In visual principles, we learn about the visual form (visual elements and interaction), principles of interaction and controlling attention.

I decided to choose the topic of saving the sharks/ stopping people from killing them. The below is the prototype of the sharks and some design concepts I had

         Meet Sharkie                               And his brother     

This was my initial idea, but it looked quite baffling.

After that, I thought of another way to express the same concept.

I hope that’s pretty clear (:
My friend said that it’s very twisted. sigh.

I chose to draw pretty adorable sharks because it will nmake people not want to eat them. Besides, it will be impossible for me to get a real shark’s picture anyway. (if I don’t rip if off flickr or google that is.)

The font colour, however, must be changed. I will change the colours around so that the “dying” will be in black instead.

I had an extremely hard time thinking of a storyline for this assignment. (think cracking my head for 5 days or so, for the “TWIST”)

But anyway, while brainstorming with my friend in the library the other day, we thought of many possibilities.

One of which was to use chess set, and pretend that I’m one of the pieces in the chess set, and the twist is that I’m actually the one moving it too (yeah, weird and harry potter-esque I know).
Suddenly, I was reminded of the days when both of us were in working in Singapore Polytechnic. I saw this guy who was walking, listening to music. However, I noticed something swinging at the bottom. When I looked down, there was the connector (of the earpiece – to be placed into the mp3) was swinging to and fro. Noone had any idea why, and we thought it was hilarious.

Thus, the below is an inspiration from him.
Kudos to him.

The class (totally) didn’t get the storyline I think. They were looking pretty blank.

They suggested that I should change the storyline abit, like him dropping the wallet first, and me falling down on my way of catching him. There’s another part about him being deaf, but I don’t think it’d have the funny factor if I do so. ( Or is it so un-funny? =( I think my sense of humour is seriously warped.)

I’m going to re-take the whole set.

Was thinking of new storylines, and maybe I shall take 3 sets and see which one is better!

Honestly, I was VERY lost for this assignment. Thankfully however, I got it right after staring at the slides that were uploaded for awhile.

My object is..
this:

This is the birthday present last year from an old friend.
She bought it when I was having this obsession over excavators. ._.

Some of the comments that were posted on the online forum were that I should choose the 5th level of abstraction, and the “teeth” of the excavator hand should be taken away. So it’d look like a spoon instead!

This is to be printed in A3. I’d make some changes and add some colours and see how it goes from here.

This is the coloured version of “I hate storms”.It’s basically almost like the sketch that I had, but I changed the “W” from my name from falling leaves to the tree branches.

Used illustrator to trace it out, with my sketch underneath (explains for the weird pencil marks for the clouds =\ ). After that, I used photoshop to fill in the colours. It was rather tedious, for this is the first time when I truly have to use a computer software to colour something.

The comments given were that my “anyu” isn’t too obvious, and it is quite crammed together. Miss Siti gave the suggestion that it could be in landscape instead of portrait, so it will be more spaced out.
Also, the picture looks slightly like, “I like leaves”. I have totally no idea how to do that but perhaps, I’d try to change the ground to a darker colour and add more “rain” to make it look more stormy and gloomy.

Here is the coloured version of “I love Chinese Dance”.

Like the above, I’ve used illustrator to draw out the details and photoshop for colouring.

One of the comments that were brought out to me was that the background was too dark, thus making the whole piece seemed too concentrated and messy. However, a few (lighter) variations that were done earlier on didn’t seem to work too.

Both of them seems too light.

For the final piece for portfolio, I will probably try something more simple for the background. Another thing that I will figure out will be how to make some “shadow” effects at the bends of the ribbons. The wording for “u” seems too unnatural also.

Here are some of the really ugly drafts that I had.

1) I used thought of using the Chinese dance’s 红绸, something like a thick and long piece of ribbon to form my name,

2) These little figures are supposedly doing stretching (Can’t see my name, I know. Haha)

3) Decided that each person can use 2 ribbons – lousy scanner thus can’t really be seen.

4) This is the worse, all thanks to my superb drawing skills.
My idea was to make it in a way of footsteps stepping along the road, from small to big – meaning from little to old, and finally stepping on stage. It’s something like a Chinese saying of how a minute on stage is made possible with 10years of practice.

Next is the “I hate..”

Actually, the thing that I hate the most is ANT. (Note: They will die a horrible horrible death if they won’t leave me alone. >=\ )
However, there are not much things to draw about besides various methods of killing them. And to risk being misunderstood as liking ants, I scrapped the initial idea and drew “I hate storms instead”

1) Not. Good.

2) Kind of liked this but it looks slightly.. kiddish?

3) Not good too!

4) Leaves falling cos of rain to form my name.

Sounds like an interesting assignment, no?
Comments from tutorial in the next post!