Abby Jocson

My first task with Susan was to create mood boards and thumbnails of the five backgrounds. In total, I ended up with around three mood boards, one focused on interiors, another on exteriors, and an extra one with additional building references.

Taking inspiration from my mood boards I was able to sketch out five thumbnails. For most of the thumbnails, I directly referenced pictures I found interesting. Although there are a few that I ended up being more creative with or mixing elements from several photos.

For each environment thumbnail, I made sure to include context so that Susan could have a better understanding of its role in the story. Creating these descriptions also helped me to have a better idea of how I could compose these backgrounds in actual scenes within the comic.

With each thumbnail, I tried to see different angles that I could explore, but because I’m not accustomed to drawing backgrounds, let alone drawing them in perspective, they turned out relatively simple in terms of compositional layout. That being said, it was still good practice to think about where things would go, how I wanted to set dress the scene, and what kind of shape elements I wanted to include.

Susan’s feedback was incredibly detailed and it gave me a better grasp of how to bring these thumbnails to the next stage. Her additional sketches and references also helped me to better visualize what she was trying to describe. I really appreciated that she drew over my sketches to show me what I could improve on, or how I could approach the background in a different way.

Overall for this phase, I would give myself an 8/10, while I was able to provide thumbnails and descriptions of the environments to my mentor, I definitely feel that I could have done even more sketches exploring things from different angles or even trying to different structures or layouts.

For my mentorship project, I am fortunate to have IDEA alumni Susan Li as my mentor, she currently works at IUGO games. I decided to expand on a project I started in one of my previous classes, Portfolio Bootcamp with Dominic Prevost. The project revolves around a story titled “Re-Fracture”, I have plans of publishing the story as a webcomic on a platform called Webtoons. The plot revolves around four characters and it’s essentially an amalgamation of story elements I have loved in other series such as elemental magic, legendary weapons, a rivals-to-friends-to-lovers trope, and much more.

In Dominic’s class, I began working on character designs for the story’s four protagonists. Since I already did character designs, I wanted to have a clearer vision of the world these characters exist in.

I rarely create backgrounds for most of my pieces and I know that I can’t keep avoiding them forever. This project is the perfect opportunity to tackle that fear and become more accustomed to drawing backgrounds and really elevate my illustrations. Susan also creates background environments at her current job, so I knew she would be able to give me insightful feedback on my work.

To stay on track but still have a good chunk of work to do, Susan and I decided that one background would be fully rendered, and four additional backgrounds would be tightly sketched. While I still feel hesitant about actually having to draw backgrounds, I’m up to the challenge and excited to continue fleshing out “Re-Fracture”.

For this phase of the project I would give myself a 9/10. Since I already had previous assets to expand on, it was easy to come up with a project plan and present my idea to Susan.

As mentioned in my previous post with all three logo concepts, I was leaning toward the idea of a video game controller the most. In the end, I decided to go in this direction as it’s the one I felt the most confident in, I also liked how the concept was directed toward a specific audience. I find that it strikes a good balance between illustration and design, while also showing a bit of my personality and interests.

Overall I’m pleased with the logo that I came up with this. Whether or not I stay with this logo in fourth year, I am really glad I went through this process and came out of it knowing myself better.

Concept One

This concept draws on my love for macaroni and cheese. It’s playful and shows off a bit more of my illustration side.

Concept Two

The second concept is geared toward my design side. The logo uses a simple handwritten script, but incorporates a face to be more fun and inviting.

Concept Three

This final concept takes inspiration from my love of video games. Even if people do not understand that this is visually referencing game controllers, my name is still easy to read.

Out of the three, I personally feel most attached to the third concept, as I can continue to play with the concept visually in business cards and on my website. Although I could definitely see myself using the other two as well.

The first round of logo sketches I started out with using my legal name “Gabriela Jocson”, after ten or so sketches I decided to stick with using “Abby Jocson” as it’s a name I’m more familiar with. I tried to explore different routes, but mostly stuck to using the initials AJ and trying to find ways to represent my brand essence while still having readability.

The second round was more of an extension of the sketches chosen from the previous round (shown in the first picture on the left). While my three concepts all ended up being chosen from the first round, this was still a good exercise to ideate and explore different ideas and to practice more conceptual thinking.

For my personal ad, I wanted to go for a style that was fun, while remaining organized and contained. I decided to do simple illustrations of myself scattered across the page to showcase my illustration skills, while still keeping in mind design principles by creating hierarchy in the middle of the page.

For my mood boards, I did not realize how much I value freedom, exploration, and comfort. It was interesting to see that there were many re-occurring themes in my mood board, and several images evoked similar emotions. Overall, creating the mood boards was a nice change of pace and helped me see a clearer version of the kind of illustrator and designer I want to work toward.