Assignment 5 - Colourful Asia

Initial design was not on costumes, but on rice. But it was too simple as can be seen from below and hence called for a change in design. haha. There are some colour distortions. The images of the Indian, Thai and Japanese women were from cliparts.






For the next design, I had to trace out the images from scratch. They were traced using the same method as in Assignment 2, where we had to create Pictograms. They were then coloured in Photoshop. Because they were outlined in Illustrator, all the details provided in the clip art were lost. I had to add in my own details using Photoshop brushes. As can be seen in the final postcard design, the Indian sari was added some sparkles to make the costume more unique.











There are 4 colour schemes initially, each based on a season. Blue for winter, green for spring, orange for autumn and pink for summer. Initial design as seen below was to place these 4 different colours of a nationality in one postcard, but it did not fully represent a colourful Asia.

The solution was thus to add in different Asian costumes so it is more vibrant and colourful. Colour schemes are based on the background. This is so the spotlight on the costumes do not get compromised. 4 schemes were created

Pastel scheme

Shades of black scheme


Fabric Scheme


Grayscale scheme (some distortions occured??)

The final chosen design was the fabric scheme, as it it able to bring out the costumes most effectively.

Final Project

A children's storybook was decided for this final project. Several themes considered, for example, family values, self-acceptance and also friendship and teamwork. We decided to go with teamwork, as we felt it was not a theme commonly explored in children's storybooks.

1. Brainstorming and story generation

Chosen theme: Teamwork
This theme was based upon a personal teaching experience of a group member.The story centers around the two groups within the Alphabets, the vowels and the consonants, who did not like each other, and hence did not like to work together. However, when a crisis emerges, the vowels decided that they have to put aside their differences and work with the consonants to throw a spectacular part for the King of Alphabet Land.

Moral of the story:
The moral of the story is how teamwork is vital to success, and in a society that promotes individualism, we believe it is essential to teach unity as an important concept in today's world.

Typography

Several font types were considered for this storybook. We wanted font types that would appeal to children. However, most of such font were unsuitable as they are often illegible. Thus, we had to search for a font that was legible, yet appealing to children, which was not an easy task, considering the amount of fonts available for free download on the internet. The final choices for font type were:

FG Klara: This font was decided for our body text. It is available for download from http://www.1001freefonts.com. This font was chosen primarily because the space between each letters was not too cramped. A bold but not too thick font meant that there would be easier readability. It also added an unique and child-like element to our book, suitable for readers of our target age group.

Akbar: This font was obtained from http://dafont.com and it captures the essence of children’s handwriting. This would be suitable to our activity page, which allows the child to either fill in the page by hand, or by using stickers provided in the book. This font also resembles our main text body’s font.

Colour Scheme
Colours used for this storybook were bright and colourful. This is to contrast the characters against a white background for the pages of the storybook. We also made sure that for the King and Queen who often appear as a pair, had colours that complemented each other. We realised that the colour of our characters changed once the CMYK mode was employed, which made the initial chosen colours to be dull, the opposite of our intended effect. As such, we made sure that colours employed in the colouring of our characters would still be bright. This was done through a careful selection of colours.

Character Building

Characters were drawn using Adobe Illustrator using the pen tool. In Adobe Flash, the line tool was employed. After the characters were painstakingly traced (they were hand sketched before being scanned in), they were then transferred over to Adobe Photoshop for colouring. Gradient as well as the paintbucket was the tool of choice.

Expressions
Characters were given expressions for certain scenes. For example, the character "A' features in many scenes that require different expressions. To fully achieve the effect of say, excitement, we drew "A" with a wide smile, with hands in the air. When we wanted to portray angry, we drew "A" with arms by the side, and also changed the way his eyes and mouth looked.

Textures
For characters like the animals, textures were added, such as a rough skin texture for the elephant, and a fur like texture for the lion. While the elephant did indeed achieve that rough like effect, it was not that obvious on the picture of the lion, especially when printed (the fur like texture was visible on screen). We felt that the addition of such textures would add a sense of realism, although on hindsight, a better effect would have been achieved if we had stuck on cloth of rough and furry texture respectively.


Text Positioning

4 variations of text positions were employed in our storybook.

- Text on the right of pictures
- Picture between text
- Picture below text
- Picture above text.

This was based on a 4x4 layout grid. 10mm margin space was added all around to ensure there was enough space during printing.

Production Stages

1. Brainstorming of themes, moral of the story
2. Writing storyline and character building
3. Illustration process
4. Layout selection
5. Putting it all together
6. Editing
7. Print
8. Reflection; spotting of mistakes
9. Re-print.

As seen from above, the book was printed twice. The first print allowed us to spot several mistakes we were unaware of previously. Corrections were immediately made before quickly being sent off for printing again.

Reflections

The building of this storybook was particularly frustrating at times, though a valuable process that I can proudly say I have experienced. Working on Illustrator for drawing out pictures severely tested my patience, as it was a very long process, where I must take into account different stroke weight of every different part of a character. For example, the Queen's eyelashes was drawn with a stroke size of 0.75, different from the stroke size of her body, which was at 2. In another example, the character C was of an elderly with bushy eye brows. As such, I decided to completely fill the eyebrow white, before adding a hair-like effect using Photoshop.

While we had thought our book looked nice on screen, it was a different case when it was sent for the first round of printing. Insufficient margin space was given in the first draft of print, which resulted in the printer having to expand the printing space, and reduce the size of our image. This led to an ugly column, though not visible unless seen up close. It however taught us a valuable lesson of remembering to add at least 10mm margin space in our next and final draft (cost and time constraints, haha)

Working in a group of three does indeed have its pros and cons. While we were able to decide quickly on what we wanted (less people, less differences, quicker agreement process), the workload was indeed more than other groups who had 4 or 5 people. Thus, we decided to keep our book simple, choosing to work with what we can. Our division of labour was also strongly based on each individual's skills. Hence, one person took care of hand drawing the characters before scanning them into the computer. After that, another person took care of the digital illustrations and colouring of the characters. Amidst these, another person took care of the backgrounds in the storybook. Once a person was done with what she was to do, she would then move on to help someone else. This method of division proved effective, as we were able to complete our assignment on time.

All in all, the project was a rewarding, though extremely time-consuming experience. :p