Illustration:
Report:
Audience/Purpose: describe the intended audience of your illustration(s); what are you trying to communicate to this audience?
The intended audience of this illustration include college students or young adults who have a lot on their plate and often juggle various responsibilities: school, work, friends, and family. These audiences are overwhelmed and stressed; they often need an outlet or a source of relaxation. The purpose of this illustration is to encourage the audience to add active yoga to their daily or weekly activities took act as that source of escape. Yoga promotes so many health benefits, improving the mind and body, thus creating a balance in life. It relieves stress and improves focus by narrowing a person’s focus on a low stress activity that allows them to set goals that are separate from the stressful responsibilities surrounding them.
Image(s): how do features of the illustration(s) effectively convey the message to your audience?
Many of the features of this illustration are geared toward the intended audience. One of the features include the subsection titles; each message asks about topics that college students may be struggling with and may be looking for a simple substitute. For example, trying to exercise or lower anxiety may be some main struggles for college students who are trying to stay afloat. Another feature of the illustration includes the main color scheme of the infographic. It has light and dark shades of blue that encourage the feeling of tranquility and comfort that is also inspired by active yoga. The pictures in between the listed benefits as well as the two images next to the title were all done in illustrator. The yoga poses placed next to the title were chosen because they are both simple and commonly associated with yoga. The first listed benefit is supplemented with a heart that illustrates one of the many health benefits associated with yoga. The next image is a yoga pose that requires a person to balance on their hands and hold their legs above their elbows. I believe this pose demonstrates a lot of the strength that is acquired from active yoga. Next, an image of rocks being balanced on top of each other is to demonstrate the piling up and balancing of various responsibilities. The next image depicts a scrambled mind next to an organized mind. The scrambled mind illustrates that of someone with anxiety or who is overwhelmed. The organized mind illustrates how yoga helps to reduce stress and clear a path in the mind. The last image is of a puppy sleeping which demonstrates the relaxing aspect of yoga. The images were all transformed into drawings and outlines to demonstrate how participation in yoga encourages these feelings: the freeing of boundaries and the lack of restraints. The title of the infographic is created in two different fonts. The first half, “The benefits of”, is done in a smooth and delicate font while the second half, “Active Yoga”, is done in a bold font to make it stand out as the main idea of the entire illustration.
Process: what did you do to create the illustration(s) in this project?
The majority of this infographic was done in Illustrator and accompanied by Canva. Every single one of the images used were sampled from either Unsplash.com or Google images. The two images next to the title came from two different pictures of people doing a yoga pose. Both images were traced using the Pencil tool and repeatedly joined together to create a single trace for each image. The tracing was separated from the original image and then filled with a light pattern that matched nicely with the color theme of the rest of the infographic. The Embed and Image Trace tools were used to transform the image of the heart into an abstract of multiple colors. I then used the recolor wheel to slightly alter the colors to make them stand out a little more. The image that represents strength was altered with the Image Tracing tool using 6 colors. This made the image look a bit more abstract and easier to trace with the Pencil tool to get a simpler outline. The Live Paint Bucket tool was then used to drop color in between the lines and emphasize what the image was depicting. The rock and the puppy images were created in similar ways only with the tracing of more details and the use of different colors. The scrambled and organized minds image was simplified with the Image Trace tool as well, with the addition of the Selection tool to move the heads closer to each other and to size and space them equally. These images were all placed into a template from Canva. The fonts and layout were all sampled from Canva.
Learning: what did you learn from working on this project–for example, about Illustrator/Canva, about design, about communication, about yourself?
Working on this project made me realize how a simple idea can be much more complicated and require much more time than expected. Creating an outline or trace of images can take a long time and consists of a lot of trial and error. There is always something more that can be added or taken away to make the illustration better, but sometimes it is not easy to do and can get very complex. Much of the work I did in Illustrator was similar and sounds simple, but doing it was a whole other story. Each image that I traced took me at least 30 min, not including the coloring. The coloring itself opened new challenges because I would have to figure out which tools to use that allowed me to isolate areas and color them separately instead of coloring the entire image. Canva also posed some challenges, such as uploading and sizing images into a template or altering the shapes and layout that was already present. Combing Illustrator and Canva was challenging in the sense of figuring what fit and blended well with each other when switching between the two. I loved the template I chose, but I was struggling to find what colors I would include in the images to make them stand out and blend in at the same time. I have also learned how the different aspects of an image can influence the message that is being conveyed. For example, I realized that the tracing of the images visually contributed to the topic of yoga. The space and free hand of drawing supplemented the liberating aspect of yoga, thus attributing to how the message was conveyed.
Next: what will you do the same/differently on the next project?
For the next project, I will make it a priority to have ideas of what I want my project to look like and the message I want to convey to help me be more efficient with my time. Since we are spending much less time to experiment with the programs used in the creation of our projects, planning the general idea of my project beforehand will prove useful. This will allow me to utilize the in-class tutorials as drafts for my final product instead of using the tutorials on random things. I will continue to ask my friends and roommates for their opinion on my projects as I work through them. This was extremely helpful because I was able to bounce ideas off them and understand how they interpreted my projects. Especially when my projects are geared toward the same age group and audience as myself and my friends, their opinions are very valuable.