Final Design Process

Moving my 9 iterations project forward I took my inspiration from my photos I took of pencils and trees and moved those into a digital form. I wanted to work on my digital illustration skills as this is an area that I really want to grow into and develop my skills in.

Previous blogposts about this project:

Building the Story

I created a spider diagram with different story ideas surrounding pencils and lines.

I decided to take my main inspiration that was trees, nature and pencils and create a simple, story involving all three. The story I decided on is about a pencil who wants to know where he came from, he asks his friends and they go on a journey to find out where they came from. Their journey takes them to a forest where they find out they are made form the wood from trees!

Inspiration off screen

The sketchbook

After creating the story, I needed to decide how I wanted the illustration to look, how I wanted the different elements to present on screen? I took the story to the sketchbook…

Here are some sketches I drew inspired by my story, I always start on paper. I began with sketching out some animation ideas for the different elements that are included in the story.

Story board

I sketched out the story in a storyboard fashion, I included speech bubbles to tell the viewer the story, however I have decided to go with a small caption at the bottom of each image instead.

Taking it Digital

I began with illustrating each of the elements that are included in the story. It is important that I keep all elements of this story ‘line’ based as this project is all about line. So I need to keep the designs simple and made mainly from different, straight lines.

The pencils

I took these drawings into the digital space. I played around with eye shapes and colours of the pencils themselves and I didn’t add any mouths, I thought this would be a quirky feature.

The trees

Here I experimented with the tree illustrations and what type of tree design I wanted to go for.

After experimenting with sketches, the digital designs and creating the main elements of the story I needed to bring the whole story together. I needed to figure out how I was going to fit the illustrations into 9 squares and still make it make sense. I took each square at a time and I decided to add a line of text at the bottom so the viewer would know what’s going on.

Final 9 Iterations

Reflection

Looking back over this project I have come a long way from my initial photographs and even the group aspect of pencil images alone. At first it took me a while to think of a narrative and how could I take my inspiration of line in nature and pencils and put that into a story and have it make sense? The biggest struggle was fitting the story into the 9 squares, however I am very proud of my final outcome and I like the simplicity of the story I have told with the images I created digitally. I know I have a lot of work to do with illustrating digitally but I enjoy the process, it is satisfying seeing my work come together. I actually enjoyed creating a short, simple story with these illustrations and I appreciated the challenge, overall I have further developed my design skills and I am pleased with my outcome!

IXD101- Final 9 Iterations