project 02: animal part two
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I started sketching out thumbnails as soon as we got this assignment. I love using Illustrator, so I was excited to get started.
I wanted to show that these foxes live on islands without showing them on a beach, since I haven’t actually seen any photos of them on a beach. This was a little tricky, but I think I figured out a few good compositions for this poster.
I circled my favorites. Depending on the feedback I get on Tuesday, I might bring multiple compositions to class, or just variations on the same composition.
I ended up going into Illustrator to create the center top circled composition (with the fox on the rock on the left side of the page), just to practice illustrating animals in Illustrator.
Daphne came into studio on Monday and gave me some feedback — the rock the fox was on needed more detail, and the colors needed to be more balanced in terms of saturation. I made those changes and came up with this!
For the text I wrote about how the foxes are recovering from their endangered status due to the help of scientists. I included the eagle in the background because an increase in eagle population is the main reason these foxes were dying off.
March 17, 2021
After getting feedback at the end of class on Tuesday, I decided to go with a different composition. I sketched it out a few times to nail down exactly what I wanted. I went into Illustrator and traced over some reference images to get the animal anatomy correct.
I wanted to focus mostly on the flow of the composition. In our feedback groups on Tuesday, Q mentioned that the path your eyes take through my previous composition wasn’t very clear and didn’t flow as well. In this one, I wanted to make sure that it felt more open and smooth.
I tried out a bunch of different color schemes for class on Thursday. I’m not super happy with any of them, but I think they’re good starting points.
March 22, 2021
After class on Thursday, I reevaluated my colors a bit. I thought my colors looked nice, but didn’t do a great job of showing depth. I also tried out some other compositions, but eventually just came back to this one, since I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed to change about the composition.
To fix the colors, I first changed all of the colors in my composition to shades of grey, so that I could focus on the values, contrast, and depth rather than getting caught up in hues. I then grouped all the same-colored elements and rearranged the greys to make them fade as they went further back.
I then added color back in. I wanted to preserve the values and contrast, so I duplicated my row of color swatches and then overlaid a gray rectangle on the “Saturation” blend mode across both rows.This way, I could change the hues in one row of swatches while still being able to see their values and make sure they looked similar to the original grayscale values.
I also labeled each swatch just so that I knew what objects were going to be what color, and to make sure that everything was accounted for within these seven colors.
Once I had created my new color palette, it was really easy to use the Select -> Same -> Fill Color option to change everything of the same color at once to its new color. This made my process pretty fast, and ensured that I didn’t miss anything.
I then duplicated that artwork and changed it from complementary to monochrome — just shifting the hues of the blue tones to orange/brown as an alternate color scheme. I’m still not sure which one I like better.
I also changed my headline and subtitle. I remember Daphne suggesting that we use something other than our animal name as the headline, so I came up with “The Comeback Kits.” Baby foxes are called kits, and the Channel Island Fox is currently recovering from its endangered status, so I thought the pun was pretty clever.
March 24, 2021
After talking to both Q and Daphne about my composition, I decided to add more detail and shading. I also changed the island to improve clarity, and I switched the placement of the birds to better indicate depth.
March 26
After talking to various people about my color schemes, I decided to go with the blue one.
I made some final adjustments to the colors, tweaking the dark blue to be less green and changing the reflection color as well as the text color. I also changed the reflection of the island to look more realistic & be more recognizable, and added quite a bit more grass.
Here’s the final product.
