A visit from our client! (Previous tutor)

We had our client come in today, our tutor who now is with the festival visited to see how our designs are coming along. As well as coming to see them she also made some suggestions on how we can slightly change our designs to perhaps make them look better.

She suggested that I used the green trees as more colour shows up on them and they don't look as faded as the other ones. She liked the idea of having bolder colours from the fading effect of the trees, so rather than having all these different colours, she recommended having pink for the start of the trees, a slightly darker green, and an almost sky-like blue to finish the trees.

After seeing how the trees looked with her suggestions, I felt it was better to keep them that way just because it makes the colours 'pop' a bit more, and will make the illustration more eye-catching on the banners.

 

Week 8 - Workshop

During todays workshop we were shown how to make our illustrations in a format where it would be compatible with the printer needed to print our illustrations onto.

We were given a hand out of all the elements needed to prepare our illustrations for the festival. We had to (in photoshop) flatten the image, place to web, and make it a high quality JPEG. They told me to consider my overlapping, and my individual elements. They also mentioned that white DOES NOT print onto transparency which wasn't a problem for me as my designs aren't white, they jus have elements within them that can be white but will look fine transparent. (I already considered transparency at the start of the project.)

We also had to create a cut path for the printer to cut around so the illustrations can be placed onto the vinyl. 

It was named 'CutPath' with a new layer to separate it from the illustration itself. The new swatch that was needed to create this was required to have 100-M, 54-Y, 0-For rest of colours, and had to have no fill.

We were also asked if we needed to do cuts as a group or to have it as individual elements, again this was not a problem for my illustration as each individual file was a group, but was separated enough to be cut the way it was.

Night time theme?

After realising how dark my illustrations can be when put through the photocopier on a negative format, and some advice from my tutor, I decided to create a night time theme for my over printed trees. Both Illustrations were put through the photocopier and turned into a negative format to give it that dark and gloomy colour.

This design was scanned through on the photocopier and overprinted several times, the outcome didn't turn out so great and I will not be using this method again, unless it is with lighter colours.

As shown here the lighter colours work more effectively than the darker ones.

Week 7 - Holidays

During the holidays I wanted to keep my focus on other projects, as before the holidays I finalized my designs, but I still wanted to play around with the concept of my trees.
Keeping the same design and initial idea of my trees my clients liked, I created some trees with mixed media, also I played around with the sizing of my trees. I also thought about having a different theme as the current one I'm working on for the project is focused around 'from dusk till dawn,' as well as having to focus mainly on warmer colours because the festival is going to be held around spring/summer time, I thought about using colder colours, maybe a night time theme for future reference?

These trees were my original 'Naturalistic Trees' to make them colder colours (even though I already had colder coloured trees, I wanted to really focus on darker colours) I used the saturation tool to turn the trees into colder colours.
However I was not happy with this outcome as the trees look plan and doesn't really give the feel of them being darker. In future I will look more into how I can change this.

I decided to try creating a tree on a larger scale with more detail within the trunk (using a white gel pen like I have done with my previous designs.) I feel this worked effectively as you can see the trunks better, this also helps to see the detail on them clearer. The thing that didn't work as effectively is that they tree is on its on and is the main focus, I feel as if trees like this should belong as a forest not on their own.

I did the same thing with this tree but this time, instead of using watercolours for the bush at the top, I used pencil. Again, this is my complete original design I will be working with, but this design is on a larger scale, with a lot more detail on the trunk. Using smaller patterns to make it more detailed.

For this design I wanted to go for a choice that involved complimentary colours (Purple and Yellow.) I wanted to use a medium that really bought out the pigment of the colours, in doing so I used soft chalks with a bright background, followed by a darker colour for the trees, to compliment them. I used pens to create the trunks. I first used the black pen to create the trunk and then went over it to create the patterns with white pen.

Some things that didn't work as well during the holidays.

This was an overprinting used on a negative format, the outcome didn't work so well as the trees are so faded you can barely see them, and have the faintest lines for the trunks. The better side to this image is that it fits in with a night time theme. Something that I may possibly work on after deadlines for the finalised designs.

These trees didn't work well as they were created using oil pastel and it makes them look too bulky, hence why I chose not to finish these because they didn't work as effectively as I wanted them too.