So I was asked a couple of weeks ago to do a poster for my church’s Children Mission Conference. Initially I couldn’t imagine designing something for a children’s event without making it look amateur. But it’s been so long since I’ve designed anything, I was up for the challenge even though at the moment I felt a little unsure. I need that pressure of having a “client” and an “audience” to really get me designing. I still find it very hard to just sit down and design for the sake of designing. That’s something I want to work on, to be able to draw and design something simply because I feel like it. This mini project was very small and I was given at most a few days to design from scratch. After a brief meeting about what the event is about and technical details such as paper size, color, and deadlines, I began brainstorming that night.

This is usually what it looks like at this stage. For this particular project, the amount of research, brainstorming, and roughs were very minimal due to the time constraint.  The very first thing I do is write down a list of words and ideas related to the subject. This is something I was taught in my first graphic design course I took at SMC. It helps me to generate imagery and gets my mind going. The event tagline was, “inspire children to share the love and the message of Christ”. This was to be done by teaching the children all the different ways to love others such as giving and sharing, praying, and helping others.

I then came up with an idea to do a collage like poster to show all these different ways. The imagery of a cloud pouring out of a bible shows the inspiration that can be founded in something as ancient as the bible, even to kids. The bible becomes the source of inspiration to love others.

This is the actual cloud that I scanned into my computer for tracing in Illustrator. Everything else such as the book and kids in the cloud I scanned and traced from the first couple drawings. I love to use my scanner because it frees me up in terms of what images I can incorporate. I love the versatility of creating any image I want that doesn’t look like a cookie cutter even though I can’t even draw that well.

After tracing in my scans in Illustrator, I now have my foundation down. The rest is now cleaning up and making it look pretty. I knew I wanted to go for the kid drawing look so I applied a graphite brush to the tracings. This adds a very cool effect with just a single click.

I trace everything in Illustrator because it’s so much easier than in Photoshop. So at this point I bring it over to photoshop for some crayon fun! Not literally, but I did reminisce about the days when I got to color in a book for school. Anyways this was the real fun part. A lot of experimentation took place at this stage. First I wanted to color in the clouds and add some depth to it. I created my own “crayon” brush by googling and using a page like this. Luckily I was able to stay in the lines thanks to the magical eraser tool. It was 10x funner because I got to use my Wacom tablet.

Next I added my type as a placeholder to see the entire composition. I knew I wanted a nice paper texture as the backdrop to make the whole kid’s feel complete. I found a construction paper like texture and duplicated it several times to create the backdrop to give it a nice organic feel.

Finally the last stage of the poster was adding the finishing touches and detailing, which I think really adds a lot. This was probably where I spent the most time drawing and erasing because I was improvising most of it. That was kind of the feeling I was going for, like some kid doodling over his homework. After doing some final typesetting, I decided that I would end it here. Overall I’m happy with the presentation of it within the time constraints. My drawings are lacking, but I could always just say some kid drew it.

Here are the baby pictures of my niece that I took during my short stay in Denver. It’s easy getting babies to pose as opposed to hyper little 4th graders who know too much. I shot the close-ups with my 50mm 1.8, my favorite lens so far out of the two I own. The wider shots, I used my mediocre and slow 18-200mm 3.5. The problem for me with that lens is that it’s too slow especially on my D80 body. For me, it’s only useful when I’m shooting outdoors in the 18mm-35mm range. Also the glass isn’t of very high quality. These photos were shot in RAW and briefly edited in Photoshop CS3. Go ahead and click on them for a better view.

It’s been a while since I’ve been motivated to post here. That’s mostly because most of my time is taken up by work. Aside from that, I’ve been excerising my photography. About a couple of weeks ago I got to shoot unofficially alongside Calvina of Calvina Photography. She’s a friend from church who has an amazing porfolio of work. Definitely check her stuff out for inspiration. It was a great experience, albeit a very tiring and draining one. I learned much and will post some more pictures as well as my experience of shooting a wedding for the first time. I also got to capture some cool moments on my vacation trip to Denver to visit my sister and her new baby. I’ll definitely post those pictures as well once I finish doing some quick edits.

I’m finding myself shooting more and more in RAW now because of the ability to go back and edit since my camera sometimes limits me especially in low light situations. Also I’m kinda paranoid about quality loss with compression methods. (for example, I’m debating whether I should rip my CDs as .wav or 320 kbps VBR.) I also finally got my hands on the hardly sought after book, Never Sleep: Graduating Graphic Design. I’ve been trying to find a good price on this book since I read this post. It’s basically a biography about two designers who write about their experience of transitioning from student designer to professional designer. It is exactly where I will find myself in hopefully a couple years from now. I will post back about my thoughts about it. Lastly I’m currently working on a poster for my church. It is an 11″ x 17″ poster advertising the Children’s Mission Conference. I’m glad to have little projects like this to keep me working on design, as I find myself lacking motivation many times. It’s hard for me to design unless I’m given an actual problem, real or not.