Assignment 5: Final

Here's the previous design I worked on:

Too much colours, detail, unclear words, plus no musical clues. So howwww? :( LOL. I decided to tweak it a bit. And haizzzz.... Why can't I upload my new designs? Urghhhhh... Everytime I do, it gives me this black screen. :(

This will take a while. So stay tuned...

Assignment 4: Final

After the Tutorial, I decided to pick the following design to work on, rather than the other one, as Jolene also used that same phrase.

The kite looks like it's puntured by the sunray. Plus, the fonts... urgh.... should get better fonts, plus the top one deserves a better location...

This should be a lot clearer and simpler to comprehend. :)

Assignment 3: Final

Now, time to fix this story. From what I showed during Tutorial, there were gaps in the story which my peers couldn't decipher without help. I knew I had to maek the connections between the frames clearer. It really gave me a sense of appreciation to film directors and photographers in general as it is not easy to create stories that make sense to people and allow them to understand what is going on without any verbal clues from the creators at all. Wow.

So thus here are the problems I will fix:

Ok, this is the first frame and it is a big problem. No one knows what to expect nor do they even know what it is all about. Plus, its too dark. What I wanted to say was that I was on my bed and my Teddy was missing. Hmpf. I doubt I got the message sent at all, huh? So I corrected it with this instead.

I hope this is clearer in showing that my Teddy went missing in the middle of the night. Following the story, the next bit is also a problem:

I wanted to show that in the middle of the night, my study room was lit up. Someone was using the room at night and I wanted to check it out.  But the photo is just too dark and not much details for anyone to decipher really. So I reshoot and took this:

Should be much clearer now, I hope. Now, I am going towards the room, gonna check out what's going on.

The next bit is ok i think... about me opening the door to the brightly lit room.

Now, the next bit got a bit confusing for my tutorial mates. Maybe due to the may different things that's going on. Like there's no connection.

Here was the part where it goes all 'Toy Story' and all the toys are doing their own thing in the night. Yep. But I guess it'd be better to just stick with the story of the Teddy, to simplify things. So, in the end, here is the final line-up of frames:

And the saga of Naughty Teddy is complete. :)

Assignment 1: Final

Ok, based on my previous 2 designs, I worked it out some more and came up with these final two designs. Same concept, different look.

The previous design, the one right above, seemed too cheerful for someone who hates laundry. So, I decided to 'darken' the atmosphere and make it more heck-care, if you know what I mean. I also tried to make the T more obvious by using a T-shirt. LOL! The fonts are quite self-explanatory I would think.

As for my dishes design, the first didn't make sense as it did look very clean, and I'm supposed to HATE washing the dishes. So I dirtied the dishes and cutlery up. Plus, I got rid of the confusing lines at the back of the first design. I was actually trying to achieve a dishwasher look as if one were to hate to wash the dishes, they'd usually just chuck it into the dishwasher, right? But, my peers thought it made the design more complicated and busy. So I resorted to simplifying the background and made it just compliment the design instead. Hopefully the plates show more of the 'T' as opposed to the big giant pot.

And that concludes my Assignment 1! :)

Assignment 6: The Beginning

For this Assignment, which is the actual storybook project, all of us are required to come up with a story and some rough sketches of the characters. Since I pretty much suck at sketching, I think I will try using Illustrator to 'sketch' my character out.

But before you even get to look at my character, here's the story I thought of... :)

The Gift:

This story is about a little boy named Timmy.
Every year, on his birthday, he and his parents would go to his Grandma Anne’s house and she would celebrate his birthday with them.
Every year, he would ask his grandmother for a gift.
And every year, his grandmother would give him whatever he wanted.

On his 5th birthday, he got a toy car.
He loved the toy car so much that he would play by himself all day.
“Timmy, will you come play with me?” his grandmother asked.
“No, grandma, toy cars are for boys!” Timmy responded and continued to play with his toy car alone.

On his 12th birthday, he got a game console.
He loved the game console so much he would sit in front of it and play games all day.
“Timmy, will you come play with me?” his grandmother asked.
“No, grandma, you probably won’t even know how to use this latest game console anyway,” Timmy responded and continued to play with his games alone.

On his 18th birthday, he got a laptop.
He loved the laptop so much he would be surfing the net and play online games all day.
“Timmy, will you come play with me?” his grandmother asked.
“No, grandma, can’t you see that it’s only meant for one player? Besides, I doubt you even know how to use this,” Timmy responded and continued to use his laptop alone.

For 18 years, Grandma Anne watched her young grandson grow up before her eyes. She knew that every gift she gave him made him happy. She smiled.

On his 21st birthday, Timmy felt it was time that he celebrated his birthday with his friends. But he never forgotten about the gift his grandmother would give him every year.
“I hope she was able to get me that car I always wanted…” he thought to himself.
As he was getting ready, he noticed his parents were sitting down in the living room area, his mother crying.

“What’s wrong ma?” he asked his mother softly.
“Grandma Anne just passed away in the hospital this morning,” his mother told him woefully.
Timmy was speechless. He suddenly felt very sad and guilty for all the times that he could have spent time with her.

“Oh Timmy, there’s a package for you waiting at the front door. It was delivered yesterday. From Grandma Anne…” his dad informed him.
Timmy immediately rushed out to collect the package.

It was a gift, a small box wrapped in gold, with bright red ribbons. There was a card on top.
It said, “Dear Timmy, here is my last gift to you. I hope it will make you happy. Love you always, Grandma.”

Timmy opened the box and saw that the gift was a framed picture of Grandma Anne and Timmy himself.


Moral of the story: Grandparents are a gift. Treasure them while you can.

Here's a simple sketch of Timmy at 12 years old:

I'll be creating more sketches of him at different ages, as he progresses in the story (since he's getting older and older). So it will be a fun challenge to 'age' this little cartoon boy into a 5 year old, 18 year old and a 21 year old.

I just created this, a 5 year old version of him:

Assignment 5: The Beginning

For this Assignment, we are required to create a postcard of a Musical Festival. Sounds interesting? Sure is! I mean, what a unique topic to do a postcard in. Not many around really... So this should be pretty cool to do.

Initially my first thought was to do up a postcard for an existing festival in Singapore, happening around this time.

I thought of concerts like the F1 Rocks!, Baybeats, and TimbreFest. Those 3 'festivals' were some of the ones which I know of personally. Was hoping to do them, but then I thought... "Hmmm... wonder what the rest would do..."

So I looked up the Forums for the other Tutorial classes and found that many of them are doing the same festivals! 0_0 Hmmmm... Maybe I should try to do something different...

And I went and 'shagged' the whole thing out! grooooovy huh? :D A psychedelic theme! Thought it'd be a fresh idea... I know there are others too, so I really hope mine stood out.

The 6 variations are all pretty 'red and loud' and based on the comments received during e-tutorial, it would be better if I have lesser colours, because it's just TOO colourful. Plus, I know I have to stick with 4C, I will work on this soon. :)

Another comment was the words. They seem to blend into the background, it seems. My tutorial mates commented on the words particularly, so it must be quite a problem. Think I'll make it look more obvious then.

One more thing. The flowery waves all around. They commented that it was already so shaggelicious and psychedelic enough with the van and stripes that I really don't need the flowers to make it look more... 'hip'. So I'll remove them then and instead add in some tasteful music notes or signs of 60s music into it. That was the layer I forgot to add in. The actual music. -_-. haish. I know...

Yep, so I'll be making some further changes to this postcard and hopefully it'll be good enough for the portfolio! :D

Assignment 4: The Beginning

Now, it's time for Assignment 4. This is about creating an effective poster that will capture the attention of passers-by and portray the message effectively. :) And the theme for this semester is Active Aging! Wooohoooo!

Ok ok, so I got some ideas over Recess Week and came up with two posters during the break. Only hada chance to blog about it today. But first and foremost, I thought of my so-called 'sub-theme', which is basically the topic I want to focus on that is under the category of Active Aging. I had some ideas at first, which I wrote down on a piece of notebook paper. They are mainly slogans which I found here and there and it gave me some great ideas (with my main ideas in brackets). Copied it here:

- Make your WRINKLES TWINKLE! (Emotional health)

- An apple a day keeps the doctor away (Eat healthy)

- Laughter is the best medicine / Let laughter be you medicine (Emotional health)

- You're never too old to be younger (Enjoy life and keep that child in you)

- We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing (Enjoy life and keep that child in you)

- Keep on raging to stop the aging! (Be physically active)

- Life is not measured by the nuber of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away (See the world, explore while you can, enjoy what life has to offer)

So from my little brainstorming session here, I thought of various ways of creating my poster. Since I'm not allowed to grab images from the Internet, I'll have to consider my capabilities on Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I seem to be more intuned with Illustrator. Hmm...

A lot of my rough ideas were played out on the Illustrator canvas, and some of them turned out to be promising. Like this one:

I thought this was a good idea, with a short funny description of the laughter tablets on the label, and the walking stick to show that my target audience is senior citizens. Then I realised that with aging seniors, this maybe be a bit crude and sad, as I highlighted the stereotype that all old folks eat medicine. I thought of a friendlier way to put my message of emotional health across.

One problem with this. I'll need to really make the wrinkles twinkle... Right now, you can't really see the twinkles so clearly. I felt that the slogan was catchy though. My own creation! :D

So then I asked my friend for her opinion on this poster, and she personally thought it was too childish and she even felt it might be an insult to old people. She suggested something more mature and detailed.

Then I thought of this:

Simple design. Message clear (I hope). Difference in font. left side is more... old-ish (words and the man) while the right side is more childish (a kite and the font). I chose a kite as it's probably wat was played by the old man during his childhood day. The shadows ot the old man and front scene gives it the calming effect. I also like how there's a balance in the picture :)

So thus, as you can see, the two done-up posters here are my finalists... I can't decide it myself though. Would need to get the opinions of my tutorial mates.