The Final Piece
The Process
As Valentine's Day is around the corner I was really inspired to come up with a romantic quote, and looked through some quotes by Nicholas Sparks who wrote The Notebook and other notable romance novels. After a while I came across one that was short and sweet: "You are, and have always been, my dream."
I started trying out different layouts but I was quite stuck because of my lack of inspiration (caused by the lack of research I've done, as mentioned in my last blog post) so to overcome this I gathered some inspiration on Pinterest and came across a lettering artist, Jessica Hische. I loved her work but I wanted to go down the more Linzie-Hunter-style route so I looked at her work for inspiration as well.
To help me out a little bit more I wrote down a list of words that relate to "Dream", and this sparked an idea - along with the help of Linzie Hunter's work - so I quickly drew some more layouts before drawing up my final idea.
The connotations I noted down that was related to this quote were: magical, mystery, sleep, stars, night, cloud, love, adventure, swirls, calligraphy, handwriting, and love letter. I was thinking of going on the more cloud/dream side of things because it had deeper links in with the quote. It is a bit obvious, but as it was for a Valentine's card I didn't mind so much.
I wanted to come up with an idea that looks quite 'fun' and 'child-like' to reflect our inner-child and those romanticised thoughts about love and how we could find our 'one, true love'. This technique would also contrast strongly with my previous piece "My Thoughts Are Constellations" because that had done in script. I want each spread to be quite different from the other, so I flicked through some Valentine's cards for inspiration for this quote.
Adobe Illustrator
Drawing the Shapes
With the sketch scanned and done I created a new document in Illustrator and put in the dimensions of my book (125mm x 154mm), placed in my scan and started to draw around the clouds using the pen tool on a separate layer. I did this for all of the elements, focusing on the small illustrations first as I'm going to do the lettering last.
I used the shape tool (ellipse) for the moon. I tried ways to put these two together but it didn't work so I lowered their opacity and drew over them with the Pen tool.
Now it's time to draw the letters and I did so with the Pen tool onto a new layer. I hid all of the other layers where I drew the clouds etc so that I could concentrate on the letters.
This was a lot more difficult than I thought because when I did I noticed some problems with consistency in x-height, so I had to change some. Each letter was a challenge, but I managed to do it as I took my time and continuously had to add and subtract anchor points as well as adjusting them. Once I was done I could just copy and paste some of the repeating letters.
For doing letters like an a where there's a little bowl I had to use the pen tool to go around the edge. While they were still selected I tried out different tools in the Pathfinder where I found one (the third one in) that deleted the bowl out from it but this didn't work. I went back and selected them before filling them in with black instead, and tried it again. This time it worked!
I repeated all of the processes I've learnt from for the next couple of letters, and ones like b and d I just drew the b and then reflected them so that they looked almost exactly the same. To keep letters consistent I drew them at the same height as the letter (that was already drawn) next to them. Unfortunately, I didn't take any screenshots of this. After a while I was done!
It's time to place the letters within the clouds so I unhid that cloud & shapes etc layer and shifted the words around a bit.
Adding Some Colour
I wasn't too sure what colours to have so for now I worked with different shades of purple/pink because they are quite romantic, warm colours. This was when I thought of changing the layout of the words within the second cloud so copied and pasted the cloud and worked on the copy. I then copied the whole thing to try out this newer layout.
I then had three variations and I went with the third after changing the cloud a little bit. I had reduced the size of "and always have been" so that there is more of an emphasis on "You are" and "my heart", so that those two words were connected.
With the layout and everything done I decided that I wanted to create a faint outline around the clouds, so I worked one by one, selecting it before copying and pasting it. I reduced the opacity to 50% of the copy and changed the anchor points so that they looked more like an outline than a shadow.
I went to adobe.kuler.com to look at different colour palettes, choosing ones with different shades of pink and cream as they are quite soft romantic colours. I wanted to create something quite abstract so that it contrasts strongly with what I've done before, so even I chose a blue for the sky in my later versions I didn't choose a very dark shade because it would make the piece quite gloomy overall. Even though it was a night scene, a light blue was better as it was light and cheery.
While I was trying out different colours I realised that I hadn't drawn any stars! I quickly uploaded my sketch again, using the pen tool for the stars, before carrying on trying out different colours.
With the base colours and stars done I worked on the cloud that Nicholas Spark's name would be on. I chose a sans serif font as it didn't bring up many connotations apart from a friendly texture because of the smooth curves and lack of 'barriers' that a serif font would produce. I placed everything in lower case to connect with the other words, and chose a shade quite similar to the cloud it was in so that the main focus was on the quote.
So all of the different parts were now complete so I tried some more colour combinations, and in the end I picked out three. I had to make a choice on what I'd choose so I wrote down the following:
1) Too pastel coloured, might bring up connotations of babies and other child-like aspects.
2) This is actually quite a nice combination, but is blue too vibrant? Not Valentine-y enough (to match the theme of 'love' that I was going for). However the blue really does bring out the red and makes it look more vibrant.
3) Very nice. Really soft, heavenly colours (purple & white).
I'm still a bit unsure of which design to go for out of the second and third one, because the first is much too baby-like for this design. If it was for a birthday girl or something then it would've been more acceptable.
In the end I think I'd go for the last design because it has connections with 'heavenly' aspects because of the light hue used for the background. It's strange why I think of heaven, clouds and angels when I see that colour...
Reflective Learning - Summary
Here I wanted to quickly and effectively produce a piece, mainly focusing it on being a Valentine's card but I would still like to use it within my book. I have tried to link it in with "The Notebook" but now that I look back, I think I could've done something other than clouds and a nighttime scene. In terms of a greetings card, however, it is fine.
Therefore I'm not too sure if I would include this design in my final piece after all because I realised that it looks very much like a Valentines Card and not appropriate for the target audience. Nevertheless, it was still quite good to experiment with and I managed to try something new: hand-lettering on the computer.
If I was to go back to this quote I think I might have to re-read the book again or quickly look up the plot online to highlight the main aspects of the book as well as figure out where they actually said this quote. I used a very 'heavenly' appearance for my card because of the fact that the lovers died in each other's arms right at the very end of the book, so I wanted to link it into heaven and the fact that people are reunited there (from a Christian's perspective). However, like I've mentioned before, this link might not be strong enough so I might need to take some more time to think about it.
My next step is to now move onto another quote as I could always go back to this one.
Learning Outcomes:
[5] Developed skills of independent study, resource utilisation, problem-solving and decision-taking.
[6] Developed skills of critical thinking, analysis and evaluation.
[9] Developed their ability to work with complex material, analyse problems and identify appropriate solutions.
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