Illustration and Visual Narrative 1

 28.3.2022 - 2.5.2022 (Week 1 - Week 6) 

Teo Javin 0349352

Illustration and Visual Narrative/ Bachelor of Design in Creative Media / Taylor's University

Task 1 - Exercise 1 - Illustration and Visual Narrative

Lecture

Week 1

Mr. Hafiz introduced us to The Bezier Game, a helpful application for learning the basics of Adobe Illustrator. The goal of this game is to finish all the given exercises while using the least amount of nodes.

Figure1.1 The Bezier Game

Week 2

Lecture Report 1

For this exercise, I chose a character from a famous cartoon series...Gumball Waterson! Gumball Waterson is a cartoon character from The Amazing World of Gumball. As obvious as the title stated, he is the main character of this series. 

Figure2.1 Gumball

Shape

Gumball's shape language plays a huge role in his design, the round and soft shapes of his face and his rectangular body allow us to know that he is a playful and active goofball. Gumball's design is fairly memorable, thanks to the round and simple shapes that form him. These qualities are able to convey Gumball's feelings to the audience with their dynamic yet fluid-like poses and gestures. Because Gumball consists of simple shapes with a clear silhouette, it is fairly easy to tell it is him if we were only given a dark shadow of himself. These qualities are able to convey Gumball's feelings to the audience with their dynamic yet fluid-like poses and gestures.

Figure2.2 Gumball's expression sheet

Expressions

Gumball's design consists of simple shapes that the artist can bend and reform his form but we can still tell it is Gumball, hence allowing him to have a more versatile expression range from different artstyle to even media like clay and CGI to convey the message of the episode.

Figure2.3 Gumball's wide range of expressions

Figure2.4 "Maybe you should check your privilege", Gumball, the Social Justice Warrior

Figure2.5 Gumball in Sassy's world

Figure2.6 Gumball's spooked

Week 3

Chiaroscuro  

It directly translates to "light and dark" in Italy. It is the effect of contrast between light and shadow in a composition. Chiaroscuro was recognized to the public by Leonardo Da Vinci in the late 15th century and became one of the primary techniques for painters in the 17th century.

Example

Figure 3.1 Gerard van Honthorst - The Matchmaker

This is an example of Chiaroscuro an artwork by Gerard van Honthorst. This piece brilliantly uses Chiaroscuro to identify the main subject from the rest, to create visual contrast from a flat surface. The light of the candle shone towards the lady's face, revealing her face and beauty, whereas the other ladies were covered in shadow as the camera angle only captured the parts of them without light hitting their bodies, therefore the main subject of this piece is the lady on the right.

Lecture Report 2

Figure 4.1 Chiaroscuro Visual Study

Week 4

Composition

Basic composition visual rules

• Visual Narrative

• Visual Flow

• Visual Balance

• Visual Hierarchy

Types of shots

• Establishing

• Bird's eyeview

• Frame within a frame

• Medium Shot

• Close-up

• Worm's eyeview

Lecture Report 3

As someone who seldom picks his phone up to take photos, these are the only pictures I could dig up from a 6 years-old phone.

Establishing

This landscape photo was taken in the fields of New Zealand on our trip from Christchurch to Queenstown. The sunset there is a sight not to be missed!

Figure5.1 Sunset in New Zealand

Bird's eye view

The scenery on the highest building in Australia (Q1) was too stunning my fear of heights won't stop me from taking pictures up there. 

Figure5.2 Just realized the sea looks like resin

Frame within a frame

This was on a tour bus in New Zealand. The "frame" are the windows of the bus, emphasizing the mountains behind it, too bad it wasn't really clear as I did not take the entire mountain because my photography skills sucked years ago (it still is). Also, it was super cloudy as the clouds covered most of the sunlight there, creating a moody atmosphere, coincidently I was in my emo phase listening to sad songs.

Figure5.3 sad vibes

Medium shot

The beautiful ski mountain + My brother with extra sunscreen discovering snow for the first time = Medium shot.

Figure5.4 Oh look, snow

Close-up 

A building with a strange-looking sculpture on top. This close-up shot shows this mighty figure in his dominant pose, looking down upon mere mortals.

Figure5.5 Our lord and savior, Hand Man

Worm's eye view

A picture of our helicopter ride around Melbourne. You could see how small the helicopter is from our view, but the same goes for the pilot looking at us.

Figure5.6 Helikopter helikopter; parakofer parakofer

Week 5

Lecture report 4

Fore, middle and background

This scene is from a short cinematic video, Warm-up from Valorant, a first-person shooter game by Riot. The usage of fore, mid and background could differentiate what elements should the audience focus on.  

Figure6.1 A scene from the cinematic

If we made this scene into greyscale, it is much easier to see the contrast. The dynamic poses of the characters show movement, it tells the audience that the figures are heading toward something in a rush. 

Figure6.2 Greyscale of the scene

This worm-eyed perspective creates a dynamic feel as it makes the figures look bigger and "mightier". 

Figure6.3 Analysis of the scene

Instructions

Task

Vormator Challenge

For this task, we were assigned to design a character with the given shapes

Figure7.1

Exploration

Without sketching, I started exploring what I can do with these shapes and my first Vormator character was born. It is a sausage lady with tentacles for arms, it wasn't pleasant to look at so therefore this idea was scrapped.

Figure7.2

After some thinking, I sketched a character inspired by the sausage lady... a sausage knight.

Figure7.3

I started refining the sausage knight in Adobe Illustrator. Things are going smooth...

Figure7.4

... as sandpaper.

But I still got the job done.

Figure7.5

Layout development

I started finding references and inspirations to make the card layout for sausage knight.

Figure7.6

Figure7.7

Figure7.8

After some thinking, I chose the Hearthstone card as it looks fancier. First, I tried imitating the symbols first by starting off with the base colour and then add details to them.

Figure7.9 Base shape and colour of the crystal

Figure7.10

Figure7.11

Figure7.12

• Mana cost
• Copy, pasted the image onto card
• Added cuts on the card to make it looked used
• Copied most of the layout from original card
• Name of character
• Used Pathfinder tool to create tones for the gem
• Multiplied & enlarged the shape to create the border
• Damaged
• Health

Figure7.13

Figure7.14

Feedback

Good usage of tetradic colour scheme to design the sausage knight. Shadings are OK. Overall, the character and card are very nice. Got a good sense of technical and design skills. Try to explore more design styles.

Reflection

I am satisfied with this outcome but I think I could do it better, such as adding more shadings and tweak the fonts a little. But I cannot be too ambitious towards my assignments as I would use up too much time to finish each assignment from each subject. In the end, I still enjoy this learning process from designing a character from limited shapes to creating a game card.