The first project I want to look at is a children’s book illustration. The project was to illustrate a children’s folktale from a country or culture that we had no previous knowledge about. I received the story of Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters which originated from a folktale told in what is now Zimbabwe.
The first step in my process to accurately illustrate this story was to do research into where the story originated from. Since we had an English copy of the book and were not allowed to change the source text I didn’t need to worry about translation, which was nice. Since this story was originally from a culture that I was wildly unfamiliar with I started to learn about the original source text as much as I could. The original text that inspired the award winning African American author John Steptoe to write this book was from a collection of stories that were written down by colonial settles in the late 1600s. I looked into the original story that the colonists had written and found it it be filled with some of the most vile and racist descriptions of human beings that I have ever read in my life. So much so that I didn’t see any reason to use that original story in my design process. There was no new information there, just hate.
The character design process involved various ethnographic research methods to make sure I was depicting the people in an appropriate way. I met with a fellow student at Iowa State who was from the southern part of Zimbabwe and was familiar with the tale. He helped a ton in creative direction as far as character depiction goes.
The layout and illustration style came down to efficiency. As I had a limited amount of time to illustrate a book, set all of the type, and create a 30 second promo animation for the story I wanted to simplify my forms as much as possible. Key character attributes were set up for each character based on their defining traits so I would be sure to include identifiable features, as well as recognizable settings that could carry over into Adobe After Effects for the animation portion.
Another project from my time at Iowa State is this video from ArtGr470. I’ve always wanted to produce content about skiing as it is a hobby of mine so when the option to create narrative-driven animation came up in class I jumped at it. The first portion of the video was done in Adobe Photoshop and I hand drew hundreds of frames to create the first bit. The second part is some footage of my favorite skier, Tom Wallisch, running a lap through the park. Then, I brought all of the footage into Adobe After Effects to do some pixel pushing and then Adobe Premiere Pro to cut it all together.
This concept has been in the back of my mind for a while. I can remember countless instances when I would drift off in school to think about hitting the slopes. Making a moving picture to capture that feeling was a blast!