tonya

I took my inspiration from botanical books and neat text underneath illustrations. This approach allowed me to celebrate my illustrations to their full potential whilst also providing customers with information. This style is also not only visually pleasing but creates associations between the books featuring endangered or extinct species. 

I used a wavy cutting blade to replicate the look of vintage postcards and almost remind the viewer of stamps that reveal certain topics. I am quite sad about the misspelling in the word “Thriving”, as I have a sticky i on my keyboard. I would have fixed the issue but I only had one sheet of this thick paper. 

This is a finished look of the sample book that gradually unveils the transitions within the patterns. I am very pleased with the look of it and I think it portrays the meaning and idea of my project in the best form. 

Another physical element I wanted to submit was these postcard designs. This would be another way of donating money to save the environment while being a visually aesthetic postcard that people can put on a wall as a decoration or send it to their friends/family. 

Here is a sample book prototype. I test printed my patterns, cut them into long stripes and folded them to see how I can possibly bind them. I thought of doing a single fold bind and attaching it to the cover by making holes in it and using the ends of the thread to tie a knot. 

These places could be a great way of promoting my project to a larger audience. I got interested in underground advertising as people spend a lot of time being on escalators or waiting for their train to come. I also though of placing my design in the train itself, as people spend even more time on it and if they aren't on the phone they are looking around and reading all the adverts. 

I also came across these binding methods when I was searching for poster designs in the library. They gave me some ideas for how I can demonstrate my patterns in a physical manner. I started thinking about accordion books and how it could be a great solution for my wide frame designs. 

I went to the library after my tutorial to see how creatives manage text and image on posters. I particularly liked these ones as they balance text and additional elements really well. I at some point during my development started thinking that everything on poster designs should be centered in order to look like a poster but these proved me wrong. It is not really about the alignment of elements, proficiency increases when the composition is thought through and each element has its own role and meaning. 

- tell a visual in my story, a step by step of how the situation with nature has developed 

Here is a step-by-step process of how I illustrated the transition in this tomato pattern. I started by changing the initial pot design to a bin. However, I noticed that it still looked like a pot rather than a bin, so I decided to add some rubbish to the background to make the message clearer. Next, I replaced the tomatoes with the bin lid, positioning it in the same location as the previous element. Lastly, I kept the single tomato design for consistency, but I added some mould and imperfections to further emphasise the meaning of this piece. 

I also demonstrated how flower petals are falling off as they also get affected by pesticides and the loss of their pollinators.

Initially, I experimented with a dotted brush, but I soon realised that it disrupted the consistency of my pattern and made the absence of the leaf elements more noticeable. As a result, I ended up using the same brush and colours that I had used for the leaf elements, which enhanced the overall coherency.

During my research, I explored various artworks that depict destructive human activities and the lack of concern for our wildlife. I used these pieces as inspiration and looked at how creative individuals advocate for the environment. Among these works, I particularly enjoyed the piece by Gracia Lam, which effectively portrays the disconnection of humans and nature. It emphasises the vulnerability of nature and highlights the barriers people built up between themselves and the natural world. The artwork conveys a powerful message of forgetting our existence is a part of a unified whole. By getting rid of other vital members of this system, we harm ourselves in the long run.

As I made slight changes to the form of my project, it was necessary to update the Learning Agreement accordingly. I only edited two elements in the synopsis of study. Firstly, I revisited the initial task, which was to design a set of patterns for interior design, and changed it to surface design since my current focus is on creating patterns for reusable bags. Secondly, in the third paragraph, I initially mentioned exploring the links between visual language and mental health. Mental health didn't become the main subject of my exploration and, therefore, I decided to instead focus on how visual language impacts decision making. The aim is to motivate individuals to think about the state of our planet and take action to protect wildlife. 

Tomato illustration process

After finishing drawing tomatoes in a plant pot I moved onto adding additional elements, I illustrated some tomatoes to make sure it is easy to spot them in a smaller scale. When I was happy with the quality and detail of my illustrations, I moved onto creating a pattern put pf them and noticed how there is a lot of negative space and some of the gaps were uneven, so I fixed that by changing some sizes and flipping some elements. 

My chosen colour palette contains colours of the previous illustrations which makes my set look coherent and consistent.