The final assignment involved more of a trial and error kind of approach. I believe it was generally a matter of just repeating the same process over and over that killed the motivation to take all the those steps to figure out what to make. So, this was the most straightforward method of approaching a task like this. Which basically involved me putting my stylus to the tablet and letting whatever needed to come out, come out. Although, I had managed hinge myself to the theme which was “seven days’, in a state like this, the obvious brief was:

“Brief: Create an illustrative piece expressing your feelings across the days of the week.”

As reference for the ideas I was trying to portray through the images I would create, I create a list of each day with their respective associated emotions written as phrases.

I won’t lie, it is quite impossible to be a hundred percent consistent with these emotions because there are some things that just work better visually, so while there is a basic semblance, it isn’t necessarily the exact sentiment used in the illustration as it is in the list above. To give you an example, the first idea I came up with didn’t express Friday as a blessing as much as it expressed it as a feeling submission to the situation. A “to hell with it, let’s just finish it off” kind of an idea.

As a bonus, I tried to make it more versatile in terms of usability, i.e., an image that could be uploaded to instagram as a post, and looks just as interesting as a print on a T-shirt. The first idea was the most complex idea I could come up with, which was creating a series of illustrations based on each day of the week. While this was a lot more my type, it was just a lot of work.

The other problem that weakens a piece like this is that its effectiveness comes out without the help of text; creating that mood without text is the true challenge, text would just make the message more obvious. And seeing as I’d done an entire exercise on text, I thought it’d be a waste of an experience not to try using text in an interesting way in the final assignment. Below are images from one the exercises. Due to a lack of time I decided not to add this to my learning log as a separate topic.

Following are the thumbnails for the first idea.

I didn’t really see the point in going further with this idea though, so I dropped it and started working on a new one. The inspiration for the next idea actually came from an older idea from my own portfolio. This series of frames was from a comic book attempt of mine from several years back when I was trying to start something solid but just never managed to, because while I had apititude for art, I wasn’t very smart when it came to writing. Now that I look back at it, it might’ve worked as a single issue comic book expressing the idea of having perhaps an existential crisis in their sleep. This wasn’t the only page though, there were a total of 5, the last one only half done. But enough of that, back to the assignment.

So yes, it started with 7 horizontal panels, one for each day. And while I had initally thought of trying this with a mouth, eyes in general are more expressive of emotion. So I decided to draw eyes instead. And since this was a close up of eyes, I added the fish eye effect where when you get to close to the eyes they start to seem like they’re looking in two different directions even though they’re just looking straight. There’s something about helplessness in the human condition that really brings out this sense of rawness. Helplessness when it comes to expressing emotion, where you just can’t help but look a certain way or do certain actions, which also comes out in this angle.

The rough drawing for the same looked like this.

With the eyes further elaborated upon the image looked like this. Here the eyes are more realistic and really capturing the sentiment…

…followed by shading and emphasis on the emotion in the text. With each day, the text gets less aggressive.

I then added a colour to each panel depending on the emotion expressed. Red for Monday, being the most aggressive of the days; Tuesday had orange, as a sort of cooled down version of Monday. Wednesday has a dark blue grey, being the dullest part of the week. Thursday has purple which is a middle-ground between hope and despair. Friday uses green which is purely hopeful. And saturday has a lighter shade of orange which is more blissful and still aggressive but more as an act of revenge rather than fighting back, as a sign of the arrival of the weekend when you can do whatever you want.

And the last part was adding it as a print on a T-shirt.

The border was to counter this insecurity I had about keeping the edges open and it seeming too cheap as a result. But the border already looked cheap, so I decided to remove it and see how it looked then.

And thus the assignment was complete.

Attribution for the mockup: T shirt psd created by Vectorium – www.freepik.com