Illustration & Visual Narrative / Task 2 - Compositon

Week 4-6
An Hongzheng / 0378415 
Illustration and Visual Narrative / Bachelors of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
Task 2 - Composition

---

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Lectures
2. Instruction
3. Project
4. Reflections

---

LECTURES

Week 4

Lectures and tutorial videos on explaining colors and gradients.

The saved palette can be used to recolor the character.

We can also download ASE formatted palettes from Adobe Swatches

Week 5

Online lecture on perspectives. When we draw anything, we should consider the perspective.

Week 6

Deepavali Holiday

---

INSTRUCTIONS

---

TASK 2 : COMPOSITION

3.1 Sketch & Reference Board

Reference:

I chose the character I created in Task 1: Vomator to continue my creative work and added a background story and environment for her.

I create a sketch of the background environment firstly, and put my vomator work into the environment to check if they are suitable to each other.

Acrodding to the sketch I made, I tried to make some shapes in the form of the trees in my sketch with color, and added the background to create a fitted atomsphere for my work.

After all, I send this rough work with the background story for my character to Mr.Hafiz for feedback.

Background story

The character I designed is called Morass, she is a creature that grows in the swamp. She has a human-like appearance and an attractive figure, but these are all her disguises. It can be said that the mass monster on her head is more in line with her true image. She has the ability to control poison gas and absorb the souls and spirits of creatures, and has infected the swamps in the vicinity into purple and blue.

She will summon red tentacles from the swamp to attack and absorb the souls of prey, and then store the souls in the blue soul treasure chest and hide in the swamp. She is the queen of the swamp area and the strongest creature here.

In the draft, the blue columnar graphics are trees whose spirits and souls have been absorbed by Morass, but there is no time to refine and add branches. The blue treasure chest is sunken in the swamp, but part of it is exposed outside. This is a provocation from the swamp queen and also a show-off of her spoils to the outside world.

Bubbles are coming out of the purple swamp, suggesting that the toxicity of this swamp is unusual.

Later, I will continue to add branches, ghosts of dead animals or some ghost lights, and add some details of the treasure chest and swamp. I will add shadows and highlights to the items throughout the image.

3.2 Process Work

After the general design and create of the background, I decide to add some details to my work.

The first step is to add shadow to the cloud-shape swamps.

And then, add the shadow to each trees and their branches.

add the shadow to teh chest, for the shadows on each different objects, I created separated layers with labels which can be more convenient for the following steps and changes.   

add some littele bubbles and their shadows.

For one of the most important part of the whole work, the shadow of the main character, I decide to make the whole shapes together to form a big general shape with the pathfinder tool, because less shapes means the smoother programming of the computer, sometimes my laptop will get lagged or crushed due to the massive works of programming too many shapes.

It's still a big program to create shadow for the character even with the pathfinder, as the reason that my character is made of many complicated shapes. At the progress, the scissors tool and eraser tool help me a lot.

After all the stuff above, I just need to add some more details to make the whole picture looks better.

I add the projection of the trees and other object's.

The highlight of the trees 

Add some ghost or souls from people to make the atmosphere more appropriate

and I use the fluorescent effect to the stroke of each ghost.

the red points witch represent the spirits from the souls and ghost.

also add the fluorescent effect to them but it's stronger effects.

At the end, I used blurring tools for the distant background to enhance the spatial sense of the entire work.

For the entire work, I choose to add a very thin stroke to all shapes include the shape of each shadows, these help the work creating a unique style.

Coloes been used.

3.3 Pokemon Card

I use the website to create my own Pokemon Card, it's very useful and conveniant

3.4 Final Outcome

Description/Rationale

The character I designed is called Morass, she is a creature that grows in the swamp.

She has a human-like appearance and an attractive figure, but these are all her disguises.

It can be said that the mass monster on her head is more in line with her true image.

She has the ability to control poison gas and absorb the souls and spirits of creatures,

and has infected the swamps in the vicinity into purple and blue.

She will summon red tentacles from the swamp to attack and absorb the souls of prey,

and then store the souls in the blue soul treasure chest and hide in the swamp.

She is the queen of the swamp area and the strongest creature here.

In the draft, the blue columnar graphics are trees whose spirits and souls have been absorbed by Morass,

but there is no time to refine and add branches.

The blue treasure chest is sunken in the swamp, but part of it is exposed outside.

This is a provocation from the swamp queen and also a show-off of her spoils to the outside world.

Bubbles are coming out of the purple swamp, suggesting that the toxicity of this swamp is unusual.

---

REFLECTIONS

Although this task is more complex than the first one, we have been given a lot of space in terms of degrees of freedom.

And we can use the results of the first task to help us complete this task, which also makes our progress process smoother and more convenient.

Based on the characters I created in the first task, I created some background stories and character settings, and finally we were asked to make a Pok é mon card. This gives me a great sense of achievement because this task gave me a chance and helped me turn my imagination into reality.

In the overall production, I found that I lacked a lot of experience and skills, so I couldn't make the final work fully meet my imagination, and I spent too much energy and time in the production process.

I compared the final work with real Pok é mon cards and found a significant gap, especially in the use of special effects. Therefore, in the future, I will need a lot of effort and continuous experimentation to become more proficient.