; the badge shapes as the head, neck and eyeballs. I used the bar and zerk shapes to create the body and the legs of my character. Additionally, I duplicated my character on the original and edited the color to be darker as the shadow, then used the pathfinder (devide) tool to take out the part that I didn't want to have shadow.

The overall shape of my character was triangle, which in the shape languages implies to strength and evil. But the triangle shapes that I used was not that sharp, it contains round angle so this makes my character look less aggresive and more cute.

Reflection

The task was interesting, it allowed us to create out our character through simple shapes. The thing that cost me the most time was the gradient color, because when I overlapped the shapes I needed to edit the gradient value until it matches the other shapes to make the connection more natural,  since most of my shapes were filled of gradient color so it took time for me to do that. Well, in this task I think my shadow was different from what I expected. We were required to use pathfinder to made the shadow effect, I was the first time used pathfinder and I'm not good at using it, so this make my shadow defective. But, I believe that in future, I can be familiar with it and use it to make my works more perfect.