theme
The overall theme of my projects for this subject was to explore on the layers that makes up ones emotions. The specific lens that I'm exploring is through the negative and postive spectrum. What qualifies as negative and positive is used loosely in this project, as what one might clasify as such differs from one person to another.
However, for my ease of research, negative falls under strong emotions you dont feel on a daily basis, or something you dont discuss on a daily basis.
The positive emotions are more on a lighter sense of positivity. Which is about appreciating the small things in life. It doesn't have to make you overly happy, but enought to feel content with it.
And based on the negative and positive spectrum focus, I wanted to find a middle ground where these two can co-exist. which made me think of the concept of two sides of the same coin.
topic development
The idea for Piece by Piece stemmed from me being one semester away from graduating college. And reflecting back on the past works that I've done, I noticed that I subconsciously developed the topics towards things or ideas that I have varying levels of interest in. And due to this aforementioned interest, I tend to make it personal or try to reference everything based on my experience or outlook on said topic.
I noticed that doing this makes me burn out faster and overall, it just takes a huge toll on me. And naturally, I wanted to create something that can reflect this horrible feeling.
Which is visualising the concept of pouring a piece of yourself into the outside world until you're stripped dry, and how you deal with moving onto the next thing afterwards.
Because I didn't want to base this project on my own personal experience as that would defeat the purpose of this entire thing, I conducted a survey to help me set a direction on executing this topic.
While I asked the respondents a series of questions, ultimately, the answers from the questions that I implemented into my project are shown on this image. While there were varying answers, most of them had similar responses towards my question. So I categorized everything based on the keyword of their answers so I'm able to narrow down the scope.
execution reference
Using the overall theme of 'two sides of the same coin,' I want to reflect on said two sides in a more obvious manner. Hence the usage of cards as my outcome.
The two sides of the cards can be related back to the idea of the negative and positive spectrum. I find that categorizing the storylines in this manner helps set the tone that I want to convey in my illustrations. This is done by using brighter colour schemes on a positive reaction towards moving on and using blue for the negative reaction towards moving on to create create a melancholic feel to it
click on the image for the original source
item visualisation
illustration ideas
The elements that I used in my outcome came from the respondents' answer of what they visualise when they hear the word piece by piece. I then mixed this with their answers on the listed questions to create a script or monologue to narrate/provide context to the illustrations.
For the art style, I used digital watercolour as my medium because I wanted to use soft colours in the illustration to create a sense of dream-like sequence, or hazy memories that you try to recall after some time has passed by.
layout 1
layout 2
text box ref
Since I'm separating the illustration into a set of three cards, I wanted to utilise a dynamic layout with a fluid art flow to create a better connection between each card. And I did that by referencing the layout references above. Where the artist lets the image pops out of the frame to create that dynamic and fluid feel. Additionally, since I'm using soft colours, I wanted the text box to look as distracting as possible. So I referenced said image above as it takes up as little space as possible, while also looking one with the illustrations.
timelapse of the scenes drawings