Illusionary Reality

Welcome!

2009-04-13T09:22:00.000+08:00

Welcome!

As you can see, this post is locked as the first post. Theoretically speaking this is awful blog design, but since I won't be using this design anymore pretty soon, probably this will do fine. :) Hello and welcome! Yamikei was the name of my old blog before I shut it down because I have had no time to maintain it at all. It is revived only recently for a design module I am taking in NUS called NM2208. So here you'll find my works and design process. Please do comment on them if you want to! I'll see you around.

Final Project: Hype, Crook and Lyric

2009-04-13T09:20:00.009+08:00

For the final project I worked with Jessica, Janelle, Janet and Rebecca, and our initial idea was very very different from the final project. In our initial idea, we tell the story of a bear named Jeremy and his misadventures, but after the comment in class we decided our story was too simple and we had to go all the way back to the drawing block.

And so we came up with another story.

This one is about Emily, a girl who was too selfish to share her toys with anyone, even her friends. On her birthday party she received a new toy yet decided she did not want to show them to her friends. She then dream her toys walked out on her and when she woke up, they were all gone. She rushed out to find them and even asked her friends for help but to no avail. She then returns home to find out that...

Well... Please do read the book to find out the ending for yourself!

Here is the storyboard sketches for the final book. =X

Here's page 2

Here are some of the character designs!

And the color scheme we used:

And finally, some preview pages!

It took a long way to come here, we had done much of our design on paper before transferring them over to illustrator. But we had had many meetings and in some meetings we even worked overnight. End the end we decided to have hardcover printing, although it turned out expensive and the printing shop gave us shit attitude, the work was done quite well.

Thanks for reading as usual. Please do leave your comments!

Assignment 5: Colorful Asia

2009-04-13T09:20:00.006+08:00

Assignment 5 is by far the assignment I had the most difficulty of doing, mainly because I did not know what to include at all. And this is especially more stressful after I saw what people like HSK could do. XD

Coming up with the concept for this assignment requires a lot of forethought and balancing of ideas. As far as possible I wanted to avoid using photo manipulation. Not so sure if that is such a good idea now.

In the end I decided to take on the political side of view. The idea is to portray the major nations of Asia, their leaders and their troubles. But I would not be drawing out their faces, or their country. I’ll merely be hinting at them through little bubbles. The style will be deliberately childish.

Representing Singapore is Lee Hsien Loong, Japan Taro Aso, Malaysia Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Thailand Abhisit Vejjajiva, Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono, Phillipines Gloria Arroyo, North Korea Kim Jong Il and China Hu Jintao.

This is the color scheme.

Now the main idea is that the combination of all these feelings make up the political perspective today (about 3 weeks ago), so the final product is actually a combination of all the colors, all the feelings

As usual, thanks for reading, do comment in my blog and thanks!

Assignment 4: Save, prevent, Kill

2009-03-09T10:25:00.002+08:00

The theme for Assignment 4 is Save, Prevent, Kill. Basically any title with either of these three words in its name qualify as a theme ie Save the Trees, Kill all Mosquitoes, Prevent Global Warming... etc. Lacking anything good/unique to work on, I decided that English is overrated and decided to save Singlish!

Here is some preliminary sketch for the poster. One of the ideas I had was to use a dictionary to explain the commonly used Singlish grammar. I felt this would be quite interesting as it illustrates Singlish as a proper language with linguistic structure.

Here is the poster I decide to show in Tutorial on Wednesday. Be Understand is directly a poke-fun at the slogan for the speak good English movement Be Understood.

For the postit-pads I used a new technique I never used for my previous assignments called Clipping Mask. This allows me to keep track of what effects are being applied to which layer, and allows me to generally keep track of my layers better.

Generally the review is rather positive and I am very happy of course. Some of the changes that need to be made are that the red is pretty hard to see, and that I can probably make the Singlish stand out more. In the final product, to make the red stand out more I used some emboss. I also shifted the logos to make them more visible and less likely to be cut from printing, and I made minor changes to the lettering such that they do not seem to be written with faded ink. Finally I gave the background a gradient to make it more real.

Here is the final version.

As usual thanks for reading, and please do comment in my blog!

Class Assignment 2

2009-03-09T09:40:00.001+08:00

In CA2 we're divided into teams of 2 to sketch in about 1 hr using basic lines and shapes, two concepts which were shown to us in the lecture. The words were quite abstract and there were many so I don't really recall most of them. I paired up with Tiff and we worked on this!

Shift and Agitation.

The concept is to have a bear lifted accross on a crane, "shifting" its position, and the danger sign shows the bear being all angry and "agitated".
Hope you like it.

Assignment 3: U C What I C

2009-03-09T09:13:00.001+08:00

Assignment 3 was the most fun I had in doing my NM assignments thus far. The assignment asks us to create a story using only 8 photographs and no text/caption in between. I wanted to use Puteh as a star of my project this time round so I sat down and drafted my storyboard with stickmen and such.

First off, the basic storyboard. This one was done in about 1 min on my personal notebook so it looks "chui" but for all intent and purposes it is sufficient.

Anyways the idea is to have Puteh run past me to the food that is placed behind me. As it turns out quite a number of things needs to be changed in the final product. Here is what it is.

One of the biggest problem was the flow of the story. The story doesn't really flow entirely well, so I decided to switch picture 2 with picture 3. In addition my friends mentioned I could be kneeling down instead of standing up in 5 and 6, and also to show that the dog ran past me more obviously in number 7. In number 8, Puteh's food should be in a dog food bowl rather than just a can like that. Overall its a trainwreck. T_T

But my salvation of this trainwreck is...photoshop!

Seriously by rearranging the pictures and photoshopping some of them mildly, many of my friends have commented that it was much better and this should have been the final product in the first place.

The final piece in my portfolio.

As usual, thanks for reading! Comments welcome!

Assignment 2: Pictogram

2009-02-17T11:52:00.001+08:00

In assignment 2 I am required to design a pictogram. A pictogram is a pictorial representation of an object, and we actually see it all the time around us when we are looking for a toilet in a shopping center for example, the Man and the Woman logos depicting the toilet is actually a pictogram itself. Anyways the assignment requires us to take something in the NUS compound and design a pictogram out of it. Out of a lack of better things to do I decide to do something that is quite subtle yet is all around the school if we look hard enough. A water dispenser. The first stage, the reduction process. This is the first draft.

As I do the reduction, halfway down I decided that I want to change the camera angle altogether. I am not sure if this reduction is valid, but it does I believe allow me to produce a work which is immediately recognizable and reproducible, which is what I really wanted.

For this first draft the final product turned out to be this:

This is also the work I showed in class.

Initially I wanted to work on an ATM instead. but then i found a stock pictogram that is even better than what I had in mind and I gave up. XD

The class comments were generally positive, however they felt that the final product looked more like a coffee machine than a water dispenser in school. They believed that the problem lied with the cup. I should not have used a cup but instead a bottle, tilted, filling up the water this way. They also questioned the use of blue. I explained that the blue is supposed to allow the pictogram to be used in school but then realized its a much more blue blue. =X

It is ahte blue that is so deep that the rest of the pictogram has to be white to remain visible. Anyways, back to the drawing block for me.

And I chose 4, the final product is:

Sans the blue because it does not look good in the end.

Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading. Please do comment on this piece as well!

Assignment 1: Me, Myself and I

2009-02-09T21:40:00.004+08:00

Assignment 1 is about coming up with a name tag or a name card for ourselves. I have come up with a few ideas, some involving my interest in ancient Egyptian culture and others involving my love for the comics medium, but one decision I had to make early in the process was, what name do I decide to use. I have to choose between Ruishen and Claude, my nickname.

For this sketch I used Claude, and the idea is to capture the 5 senses, explaining that I like to experience things around me and I learn a lot faster by doing than by simply listening or watching. I also appreciate basic human anatomy.

This one uses Claude again and is a pretty simple idea. I like to collect pocket knives and actually have quite a stash featuring knives from various brands, but mostly Victorinox. For a pocket knive collector, collecting Victorinox is sort of like collecting Adidas Shoes or something. Part of it is due to the brand name and the other due to its legacy.

This one uses Claude and was a sudden hit of inspiration for me. By the time I drew this I was already aware that Watchmen is being made into a movie, and I went out and reread the book in Jurong NLB. I got so inspired that I took 1hr just to sketch out this idea. The basic idea is to use overlapping pages in a comic book so that their sound effects/objects form into the word "Claude". For the C I used the edge of a Battleaxe, the A comes from someone screaming "AAAAAA!!" or something like that, the U is the jawpiece of the orc... the final words "DE" could be the first part of the word "Destroyed!" or something along that line.

For this piece I used Ruishen instead as the length of the name probably fits this theme more. It looks a lot like hieroglyphics but hieroglyphics never have any humans in it. It looks more like cultural art, and truth be told, this was what I had in mind when I designed this piece:

This render had a lot of texture details which were difficult to explore and implement, but nevertheless I actually designed this piece to show in Tutorial class.

So for the two prototype pieces I decided on the Comics one and the Egyptian one. But when I presented in class I only presented the Egyptian prototype, and the reception wasn't that great.

People were commenting, why the texture. I mean if I want to create something that is etched in cloth or wood or some other fiber, why the shadow? The whole piece seems counter-intuitive and I agreed after looking my creation for sometime. Also the U seemed unreadable and it looked like Y. In fact according to the entire tutorial class, the name is unreadable. Most importantly, they asked, why the sun. The reason is because the R is supposed to be the Sun God Ra. But I know this won't work. I tried the Comics piece instead.

The final piece that I decided to show in the portfolio was:

The coloring is intentional to create a comic book feel. Overall I thought it came out alright. I hope you like it! Please leave your comments here. :)

First Post and Class Assignment 1

2009-02-03T10:56:00.004+08:00

Hi! This is a first post as well as an introduction. This blog is created mainly as a blog requirement for my NUS Module NM2208. However I feel it can become my official blog once I am done with that module. I hope to see you guys soon!

Class Assignment 1

So basically here it is!

Well, the assignment theme is about designing a machine which increases my creativity by 100 fold. So basically I really needed such a device, as mine looks unoriginal as hell. Anyways this was about a minute of doodling. I realize I sketch better than when I use most CAD software...

Idea here is this new machine which only enhance the right side and only the ride side of the brain by a factor of 100, as the right side of the brain is traditionally linked with creativity. Basically from the looks of this image, the process seems to be a rather painful one...