Animal Poster
Part Two of the Animal Project begins: Posters!
Planning
Now that the plastic animal creation is over, we’re onto creating posters of our animals to better represent/study their habitat and their cause of endangerment (or in my case, probably extinction).
Like for the last portion of the project, I first went about collecting images of the curlew that I could study while creating the poster. I did some digging and I was able to find all four existing photos of the curlew:
Most important to me was the photo of the eskimo curlew tending to its nest. That photo shows me a lot of important movement for the curlew and also how their eggs/nest looked.
However, besides the photos of the curlew, though I really could just mainly use those, I also wanted to collect some other references. So, I got a photo of a modern species of curlew for color reference and some photos of the Alaskan/Canadian tundra.
Based on these photos, I created an initial color palette. I don’t really want to do a standard green grass blue sky, so I tried to go for a teal gradient palette to try and work well with the brown of the curlew.
The tundra grass has these great spots of red, but I unfortunately don’t have enough colors to make that in my poster. With the colors I have selected here, I had three for the curlew and four for the rest of the landscape.
Finally, I created an expanded thumbnail to give me something loose to work off of going into illustrator. I don’t really want a high fidelity drawn version so that I have more wiggle room with my idea. In my experience, if I flesh out an idea too far, I risk not being able to fully realize it. However, if I keep my ideas vague, I’m often more happy with the outcome.
Going into my first critique, some questions I have are “what level of the detail should be in the birds?” and “how necessary is realistic color?”
Edit post critique: the answer to my questions are “as detailed as I want them to be” and “realistic color is not essential” respectively.
During critique today, I had Q. His feedback asked me to consider many things compositionally. The main comments of his were that I should use the mountains to intentionally offset the composition, move the sun to be not so aligned with the eggs (if I decide that I need to use the sun at all), and I shouldn’t block the sky too much with the flock of birds. Additionally, Q asked me to try and make the text placement more intentional. Right now it takes up too much of the composition and not in a good way. Ideally, I should try to place it one of the corners. Q’s feedback was incredibly helpful and definitely give me a good starting point with my poster.
Starting the poster
I’m a pretty firm believer that to get better at art, you have to do it, so I kind of just jumped straight into illustrator. Q recommended that I try to limit my current color palette to five colors right now because I’ll likely end up needing another color or two, and he was right. I started with the birds and some basic landscape and quickly required one of my two extra colors. With just the alterations of my first idea, I can definitely see how this is a good assignment to learn self-limitation.
Conor showed us a really cool tool where we can edit all the colors at once while still keeping the relationships between them. I was able to pull my colors from a more basic green to a much more interesting (in my opinion) blue. With my basic shapes in place, I kept editing the colors to create three different versions for the second critique. One was with the blues that I discovered and liked so well, another with some teal colors, and another with a more pink and green scheme. I wanted to at least try green, to attempt a more realistic color scheme, but ultimately it’s my least favorite. It feels not right, especially with the sun. At least I tried!
Also, something I left in this iteration that isn’t exactly consistent are the birds. one bird I abstracted and the other I tried to preserve some speckled quality to the bird. I like the abstracted bird much better but I thought it was worth it (just like with the color) to try a less abstracted version.
While I was waiting to be critiqued, I also took the time to create a flock of birds to fit into the background. I would have done them the night before, but I didn’t have time to create them to the fidelity I wanted to show them at. As my grandmother says, if you can’t do it right the first time, when would I have time to do them again? The birds really helps to solidify the story I’m trying to create with the hunters.
For today’s critique, I had Daphne. Daphne gave me a lot of useful feedback on how to move forward with my design. This feedback included:
- My grass looks weird. This is probably because of how big it is and/or how fat it is. Grass just doesn’t grow like how I drew it here
- It’s okay to abstract the birds. The speckles as I have them now are a bit distracting and it’s worth it to abstract things for a better overall look
- The sun isn’t necessary. What does it add to the composition? To the environment? For the birds? (A: not much, really)
- The coloring is a little strange. The beige sky, which is reminiscent of sunrise or sunset, and the blue surroundings, which is reminiscent of night time, combine for an unclear time of day. I should commit to a color scheme that more clearly communicates what time it is.
- The text feels cramped, which consequently makes the layout look weird. It’s just really tight to the edge but also very close to the mountains. I need to give it the proper space to breath.
Improving the poster: part 1
Albeit them useful, I didn’t really know how to proceed with a lot of Daphne’s feedback. So, I attended Margot’s office hours. I went in with this version, which had moved text (as per suggestion), some highlights on the mountains to define them better, and an altered color palette:
Margot was wonderful during her critique! She helped solve all my problems and I’m so thankful.
Firstly, she suggested I use my grass to establish another foreground. As it is now, there is no mid-ground but I can move the grass down to imply a new line, thus creating a new foreground. Furthermore, this will help establish depth in my composition, which was something I was struggling with a lot.
Margot suggested that my text was too big and that’s why it looks so cramped. Sure enough, after sizing it down, it has a lot more breathing room. I think that it needs some more editing with text placement, but already the smaller text is better. I was limiting myself on text size and I didn’t even realize it. Additionally with the text, I actually need to write it. What text I write is a big part of how the text will eventually look and how I will need to structure it.
I should also try to add texture to the birds. Right now my complaint was that the birds, although central and a different color, don’t really look like the focus of the piece. However, Margot suggested that if I added some texture to their wings, then they could look more like the focus point.
Finally, if I want to go for fun colors, use a particular time of day to facilitate that. For example, if I want to do a sunrise scene, I can use a bunch of pinks and oranges and it won’t look out of place.
Improving the poster: part 2
Using Margot’s I made some edits to my poster. These included moving the grass forward to create a foreground, some smaller grass on the mid ground, making the hunters smaller, and some pretty big color changes.
In critique today, I had Q. Q went through each of our posters and brought them into Illustrator to make direct edits to them. However, the main feedback I received from Q was:
- I can use the smoothing tool (I didn’t know this tool existed) to make my birds and my eggs less angular. This will make them seem much more realistic and a lot less like a bad video game rendering.
- I can use the highlights on the mountain as shadows on the beige part of my birds. This will allow me to create both more detail and more depth in the birds.
- I have too much contrast between the tone of the mountains and the tone of the mid-ground. It will feel like less of an artificial landscape if I have more of a more even fade.
- I should reduce the size of the birds and hunters, as well as potentially making the birds more sparse. They play too prominent of a role currently; the role of extinction is right in your face. Making them smaller will fix that, as well as giving me some space compositionally. I don’t have to take everything up.
Improving the poster: part 3
For our final crit, I had Daphne. Daphne’s critique was:
- I should make the grass in the mid-ground shorter. It doesn’t feel very proportional right now.
- I should make the bottoms of the grass consistent. Right now it feels like they’re all growing in different directions or something. Either way, it’s a bit distracting for the viewer to see such wild grass.
- The birds are a bit strangely placed. I should play with their placement compositionally.
- Just generally the composition is a bit off, and I should consider how I can make it better flow.
- The body of the birds and the eggs could use a shadow to better define them and add more depth. I could use the highlight color from the mountains to act as this shadow.
- The grass is still very fat; they’re fatter than the legs of the bird, which is just not proportionate. I need to thin them out to help them be more convincing.
Poster overhaul
Going back to when I said “if you can’t do it right the first time, when would I have time to do them again?” This, apparently. I decided that my composition is so totally un-savable in how it existed, I just redid the whole thing (minus some assets like the birds and the hunters). Unfortunately, I forgot to take screenshots all through my revamp.
To begin, I established a grid. Conor suggested that I attempt using the rule of thirds to help my composition. This was immediately very helpful. I was able to create some nice breathing space in my upper third, without making the composition feel too empty. It also helped to balance out all the grass I have at the bottom.
Then, I struggled with text. Based on my grid, I decided that the best place for my text was the bottom right-hand corner. For a very long time, I had the grass framing the text in this location. Something about that felt off, but I couldn’t quite decide how else I could position the text down there. I talked with some of my friends in studio and then the idea struck me: a rock. I couldn’t use a tree or shrubbery to house my text like a lot of my peers could, but the tundra does have rocks. Then, using the same style of highlights as I used on the mountains in the background, I’m also able to create a more cohesive feeling from my foreground to my background.
However, after making the rock, it was starting to look a little like a desert. The more I looked at it, the more the environment of overwhelming orange and red reminded me of Utah or Arizona… which isn’t even close to the tundra. I knew I wanted to do a cool tone, but green wasn’t going to work and neither was blue. So, I settled on purple. Also, purple mountains are a fairly standard color to use for abstracted mountains. I was able to keep both the beige/pink of the sky and the orangey highlight color. It’s like the sun is rising, but only just, which is cool.
I altered the color of the flock of birds to be a lighter color purple, rather than matching the birds in the foreground. This helps them fade into the background a lot more and make the focus further on the birds in the front.
Then, a design junior came downstairs to visit us and I had him look at my work. He suggested that I alter the front birds’ color to be the normal brown, to be more accurate to the animal. He had a good point that the animal project is all about accurately representing our animal, and I wasn’t exactly doing that when I was making my brown bird blue or purple.
I added details to the bird using a clipping mask and a pattern I hand drew with the pencil tool. This helps the bird stand out from the grass a lot more and draw the eye to them rather anything else. This is also helped by the shadows I added onto the birds and the eggs.
I cropped the bottom of every single blade of grass, as per Daphne’s suggestion, to make it look the the grass all grows up out of the same place, as well as adding more grass to the nest.
Finally, I got rid of the grass along the ridge. Dylan came by and I asked him to take a look at my work really briefly. The thing he said he took the most issue with in my design was the edge of the mid-ground. Prior to asking Dylan, two other people told me it looked like a hairy arm, so I figured that it was time. In the grass’ place, because the ridge looked empty, I added some rocks. This helped the line feel a lot more natural, as well as carry the rock theme from the foreground all the way to the background.
Honestly, I’m really proud of how this poster turned out. I think the colors are really beautiful and the composition I came up with works. Most importantly, I think that it’s in my style and represents it well.
