For our first assignment in Survey of Design, we were given the task of creating a hypothetical yearbook spread.
I was quite excited to get started on this! Initially I was caught between using a traditional medium, but ended up deciding on Procreate. I started off by importing a photo of myself and my kitty, Lyra. In the photo, she’s sitting on my lap as I gaze at her purring and drooling all over me. You can see the love and amusement of my face. In order to heighten the image quality, and achieve the painted effect I was going for, I went over the photo with Procreate’s standard oil paint brush. Then I went in and hand-lettered my name and pronouns in script to add a personalized touch.
I have always been very inspired by the poster, “Le Chat Noir” by Theophile Stienlen, and the color palette of red and maroon, gold, and black show up a lot in the ways I’ve chosen to express myself – in my wardrobe, in how I’ve decorated my room- and I really wanted to communicate that in the assignment too. Autumn is my favorite season by far and I really wanted to play with different design elements, so I decided to add some leaf imprints in a darker shade of red to the background in order to give it more texture. Finally, I drew some wavering abstract lines to direct the focus towards the illustration.
At this point, I realized that Procreate isn’t really the best for incorporating text, so I switched over to Photoshop. And then switched over to Illustrator. I’m a complete novice when it comes to the Adobe Suite, and the whole second part of adding in the text took me quite a while to figure out. Unfortunately I wasn’t super satisfied with the end result.
In the end, I learned a lot from this assignment, and for my very first creative assignment I think I did a pretty good job. There are definitely things I would change about the piece if I were to go back to it. In total I probably spent about 8 hours on the assignment, and would rate myself with an A grade for the level of effort I put into it.
