Assignment5_Music Festival Postcard

=Design Process=

For this assignment, I spent quite some time thinking about the specific topic. I wanted a unique topic that would allow colors a considerable part in creating not only the visuals, but also the meanings.
One such topic I came up with is a musical event in Singapore featuring my homeland traditional music ( btw, I am from Vietnam =)). I have never knew about such an event in Singapore before, but this makes the assignment more exciting.

The first step is to find some inspiration on the net. Thinking about Vietnamese tradition, there are 2 important images:

1. Ao Dai (our traditional costume)2.Trong Dong (the Copper Drum- a ancient artifact known for its important position in the life of Ancient Vietnamese, and famous for its artistic value which lies much in the drawings on the surface of the drum)



The images are reminiscent of some contrast: the softness of silk, femininity of Ao Dai, and the toughness of copper, the masculinity of the Drum. Both are images of the past, though. I was thinking how to cast a sense of modernity to the postcard in someway.

For now the next step is to create the image of a Vnmese girl in Ao Dai. I want it to be the focal point of the image. So I picked some very bright colors such as red and orange to create her.

This is what I have come up with after 8 hours of work(of which 5 hours were wasted, since Illustrator crashed and I didn't save anything before- a valuable lesson when using Illustrator T____T).

I have to say I like this girl very much. I made her legs unnaturally long, with a posture very rarely seen in girls in Ao Dai(it looks more like a rock star posture for me). This is intended to create an impression of modernity, strength, vibrancy within the traditional image of the girl.

At this point, I still hadn't decided what to do with her left arm though. I wanted it to form something like a whirl wind/circle/spiral that embraces/lift up the title of the festival.


After some trials, this is what I ended up with.
As intended earlier, the sleeve was made to be a kind of flying wave embracing the title in a circular path. This serves to create a sense of harmony with the front lap of her dress, as well as the round Copper Drum behind.

The Copper Drum was put at the top left corner, faded and dissolved into the scene, with its center near top of the head of our model. The shape at the center is actually the symbol of the sun. All other images on the Copper Drum are also moving in a circular path, which is kinda energetic in a sense. So I put my model in a center position relative to the Drum, so that she can "share" some of its energy, and the feeling of dignity also :P

The dissolve effect create a visual reminiscence of sand. This is where the exact wording of the festival came to my mind. The contrast concept I formed in the beginning came into the image in the form of "sand" and "silk"- the rough sand and dust of the past and the smoothness, elegance of silk - join together in a eternal circle of creation and destruction, transformation, etc....and they both fly in the blowing winds...

The words were the last elements put into the scene. Nevertheless, they must join into the flow, add to the work their identities, but in unity with the whole. Conceptual words (indicating some contents of the imaginary festival) such as "history", "culture", "music", "people", "love", etc were put in different sizes on the sandy image of the drum. Some of them were half buried in the dust, some popped out more than the others. All are intended to create the feeling of flow, of moments, of stream... for the concepts.

The title "Silk and Sand" was in large font size, intended to be the focal point. The gaze of audience will be led from the girl, up with the red silky sleeve of her dress to the title, whose end (the word "Sand") was half embraced in the whirling Silk.

Similarly, the text at the bottom "Vietnamese Music Festival"is intended to elaborate more on the event. The event name "Silk and Sand" is written in an elegant font with beautiful circular strokes. The letter "S", which serves as both in "Silk" and in "Sand", is connected with the shoes of our model, contributing to the general feeling of flows and connectedness.


========= Feed back from friend on the last version====================
--The sleeve look funny/scary
--The model might look at the audience instead of looking on her right

---------Correction---------------------------------------------------------------

- Instead of letting the sleeve form the wave, I let the back lab of the dress do it instead (this is also more logical in a sense)
- The model now have normal, visible hands--> no more "scary image of the sleeves without hands =P"

- I tried to adjust the face so that the model look at the audience. However, it didn't look nice (probably coz of my lousy AI skill =.=, so I decided to stick with the original one)

So this is the version adjusted based on feedback from my friend

More feedback came from Facebook. Ms Siti also advised me to make the drum clearer/bigger (she mentioned the fact that the postcards would be small).
So comes the very last version as followed:



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The last step would be putting on this different color schemes.