Live Brief - Ohh Deer - The Designs

Design 1 - So Fly

A lot of effort was put into this design mainly because it was done as a dedication to my babies back at home, one whom I have mentioned, had passed away recently from cancer... Throughout the night, I ended up sharing my progress with my sister (Who also adored the bejebus out of our dogs) on this piece (It was morning in Singapore by that time), getting some feedback in making this piece better.

As you can see from the old design, there were far too many balloons, which clearly took the focus away from the dogs themselves, I was also really bothered over how the smaller dogs had far more balloons than the largest dog, and so decided to redo the balloons, counting how many each one had as I did. 

The other significant change I made was to the top dog's eyes, that initially looked a little too sad in older design. I also changed the harnesses to more traditional looking ones, as the older ones simply looked like colourful bandages wrapped around their mid-section...

I had a slightly tough time balancing out the details on the background, not wanting to make the entire image look too busy while at the same time not wanting it to be too plain and flatly coloured either.

Design 2 - Prehistoric Spectrum

I thought I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted with this design, and while it didn't take too long to paint out each silhouette (It did take a little time figuring out which dinosaurs to include however, I had ended up looking through several lists and charts, taking into account the most popular ones (Such as tyrannosaurus rex, stegosaurus and pterodactyl), and the memorable enough ones (Thanks to Jurassic Park)), it took some time figuring out how I would arrange them into an appealing enough layout.

This initially had a black background, but the contrast did not appeal to me all that much.

For quite some time, I was having trouble deciding whether they should all be scaled to similar sizes, or be scaled to their contrastingly more accurate sizes... And so after much struggling, I ended up looking through some dinosaur wrapping paper for reference, and while I had finally found a suitable one, I grew ever more displeased, as I realised just how overdone this idea actually was... though I suppose, you can never have enough dinosaurs.

Design 3 - Idiogenics

Based on a game concept of mine, I wanted to show that this one actually had a little story to it, through the strangely disgruntled expressions of the characters, and the gritty background (Scroll down) that contrasts to their clean and brightly coloured selves, signifying that not all is well... and that they don't belong in this place.

Anyway back to the design itself, I thought that this was a great choice for one of my cushion designs, mostly due to the cartoony art style used. I have received surprisingly positive responses from several people (From various parts of the design industry) whom I deeply respect, and thought that this would be a good time to bring it back (Not to say I will stop here, someday I hope to expand further on this universe of mine, but that will have to wait for another time I suppose).

While the outline looked alright at first, it didn't sit right with me once I
added in the texture to the background. It probably might have looked fine if I
had gone with a plain background instead.

From past experience, I remember how much darker prints tend to turn out as compared to the digital file itself, and so before submitting this design, I decided to lighten the texture used for the background, while also making sure that there was still enough contrast between it and the characters.

Design 4 - Princess Hanabi

Another design based on one of my original characters, I just worked away on this one, forgetting to take progress shots as I did. Before the final design shown below, there was one where the character was simply surrounded by a pink mist, and another where the petals were actually pink. I feel that so much more could have been done with the layout... in all, this has to be my least favourite out of all designs, especially since it looked so much better done in marker... but I am glad that I was able to get it out of the way.

Anyway, with this brief finally completed, it is time I moved onto the next one, and perhaps this time it will be an animation based one.