assignment 1 photoshop-ed.

This is when I desperately wish I'm less of a tech idiot. Photoshop nearly took my life in the past 5 hours. Illustrator? Don't even start. I spent the past few days aimlessly clicking around and giving up.

The result isn't fantastic but I'm hoping the images might pass for a cartoony take on things. I've used bright colours to portray favourable feelings and duller colours for distaste. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the sinister green I was looking for.

P.S. The stilettoes are supposed to be red, and the butterfly is brown with green wings. I think the colours have turned out differently because I saved the images in CMYK instead of RGB, for printing purposes.

me, myself and i.

Our very first assignment. I'm feeling rather excited about this business of designing. The box of pencils with varying degrees of thickness, the sketchpad and all. It's so artsy and I think I can almost, for the first time ever, get away with the whole tortured artist routine.

So during lecture last week, we started out with 4 thumbnails of something we love and something we hate. I felt self-expression was limited in the sense that what we chose had to be portrayable visually, so stuff like 'mediocrity' and 'hypocrisy' was ruled out. Also, my love for writing couldn't be presented in an original yet aesthetically sound manner; I had to compromise one or the other. The strongest design I could come up with was too heavily inspired by Leo Burnett's big black pencil, so it had to be discarded.

In the end, I settled for 'I love stiletto heels' and 'I hate butterflies' and presented 4 rough sketches in tutorial today.

I was told to make the first butterfly more sinister because apparently it looks too beautiful for anyone to infer my hatred. The second butterfly was rejected on the grounds that it 'looked too happy' haha. I honestly don't know how to go about sinister-fying my butterfly because I can't even look at pictures of butterflies. I had to google cartoon butterflies when I drew the sketches.

The stiletto ones were fine, I guess, except that the second sketch didn't fulfill the requirement (the incorporation of my name was more arbitrary than manipulated). They were inspired by Christian Louboutin, by the way. I drooled over the sexy heels and derived such joy working on the sketches. Here's a video:

Bet you're all salivating now! (: 

(final products will be up when i'm done)

the first baby step.

I love good design. Sleek, sexy gadgets that I can spend hours staring at. Cute animation that I go gaga over. And especially ads with clever art direction, those that make you go "ohhhh...", then "damn, why wasn't I the one who thought of it?!"

Sadly, I may be able to appreciate, but in terms of creating, I am greatly handicapped by a dismal art sense and poor execution. I hope this module changes that, or at least improves it. And so far, the lectures have been worth the agony of dragging myself to LT14 by 8am so it's all very promising!