TASK 4

Drawing BAAN101 – Task 4, Evaluation.

What?

My final design is based on a quote people often say to their loved ones, family and friends; “You are my Sun-shine”.

It’s very widely known because of a very old song that shares this quote as the title. I searched and searched online for the “original singer”, but all that could be told was that many people have covered it and the song just “came about” in the very olden days in the country-side, I tried to look for a rough date so I could at least give this quote an age, but that’s still a piece of information that is pretty rare online.

Who?

I guess I can’t really say any one inspired my work per-say because upon research about my Quote, I found that there was not really a record of the Quotes originality.

I did speak to my Grandmother about this subject as a general question though, thinking she would know something about it, but she did not.

I’d say it was merely the answer my Grandmother gave that gave me the inspiration to do this piece.

She said “I don’t know where it came from, but it’s one of those sayings that will never die”; she is a big believer of love and fate and most things I’m not really into.

I guess also, I can put partial blame to my Mum who still greets me in the morning with odd things like “ I love you to the moon and back” and “Loves you billions”, and when she wrote that to me, I did start searching online for weird things similar, and then I remembered the song “You are my Sun-shine”.

I really like this song because it is sweet and beautiful and it reminds people that they still have someone to bring light in their life even if there is trouble about your lives.

 Where?

The image is based in a random secluded field depicted in very bold and plain colours, I did this because I saw a couple in a secluded field recently near where I grew up, just laying on a bench and enjoying the view of all the nature that still barely exists in our world today.

I drew a sketch of this couple very quickly from a long distance and instantly wanted to use this as a base of the idea.

When?

We did the character design over the course of a few weeks, I did do a picture before of a character for print making, but I felt no further development could really be done to that character. I did also start on a second character before I decided to go with this quote, but I didn’t believe it was a really strong idea.

I gave myself plenty of time to be able to do the final image on Flash and Photoshop, which over a series of a few days, took me three hours in total, most of this was just tweaks and finalising and perfecting though.

How?

First of all I explored all the different ways I could have depicted this image from a picture of a girl physically holding a sun to a young boy with a sun for a head, but finally decided to have the young boy glowing. I started to paint my idea in my sketch book and started building the idea to a rough image of the final.

I then took my painting into Adobe Flash and started to work from my piece and then when I felt that I was done, I uploaded everything into Photoshop as separate PNG’s, this will allow me to re-order and manipulate the layers with-out tediously having to dissect the image as a whole.

I slightly deviated from my original design, like making the couple on the picnic basket bigger and clearer, I added a shade to the people too, I also added text to the image so people could see the quote clearly.

Why?

I did this idea because I thought it would be a nice thing to work on, I also explored a style that I am not familiar with just so I can tell myself, “I did that, I am/ am not a fan”, I also thought it was a very cute thing to draw and I guess thought it could positively influence my motivation because it was something I felt quite strongly about doing.

Colours

I chose for the colours to be soft and pastel because I thought the innocence of the image needed to match the style of the drawing. There is very little black in the drawing, besides the clouds and some out-lining, I felt for an image like that, too much black would make it kinda dark and droll and not happy enough for the subject matter.

Style

Again with keeping the innocence in the image I decided to keep it very simple and cute and just wanted it to all fit the subject matter. A lot of people like the cute simple look in drawings. A Fandom born from Japan called “Kawaii”, it’s the vision of everything on this earth having feelings and having a face but was adapted to be this vision that everything can be cute, a very common image in this is things like fruit, suns, milk cartons and even random food like waffles could all have simple, cute faces on them and would be deemed very adorable.

While my style of drawing is very similar in this piece, it’s not quite considered kawaii, because to start with my subjects in the picture are a boy and a girl and the sun in this image does not have a face, while I wanted the image to be kind of whimsical and cute, I didn't really want to deviate from reality and make it all a fantasy.