INSPIRATION
Nekomonogatari (Shiro), or Tsubasa Tiger - a story arc in the anime and light novel series, Monogatari, highlights the character of Tsubasa Hanekawa, Throughout the entire show and even novel, the font, Hiragino Mincho, is used in both the Japanese and English versions. The beautiful and elegant aesthetic of Hiragino Mincho, along with the complex themes and tone of Monogatari, helps elevate the expirience of the watcher/reader.
ARTIST'S NOTE
The reason why this is one of my favorite's is not because it's one of my favorite anime series, but I like how simple it is. Simple colors and lots of space, but it also has contrast in shape, like the Japanese kanji text, "Monogatari" on the right side of the poster.
Cynthia Su; August 31, 2023 |
ACTIVITY OVERVIEW
"The purpose of this growth activity is to become familiar with some typefaces and their typographical features. Since the establishment of printing as a technology, font manufacturers and printers have used type specimens to display the range of the characters in their fonts, both as an advertisement of their design capabilities and as an enticement to the customer."
HIRAGINO MINCHO
"Hiragino Mincho, created in 1993, designed by Jiyukono studio, is simple and sharp with a bright, positive feet. A perfect balance of the orthodox and progressive.
The font was quickly embraced by designers working in a wide range of fields. In Japan, Hiragino began to appear in fashion magazines and advertising, car navigation systems, signage, television subtitles, web-to-print, medical devices, and highway markers and signs. It was adopted for Mac OS X, the de-facto standard for the design world at the time: smartphones, tablets, and other digital formats. While Hiragino is clearly versatile, it is the fon't basic design sense that continues to draw praise. In 2005, Hiragino's visual style was recognized with the receipt of a prestigious 'Good Design Award' in the Communication Design category." COMPOSITION
For this type specimen, all of the text, including the Japanese words, are using Hiragino Mincho as the font. In the beginning, I just typed out the name as well as the font-type for the main title. Then, I spent the time to write out every character/symbol that the font provided. I also looked on a website to look for more information about Hiragino Mincho. After typing out that paragraph, the poster looked very empty. After brainstorming for a few seconds, I decided to add in the Japanese hiragana alphabet. I also decided to add the huge Japanese characters, Monogatari, which means story and is the overall title for the anime/light novel series. Lastly, I added a quote that Hanekawa, and a graphic of her cat-pin.物語
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PROJECT OVERVIEW
"This activity involves creating an alternative billboard poster, similar to the ones seen outside of theaters, for a movie or play of your choosing. "
INSPIRATION
My favorite movie is "The Batman (2022)", directed by Matt Reeves. There's an official poster called "It's Raining Vengeance", and it's Batman walking in the rain. This is what inspired me to create that poster using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop tools.
COMPOSITION AND DESIGN
Everything without the text was something I created last year, actually. During my Adobe Visual Design class, we used the liquify tool in Adobe Photoshop to manipulate shapes/drawings. I used the liquify tool to create some swirly effect for the rain, shadows (which are white for some contrast), and silhouette of Batman himself. The only thing that wasn't tampered with was the emblem on his chest, which is also white for the ultimate-contrast-feeling (what am I saying).
Now, you may be asking, "What did you even change for this project?" Well, I just added the text, "The Batman", with the Robert-Pattinson "bat symbol", and the actors and director. The thing I like the most is how "The Batman" is slightly see-through, making it so that you can kinda see the bat symbol, and how there's a drop shadow for the text, as well. |
ARTIST'S NOTE
As it is my favorite movie, creating The Batman (2022) was one of my favorite projects, especially because I reused my artwork from my freshman year when my class learned how to use the liquify tool. This poster just exemplifies innovation and creative ways to repurpose and build on your previous pieces.
Cynthia Su; August 31, 2023 |
THE BUNNY
The bunny evolved after I was finished with animating the ball. I realized that the ball was super stretchy, and maybe it was too flexible to be a solid, rubber ball. I didn't want to redo every single frame, so I decided to add bunny ears. Actually, I started adding bunny ears to each frame, and then I added a tail, and then started to shade/highlight the ball in each frame, and then added a shadow on the table. I think there were about 20-30 frames that I had to individually adjust in total. This process did take a very long time, but I like the creativity and boldness of doing something that wasn't even the intention of the project in the first place.
ARTIST'S NOTE
I felt like I really impressed myself and my teacher with this one, mainly because I didn't need to do all of this - making the ball into a bunny. However, I really enjoyed the painstaking process of drawing every shadow and every highlight of each frame.
Cynthia Su; August 31, 2023 |
PROJECT OVERVIEW
"The bouncing ball is often one of the first things an artist learns to animate... Your ball needs to enter from the left, bounce at least four times on the surface and either bounce or roll off the screen on the right."
SETTING THE SCENE
I wanted the ball to bounce from high-ground to low-ground. I thought that it would be easy to draw stairs, but I wanted this to be a little more realistic. So, I went online, found some school textbooks, and redrew them in Photoshop to create the scene.
THE BALL - DESIGN AND ANIMATION
All of this was hand-drawn, so I drew one, plain, flat, red ball. For each frame, I just copy-and-pasted the red ball, and then stretched and warped it depending on it's physics and shape in the air.
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ARTIST'S NOTE
This is probably one of my favorite things I've created of all time. The amount of time, detail, and overachieving I did to come up with the final product is still so impressive to me. This shows that if you aren't satisfied with the assignment's that given to you (I didn't like the burger that our teacher taught us how to do), make it your own - yes, you should uses the tools that you learn from the demo, but use that as a guide for you to branch out and create extraordinary things like this for your assignment.
Cynthia Su; August 31, 2023 |
There was no way I couldn't say anything about this burger. This entire project took me so long (possibly 5-7 class periods) only because of this burger, but it looks so good.
-THE BUN- Starting from the bun, I used the gradient tool and mesh tool to create a 3D, hemisphere-shape bun (instead of the flat bun we were instructed to do). This bun took me about 3 whole class-periods to do, since I wanted the shading to look like really nice, shiny burger-bun. -LETTUCE LEAVES- Moving down, we have the lettuce. I used the pen tool to draw all of the shapes, and then used the mesh tool to select the outer-edge for shading. -CHEESE SLICE- I used the similar technique to the cheese in order to get the shading for the cheese: I drew a square-ish shape, with the vision of the side/corners drooping down the edges of the burger, by using the pen tool. -BEEF PATTY- For the patty, I used a flat, brown cylinder as the base, and then created little square/rectangle shapes using the pen tool, changing the opacity and color to 3 different shades of brown, to layer on top of the base to represent the texture of a beef-patty. I also added 3 stripes, made up of darker squares/rectangles to look like grill marks. -ONIONS AND TOMATOES- Next, for the onions and tomatoes, I created each one of these using ovals, the shape-builder tool, and the pen tool. You're unable to see, but I made little seeds for the tomatoes and it is overall a little translucent (made by lowering the opacity of the "inner circle" of the tomato) to make it more realistic. |