Audience/Purpose: For my illustration project, the audience is a bit more broad, in comparison to the audience for my photoshop project. The targeted audience is anyone, of any gender and age, who enjoys traveling, visiting historic monuments, and reading travel guides! More specifically though, the audience would also have to be interested in visiting London since this is the London edition of the travel guide. In addition, the audience should prefer visiting the place rather than reading about it, since the blurbs on the travel guide are very brief.
Image(s): On the cover of the travel guide, there is an illustration of an airplane, which implies traveling or flying to another place. The ticket behind the title ‘Travel’ can also be representative of a flight or transportation ticket. On the following pages, I have illustrated the following monuments as places to visit: St. Paul’s Cathedral and Big Ben.
Process: I used Adobe Illustrator to create the sky, airplane, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Big Ben. For the sky, I used to pen tool to add clouds and layered them on top of one another while adjusting its colors. The clouds in the front were short and did not fill up the entire page; To resolve this issue, in terms of lighting and continuation, I made the background a gradient to transition the light blue clouds into a slightly darker blue from top to bottom.
As for the airplane, I used the rectangle tool to create the base of the airplane and adjusted the corners using the direct selection tool. I would also use the Add Anchor Point tool to add some points that needed to be adjusted. For example, if an area of the airplane had a curve, I would add a point and then adjust it accordingly. I also played with opacity to create the belly of the airplane.
When I worked on Big Ben, I had a good understanding of what the tower looked like, but wanted to simplify it a bit. I first had to choose shades that did not look too warm or cool-toned because it would really throw off the clock tower. Afterwards, I followed the same steps I used for the airplane to create the Big Ben; I used the Add Anchor Point tool, direct selection tool, rectangle tool, and the ellipse tool. By the time, I reached the design of St. Paul’s Cathedral, I was fairly comfortable with using these various Adobe Illustrator tools. St. Paul’s Cathedral consisted of the same shapes used for the other artworks: semi-circles, rectangles, and triangles.
For the layout, my final draft looked very different from my rough draft. The rough draft was a simple flyer that said ‘Time Flies… when you’re in London!” I realized that I wanted to add another monument and to create a mini travel guide instead. Using Canva, I laid out all the pages without a template. I wanted to keep the sky as a background and use the airplane too, so I placed them on the cover page. I started to add more details to ensure that there wasn’t too much empty space on the page, hence the added city skyline, ticket outline behind the word ‘travel’, and the dotted line under the word ‘guide.’ I also wanted to follow the blue and white color scheme to keep the first page consistent.
On the second page, I decided that the illustration of St. Paul’s Cathedral would be the main focus of the page. I kept the same font used for the word ‘London’ in the first page to maintain consistency and decided to follow a simple color scheme as well. I used a color picker to pick the color for the fonts and added a short blurb, along with any necessary information about the cathedral. I also placed the cathedral on top of the text box to draw the eyes of the audience members towards the text. The motif I chose for the background were some light wavy lines that didn’t take too much attention away from the illustration.
Lastly, for the page of Big Ben, I kept it very simple and decided to use circles as the motif. The four circles on the left bottom of the page are representative of four different colors used throughout the illustration. Once again, the font used for ‘Big Ben’ is the same font used for the words ‘London’ and ‘St. Paul’s Cathedral.’ The body text on this page is also the same font used when describing St. Paul’s Cathedral. I enlarged the size of Big Ben to make use of the spacing. I also adjusted the words ‘Big’ and ‘Ben’ so they were not directly aligned with each other to create some type of movement. The color scheme was kept fairly simple and featured various shades of brown and tan.
Learning: When working on this project, I learned about the difficulties of design. I didn’t expect the illustrations to take that long, but each of them took hours. I initially wanted to add more monuments, but decided against it since I wouldn’t have enough time. I learned a lot about illustrator throughout the project. The scissors tool has really become my right hand tool. I used to struggle with drawing semi-circles by hand, but after using the scissors tool to cut a circle in half, it has really expedited the design process. I also learned that illustrator can be used to create anything. Any design imaginable can be created with the various tools on there. I never knew I could create the St. Paul’s Cathedral out of just various shape tools, but Adobe Illustrator made it possible. On Canva, I really enjoyed seeing the different elements and graphics offered on there. Canva is a wonderful site for layout and allowed me to incorporate my own artwork while using some of their graphics too.
Next: For the next project, I may decide to switch topics just to try something new. I really enjoy the incorporation of random shapes as motifs, so I may try to do that in the next project. In addition, I would like to play around with more color. I feel like the colors used for the illustration project this time around was very muted, aside the blues used on the title page.