Illustrator Final Draft/Project Report

• Audience/Purpose: describe the intended audience of your illustration(s); what are you trying to communicate to this audience?

The audience I am trying to reach are students, mainly college students. This image is supposed to represent the anguish and despair that students go through while pursuing an education. This is a very personal and meaningful message to me that I personally feel and am aware that many others do as well. I want to let others know that this is a very real sentiment and bring more awareness about it, while also providing a sense of connection to the world and other people letting them know they are not alone.

• Image(s): how do features of the illustration(s) effectively convey the message to your audience?

This illustration does the job by creating an emphasis on color. The colors and theme of the image is infrared which is the view of heat. The heat is concentrated on specific points of the image. All points of skin are red and so is the table. This shows the relationship between the student and the desk, which I interpret as students being constantly at their desks working. The desk being red implies that there is heat there, which to me I see as having slept at the desk for working through the night. The lines and texture that run through the image play a role in creating a sense of discomfort and numbness. The black and white background symbolizes the waves of tension that continuously wash over the student, and the colors being black and white connects to the texts that were placed in the illustration. There are only two types of things being said, comfort and doubt. The comforting word of others is represented by the black, and the red lines are the invasive negative thoughts that creep in and out of the student’s mind. If the black texts represent the words of others you see that at the end it had transitioned to a more ominous line. It goes from “It’s only 4 years” to “There’s only 4 years”.

• Process: what did you do to create the illustration(s) in this project?

I first began by finding the image of a person who looked to be a college student. I found on Unsplash the perfect picture of a young woman who seemed to be stressed. This was the main component that really brought together the idea. After placing the image in Illustrator I rasterized it just before I image traced it. With that, I began to search for color palettes that would best represent infrared colors. With little luck, I chose the color property color palette and from there I adjusted the color placements on the color wheel to then get the colors I wanted. To create the black and white background I used the color filling option to fill in each separate section that was created by image tracing in an alternating pattern. I found that the gradient pattern made the best effect rather than a plain white color. Then I colored the stroke of the image tracing black to get the textures into the image. Then I finished by inserting and typing and adjusting the size and placement of the texts.

• Learning: what did you learn from working on this project–for example, about Illustrator/Canva, design, communication, about yourself?

I learned from working on this project the ability to, on a basic level, use Adobe Illustrator to create shapes and illustrations. I was able to exercise my ability to convey messages through visual cues and patterns that provoked responses in the mind for discussion while trying to stay aesthetically pleasing to look at. As for what I learned of myself, I learned that from working on this final project of this section I have strong emotions and thoughts related to the subject that I chose. I found myself immersed in creating this meaningful piece. It was a new experience for me to express my emotions this way.

• Next: what will you do the same/differently on the next project?

In the next project, I don’t plan to touch on this topic. I do, however, plan to again create it based on my own personal experience and feelings, and thoughts. I want to create an homage to my ethnic lineage and history. It may be a large task to do, but I realize, even though obvious, that the more that I personally feel strongly about it, the better the resulting product will be.