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For my 30 second animation, I wanted to depict how old clothes from thrift shops can be re-purposed to combat fashion waste.

The theme for this project was fashion sustainability. We live in a very fast-paced world where trends are constantly changing, especially in the fashion industry. Every season there seems to be a new piece that everyone needs to get before it’s replaced by another style. As you can imagine, this kind of cycle produces a lot of waste for our environment.

Luckily there are lots of creative ways to be kinder to the earth while still being fashionable. I took inspiration directly from people on Youtube who do “thrift flips”, a term used to describe taking clothes from thrift stores and improving on it or making something new. This allows people to recycle already existing material while also creating something that’s one-of-a-kind!

I initially wanted to depict thrift flipping in my animation quite literally, show someone shopping at a thrift store and sewing to transform what they had found. Because I’m not so skilled at sewing myself, watching videos of people taking something old and making it something different seems almost magical! So I thought, why not set the story in a magical world? That’s how I ended up with a witch who uses some hocus pocus to make the coat she found at a store fit perfectly.

Like any animation project, it’s a good idea to start with a storyboard to get the scenes laid out. I pretty much had a solid idea of how I wanted things to look like, but I did have trouble thinking of how scenes would transition. If I had to do this project again, I would definitely spend more time thinking of transitions at this stage, rather than having to figure it out when I started to work in After Effects.

As for the visual style of the animation, for time’s sake and my own sanity, I decided to keep it fairly graphic and simple. Using gradients and minimal shading to make each frame visually interesting. If I could rework this, it would have been nice to maybe add more textures to add more dimension, but as it is, the graphic style works well.

Overall, this project was a great learning experience in learning how to use After Effects and becoming more proficient at Illustrator. I can definitely take what I’ve learned from this project and apply it to future work, and maybe even see if I can add some motion to past illustration projects!

For this project, our class was tasked with creating a character with a strong silhouette, by focusing on things such as shape language and posing.

Whenever I created characters, I never really started out by thinking of the overall shape or silhouette, I always jumped right into designing a cool outfit for them to wear. I really wanted to challenge myself this time around by relying on the ink blots we created in class, as well as making a character with a body shape I wasn’t used to drawing.

“Malorie” was the character I ended up creating in the process. I imagined her to be a twenty-something yoga enthusiast with a carefree personality. In the initial ink blot I also ended up creating a cat out of the negative space that was formed, and decided to add it to the final silhouette. Because of how I characterized her, I wanted to use a very iconic yoga pose to represent her, as well as to create a very strong shape for the piece.

Composing the Piece

This board focused primarily on the kind of atmosphere and tone I wanted to set for the piece, I wanted to push myself with lighting this time around. In many of my past illustrations, I would struggle with creating a good contrast for the overall piece, so I wanted to make sure that I paid more attention to my values this time around.

When it came to composing the rest of the drawing, the placement of most of the background items followed the natural line of Malorie’s figure. I wanted to ensure that the viewer’s eyes would lead right to Malore instead of away from her.

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As for the colours and lighting, I wanted both to give off the feeling that this was happening in the afternoon, probably just right after 12 or 1PM, as shown in the inspiration board. I also wanted the colours to be calm despite the ruckus going on between the cat and the bird.

Overall I’m very satisfied with the piece I created. I learned a lot of valuable character design techniques, as well as discovered other methods to colour and get better tonal values in Photoshop. I’m very excited to apply what I’ve learned in this class to future projects involving illustration!