Level 3 DDA Year 2
Grace Cheung
Weekly reflection
Week 1
It is the start of the second year, and I have time to acquire new skills in illustrations, designs, and animations. Additionally, I will be making progress in decisions between University and career paths, which includes creating a portfolio that will influence where I will go in any career path and/or attend university. At least I can focus on the projects while dealing with the profile that affects me a lot.
The first task was to relearn some of the basic things in Illustrator; it is a quick learning on how things are done. It includes some research on the brand logo shapes and character design shapes. I write out the explanations on how the designs become recognisable from different perspectives and the development of the design itself. In the practical work on the same thing, I took my time to design one character design that was recognisable in different shapes, yet I did not specify what kind of design to finish for the day.
The second task was required a lot of time and some managements on the files and time management, it is about Portfolio/Showreel intro, which gives me a chances to animated some of the original characters with some introductions about myself and my best creations of all (including the original characters I mentioned), it may had a bit of a planning on what kind of placements on each elements that included my stuff.
But at least I sketched out a basic outline of what I planned for the project itself.
At the third task of the week, I focused on discussing the Pros and Cons of going to University, and wrote about that on the progression page of the website; at the same time, I wrote about myself within how many I learnt about myself and wanting to took any risk and challenges, also a little bit about my past and the dream of being an Illustratiors for illustration books and an animator was still there after my 7 or 8 year old wishes.
Lastly, for the small task, which is about a building logo, I had planned on some complicated designs, but I let some smaller designs on a small building in the UK. It is easier to finish on Illustrator, and it has some complications with colour picking from the reference photos that I have screenshot from Google Maps. It was fun for me to turn a front view of a building into a flat 2D logo from Illustrator.
Outside of college, I started a two-page storyboard about the Portfolio intro, with different panels of storyboard that I slowly and gradually going towards on a more focused approach on what I am interested in and what my profession is in one single animation that lasts around 10 seconds or more if there is much stuff I have to add in the future.
Week 2
During week 2 of College, I focused more on the progression of planning for life after College, while also dealing with plans and projects to make them easier to manage within my schedule, both inside and outside of college.
Initially, I concentrated on storyboarding the introduction to my portfolio, adopting a revised plan from the one I had originally planned last week. The storyboard panels were enhanced with simple transitions and characters that I had created over the years. Additionally, I had to complete all the evaluations, research, and reflections from previous projects that I had done.
It felt unusual to settling down with something that I had done on time, which the first project was about logo designer and illustrator researches; firstly is Tom Muller who his designs were around simple title design around the X-Man series and more series, it had the influances on how the designs were capable for the engagements and unified to the audiences, the second designer is captured the logo design and illustrations well with the inspirations from Saul Bass and other designs that were simple to the eye and have the colour selections. Then the practical work was inspired by both designers, and it was done on Illustrator, which is a quick way to test out different fonts on a simple logo on its own, adding to the practical work on re-rendering shapes into the exact logo I designed, only in text. It was a headache to find the exact editing to finish all the designs.
Another project was about the magazine illustration, it is a simple design on illustration for a topic "Are Nightclubs Safe, especially for younger women", I focused on some background colours besides the obvious character choice; the colours are green, purple and orange as a triad colour theory. Given the limited colour and shade sections, I remain focused on making the illustration around the topic as much as possible. Although I was supposedly working on Photoshop, I changed the place where I design the whole illustration to Procreate, which makes it much easier to design and achieve the result.
Also, I have research on the 3 career path and 3 course from University, it seem will be a challenge to be to achieve since it is a big dream that I determined to become in the future.
I have been given the time to finish the rest of the project outside of college, with some evaluations and reflections written and updated time to time. Later, I planned to continue to finish some of the art assets for the Portfolio/Showreel intro animation.
Week 3
At week 3, I focused on maintaining a balance between different parts of the project evaluations I had completed before, while also balancing out the progression of the Showreel intro animation with the time outside of college before the October term break. As the small research projects and practical work required me to write extensively for the evaluation of every aspect of the process, including the website I researched.
The first task was about the colour theory and the colour palette research task, which focused on the colour itself. Although it was taught during primary school art class, it is important for designing and animation courses and careers themselves. Additionally, I focused on testing out the colours on the texts that I had done last week and made a new logo for the colour testing.
Other than that, I created a colour wheel in Illustrator. It was a bit complicated to create one on another platform, but it worked with adjustments on the circles and columns, and I cut the circles at once in Illustrator.
As the idea goes, I found the colours from the website "Colour hunt", which contained all possible colour palettes that I was gonna test on the text. The target was to make the text bright for appeal to a younger audience, at the same time not hurting the eyes as much as possible, so I used the higher hue colour palette on the texts. At the same time, I put a couple of lower hue colours on the texts that worked for the childish-focused logos. For the new logo, I started to use the shapes of circles, stars and a ragtag to cut out the sunrise shape; the idea was about airlines and their services. The colours were a struggle for me to pick between purple and yellow or pink and blue; it took a while, but I decided on purple as the star decorations and the blue as the main body of the logo.
The second task was about the redesigning logos, I quickly into the task and searched for two logos which were Taco Bell and Patreon, those two brands surve different purpose; as Taco Bell's logo main focused on the tacos and fast survices, Patreon's logo was about the supports and donations to the creators that were using those money and time to making the content for the people.
During the sketching of the logos, I redesigned the Taco Bell's logo to focus more on the service purpose then tacos, so the first idea was to design a shape that looked like a person and the uppercase "T" with the some small details were taco and a small bell on the tip of the hand, second idea was similar to the original taco bell logo with a taco inside of the bell which the whole thing looked like a surving platter. Another redesign idea for Patreon was having some slight changes, such as adding a blob to rushing in like a person supports that content creator or yellow circles that looked like coins, giving the money for them to continue to make that kind of content.
The texts that needed to be tested out in different fonts, which there were four results on each text font that I had thought of that would fit into the category of the brand that I was redesigning. Then, after finishing the project, I put the best finished logo and the text that were parallel to the logo itself.
For the show reel intro production, I was quite stressed of how I would done the project by myself with all the animations on Procreate, Photoshop and After Effects, there were lots of things that I required myself to finished before the deadline, but my best was finished the start and the middle part of the animation since I finished all the project by myself.
Week 4
In week 4, I focused more on the unfinished part of the websites where I had to deal with all the words and paragraphs with the help of Grammarly, there were different sections where there were one or two reflections that needed to be done by this week, and Grammarly made myself easier to understands for some punctuations and the vocabulary that required in the reflections.
There were included some arrangements on the screenshots for the Showreel animation project that needed to be finished at week 6 with inclusions of multiple evaluations on process and the change of ideas of how the entire animation worked, despite there were showcase my personal things, I had to show my projects I done so far, which included some recent art assets for the showreel itself which having some positioning inside of the reel itself.
For the showreel animation, I had a couple of changes in the After Effects and gave some thought to my Portfolio for my animated illustrations in mind for the future, and having some busy time for the intro of the showreel animation, where I had to deal with all the positions that were needed in After Effects also have awareness for the time that I needed to match from the start of the animation. Additionally, I have other artworks that I can show to the audience, which demonstrate my work on various projects and animations. It is set as an example for dealing with all the projects.
When at the end of the week, I started to thinking of the idea for the Portfolio project itself, I had to make a mind map over the project to connecting all the dots for each needs for the project that needed to be done in 8 weeks, as the idea of the project was about making an illustration book about my portfolio, digging deep into how I achiving each part of the artwork that I had done, including some new ones that I had to included for the project. As inspiration was needed for the research, the style of the illustration book revolved around fantasy, gothic, mystery, and slight horror. The idea of the illustration style may change over time due to scheduling and other factors.
More than that, I focused on finishing off the animation intro of the showreel where there were some adjustments on the character's limb and the head combine with the entire body of the character itself was a bit of the work load with the animations in Photoshop, it was a big task for the intro itself where it was one of the hand-drawn and then tweaking animations, it was close for me to done beside have to deal with some writing in the website.
Overall, I faced multiple tasks at once for finishing the project itself, including how I dealt with different parts of the project and had some needs to add the ending of the project itself.
Week 5
At week 5, it was about the mini Jam week where I had to sit through listening some professional talking about how they went throught with different achievements and goals of different jobs that match with their personal goal, it was quite fun for listen them the whole time at the same time taking notes about their personal story and the skills that they had to achieve that accomplishment. The whole mini Jam week takes two days on Wednesday and Thursday, so this whole week did not have class to attend, but I stuck to the library so as not to be distracted by other things.
For the project about the showreel, I was finishing the final touch on the animations with tweaks and adjustments on the speed itself in After Effects. I take a while to also adjust the portfolio idea of how I will do by researching online and real things around me. This reel had the big changes in the entire reel itself, where I had to put a couple of different artworks and animations that I had done for the past 3 years, from 2022 to 2025. I had certainly improved over the years from the recent art and animation assets in the showreel animation. There were three results of showreel animation where I had to plan the time for evaluations for all three of the projects when I was out of college.
Towards the end of the week, I was a bit rushed on finishing the showreel projects at the same time, and needed to research the art styles around illustration books and book covers, mainly revolving around mysteries, fantasy, and gothic. I had found it quite dark and abounded with nature, skeletons, and historical architecture. Then I paste them in the sections where I planned to evaluate what I found from books and online.
For the meetings for the professionals, I had to take some notes and get the screenshots on the website itself to confirm I had listened to their stories and experiences of their things, although I had the short briefs and notes were not much, but I had to cover the important points of those specific professionals. Each of them specialises in video productions, animation productions or photo production. There were specifics around managing in a team to make it easier to take the job itself for clients online or face-to-face.
Overall, this week, I focused purely on the evaluations for the entire showreel animation project, including the production of the project itself and the results of the showreel animation. At the same time, I had to balance other small tasks for different projects or some professional meeting notes in the sections where I had to take care of.
Week 6
At week 6, I focused on story writing and the final idea for my illustration book about my story of design and animation, while talking about how creativity can be beneficial on some days in life. Additionally, I had some other projects that were supposed to be done and evaluated for this week.
On the two days of the week, I had to deal with the ideas for the project of a portfolio about an illustrated book, starting with sketching the book cover ideas on the sketchbook for the illustration book, reflecting on gothic, fantasy and mystery themed book covers that target teens to young adults.
On Wednesday, I will be getting some changes to my showreel that include a duplicate of my name intro animation, a couple of variants for the animation, and keeping up with the selections to others to choose which one is the best.
The last two days of the week, I figured out how the target audiences for the illustration itself which is around the teens to young adults sections. So I am finalising the book cover and the context of the book where I told my side of the story of where and when I started to become the idea of wanting to become an illustrator, with the side of being creative as an escapism from reality because of the social pressures, social isolations and family stuff.
So I started to write each point of the story on the document to memorise which part of the illustration to focus on. It took me a while to finish the first part of the story, so I can do my best with sketching to describe the situation of mine till the final result in the entire book itself. It still needs some shortening on some parts of the story to make it easier to read for some people.
Overall, this week took me a while to finalise the previous projects at the same time, I focused on the main project about telling a story about my choice of wanting to become an illustrator/character designer at the same time, and fantasised about stuff just to escape from reality.