Year: 2017

This week, in the final stretch towards the deadline I finally completed my Instagram story profile. I have created a new, separate profile in order to showcase my work clearly. I feel it has came out great though, It was very difficult to upload and distribute onto Instagram.

One error was of my own, I originally created all of my work in 4k Resolution in order to push for the best quality possible. I had no problems while creating the piece, though all of the problems came when trying to upload it.

It seems Instagram does not accept 4K photography and was constantly giving me black boxes rather than my images. Also I had major trouble distributing my images onto my mobile device itself. Because of the size of the images, it was causing the same black box issue with my phone. I’ve learnt that it’s best to keep at the consumer standard of image quality as this was a major difficulty with my project.

https://www.instagram.com/undertown.sb/

Above is the weblink to my project, though it is better presented on a handheld device rather than computer.

I have created all of my panels for my piece and I am now ready to move onto adding my characters. I decided to make the backgrounds first as I feel it is. lot easier to focus on the two separately. This also helps me gain correct lighting and I can also decide whether my characters can interact with the scene correctly also.

I have tried to name the panels in conjunction with the order they will be used in for when I upload them to Instagram.

From converting to Illustrator for my backgrounds, I’ve been making fantastic process! I feel a lot more comfortable and a lot more happy with how my outcomes for this project are coming along. I feel the panels are showing my initial vision for this project with great effect.

Below is a video of my work process, I have found that utilising the dartboards in Illustrator have made my panels a lot easier to make. By using them I can only export anything that is in the 1×1 square and can cut off any unwanted excess from my designs.

I also import the previous panel so I can directly link the next image to the last to gain a continuous flow for my work.

Originally when I was planning on building my backgrounds for my characters to interact with, I Wass going to paint them in photoshop using my own personal Wacom touch tablet. Though, I felt the quality wasn’t great and I found the testing grounds helped me find better alternatives for my project.

I figured as I am already using Illustrator for my characters, then surely I could use it for my project. I decided to look up some tutorials to establish workflow and some techniques into landscapes and building backgrounds. Below is one of the tutorials I took a look at to help me.

This helped me grasp an idea of how to use simple shapes to build more complex shapes and bring the background to life.

I feel the difference between creating vector backgrounds rather than painted will help improve the quality of my work and gives a much nicer, modern finish to my work. Here is the difference between my original mockup and my finalised panel after using illustrator instead.

I have decided to begin mocking up my panel images for my final product.

For this I have trialled sample images in photoshop, they aren’t of very good quality but they are there to give me guidance and help me understand my platform personally.

Here I was experimenting different styles with the photoshop backgrounds, I tried pixellating it to give a stylish effect but I feel this made it look more bad quality rather than a stylistic choice. However I think the panels work well in conjunction with each other. I’m beginning to have a good vision into what the final outcome of my object will look like.

I have mapped out what I want my overall story to look like, I felt I needed to visualise the concept with the square borders so I can clearly see which section of the piece fits in with others.