Final Postcards

Vectors are over forever and I'm so relieved that this brief has ended.

I've made some ALMOST groovy postcards, but I don't think it was worth the hours of torture sat infront of a computer screen. My eyes hurt and I hope not to use Illustrator again for a while.

THE COLOURS ARE MUCH BETTER WHEN PRINTED. THEY LOOK BRIGHT AND WEIRD IN THESE JPEGS.

PLEASE NOTE: I'm going to be really critical right now and that's not fair my lil' Jay, you did try really hard. It's just that now it's over I can allow myself to hate vectors and let this all go. I can stop clinging to any hope I had for these postcards, forcing myself to like them. Although I'd finally got them to a state where I thought they could be shown in the crit, I can still see so many errors... but I had to find a point at which to stop working on it and this is it.

I'm still not happy with this one. I don't think it's possible to create a translation of water in this medium - vectors are flat and horrible and not how I would choose to work again. I understand how they work and why people DO use them but they're just really not for me. I don't find them attractive and they make me feel sick.

There are still issues with the composition of the above image and perhaps if I worked on if for another 1000000 hours I could get it to look acceptable but it's just never going to be something that blows my mind, you know? It's never going to make me go WOAH HOW DID THEY DO THAT? WOAH WHAT IS IT MADE OF? It's just some colours on a screen and I'm sorry that I hate it but I do.

Think this one really captures the act of RUMMAGING and finding treasure.

Not sure it really represents Berlin but my main intention was to communicate the sense of the MARKET and what goes on there.

The character is quite sweet… it's a translation of my hand drawn character but it's lost a lot of that energetic movement and the rush of pen on paper as the character comes to life. It lacks life and any energetic quirks in the lines just look wrong - because vectors are meant to be mathematically perfect, any asymmetry reads as an error rather than information.

So happy with the mountains and the mist in this one but the apples and fruit look horrendous. Still too busy! I want there to be PRODUCE and items but vectors demand simplicity.

Took me a long time to get this one right but I think I got there in the end... the mangoes look enticing and the dude looks Indian. I've created a scene without including EVERYTHING. It's a fraction of the full picture, but it's all the audience needs to work out the story.

FEEDBACK

IDEAS

successfully interpreted the meaning!!!! They guessed that the postcards were about market stalls in different cultures - nobody guessed the cities but that wasn't my main intention, I was trying to communicate the 

COMMUNICATION

movement/action

involved in their environment

these images have an effective form of communication. it is obvious that each scene is trying to tell its own story from a different setting and city.

IMAGE

Like the choice of colours used in these images. The pastel tones are easy on the eyes and complement the images

Images are quite flat but they have a nice sense of composition and depth

A varied use of composition and viewpoint in the set, making them work nicely together

effective use of shape, lovely use of texture in the fruit and other areas but used selectively which works brilliantly

The fruits are really easy to look at because of the colour and the composition, maybe except the fish one. Something is not quite right with the composition, the character on the right is too close? the yellow in the background distracts form the scene

SPECULATIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE QUESTION

They all focus on one person except the fish one, if you did it again would you make this one more personal?

How would it look if you had used some texture?

Maybe the simplicity of one character works better?

composition works well, maybe you could have a consistent theme/structure for al the images?

WE LIKE…

the composition

the characters and colour scheme

the faces

that if feels like I'm there - observing the markets in first person

the consideration of movement extended through selective use of values

characters are awesome

really nice colours, characters and interactions amazing all round

I like the colour tones

really cool characters

JAY LIKES...

This group crit has given me the chance to look around and see how other people tackled the tricky VECTORS and what they did with the brief.

I loved Bronte's subject: she chose to research and study cities related to witch hunts and witchcraft - something very different to everyone else in the room.

Marnie's composition was very clever - she repeated the same plate design on every postcard but changed the food and tablecloth to suit the city. This consistency made her set work well together.

Emma's postcards were beautifully coloured using pastel shades (trendy). Limited colour palettes worked really well and I saw several examples of this tying sets together.