INTRODUCTION
The challenge of this project was to create a visual story that could represent our personal journey of becoming artists. We, as students had the task of illustrate and recreate all out personal experiences that brought us to the program where we are and also reflect us in the future as professionals. We also had to explore and document our creative process using a variety of tools and platforms including Behance. My personal story is a little bit unusual since I discover my passion a couple years ago and not in my childhood. However, I represented my path from the beginning and lead it to the future where I project myself as a professional designer, I invite you to share my experience and be part of it!
MATERIALS
Hardware: iPad, MacPro
Software: Illustrator Draw; Illustrator CC, Photoshop
Platforms: Creative Cloud, Behance
CREATIVE PROCESS
The audience I intended when creating this projects was primarily my classmates and professors at George Brown college but also anyone who is interested in joining the art path. The tone I decided to use is friendly and conversional. The reason for that is because of my purpose, I would like to inspire and encourage students who have an unusual story, who aren’t sure what to do but have a passion to explore. My goal in this story is to show that the journey that would lead you to success not always is what you plan from the beginning but I could bring you even better accomplishments. I decided to share my personal experiences, my fails and wins to show my audience and myself that how each of them made me the passionate for art that I consider myself today.
The truth is that my creative journey just started a couple years ago, I didn’t really picture myself as an artist until I decided to volunteer in a magazine. There was a design editor that started to teach me about layouts and colours and a huge variety of things that we should take into consideration when designing, well that was my first influence. After that, I got really interested in the field and started to design for the magazine, I still remember how my first design was such an accomplishment for me. Before I fully decided to pursuit art and design as a career I researched about the field and the requirements, I saw everywhere that a lifetime of drawings and artistic pieces were necessary and then I found what stood in my way. However, I prevail by working harder that people who has been doing this since they were little kids.
Now I can say that this lucky accident of joining the magazine was the event that affected the most my decision of following design but also the encouragement of my tutor at the magazine, who taught me and motivate me to follow graphic design. The are that interested me the most because of the simplicity and strategy that requires.
Nowadays, I realize that making a decision as important as the career you will be following for the rest of your life can become a big deal, specially if you had no idea of what to do before that. Well in my case, when I told my family about it, they were really confused and not to encouraging about it. Now is a different story, since they know that this is what I want, I get fully support from them. For me art is more than a career is an expression, is a feeling that invades your hands when creating, is a way of communication with the world. When a create a piece I always try to make it relatable to, somehow. This might become a challenge when doing assignments for school since we have a huge variety of mediums and objectives, there is were my creativity needs to step out of the comfort zone to represent myself in different scenarios. However, one of the things I really like is drawing, but I should say I’m not that good at it. I enjoy infinitely sitting and drawing what I see, that is the reason why I found such a wonderful time when working on one of my drawing class assignments, where we had to recreate a scenario of Union Station. The challenge of this project wasn’t just accomplish a good piece but also represent all we have learned during the semester. I find this piece is quite important for me since it represents a long process of learning as well as growing as an artist. Until here is all good, my epic fail starts the night before I had to hand in the final piece, I had all I needed and I was extremely happy with the results, I could have never imagined I could come up with that. I just had to glue my drawing to the board and go to sleep, and so I did. After a couple hours I came back just to realize that I put to much glue and the paper absorbed in such a way that the drawing was nearly destroyed, I tried to fixed in all the imaginable ways, well, I could not redo it at this time. I ended up just accepting the fact that at some point I was going to have to redo it and that there was no way I could make it to the next day so I just went to sleep as sad as anyone could be after 3 weeks of work destroyed in 20 minutes, and next day handed in what I had with a sad story to explain. I learned, first that too much glue is never good and that no matter how bad is the situation, is never the end of the world, the answer is always work harder. For that reason, when I redid my drawing, it came up even better and now is one of the pieces that I am proudest of, it represents a wonderful time, an epic fail, hard work but also a success for me.
If I think about myself five years from now, I would say graduating from school and looking for a workplace where I can apply all my recent acquired knowledge. But before that, I think about my next steps after finishing my foundation program, I would like to follow Graphic Design possibly at George Brown since I have learned a lot in this school, lessons like what to expect in the industry and how to work with the tools that we have today. To someone new to the field I would advice that hard work is the only way to success and the time you spend on your pieces would lead you there. Therefore, if I could make a wish it would be having the opportunity to work in the field and keep myself where my passion is, design.
When developing my images for the video, I decided to go for a simple design since I wanted to keep the audience's attention focusing more on the actual message of the story rather than the illustrations themselves. Therefore, I tried to keep the details to the minimum but still get a clear idea of the objects on the image. I used different sizes on lines to emphasize important parts on the images. I also used an smooth brush that would give me a cartoonish effect to the characters and the backgrounds.
STORY OUTLINE
- Hi there! My name is Bernarda and I would like to share with you how I decided to be an artist! You might be on the same path or you might want to join! Nevertheless, here is my story!
-Well, growing up I never was an artistic person, so before I even thought about art I tried so many other careers by taking courses hoping to find my passion, like phycology, or even engendering
- The truth is that I didn’t like any of them, I always end up thinking well is cool but… the rest of my life? Doesn’t sound good.
-Just before graduating from high school I found a magazine for youth where I could do my volunteer hours, so with my head so undecided I headed there to see if I could find some answers among the youth
-I still remember my first workshop about design, I felt totally in love with the idea of creating a lay out for the articles of the magazine, I learn so much from the tutor who also was the one who encourage me to get in an artistic career.
-That night after thinking about my experience I started my own research about my possibilities and I found so many possible career I have never thought of and all looked really interesting!
-However, they all asked for a portfolio. Then I started to remember why I never thought about art and is because I have no idea about it and I knew I wasn’t good at drawing either.
-Then I tried to look for something artistic of any sort that I could have possible done over the years… but I couldn’t find anything…
- Just before dropping this crazy idea I thought well… I should try to draw something to see how bad I am. So in the middle of the night I took a pencil and a paper.
- And I started to draw my hand I came up with this which isn’t the best hand in the world but for me it was pretty good! Better than I could have ever imagined I would be able to do.
- So next day I decided to apply to the Art and Design program at George Brown, they offered this amazing foundation program where I have been learning and strengthening my knowledge about art.
- I certainly feel that my skills have been growing since I started, I know I have much more to learn. But now I am confident because I finally found what I love to do.
- Right now I am building my portfolio and I just started to apply to different schools for graphic design. I can’t wait to see where my journey is leading me, the only thing I know is
- That this is just the beginning and the support of all my family and friends has pushed me to start this exacting adventure. I think just the fact of finding my passion by a lucky accident is itself a success.
- And maybe in a few years I can become a Graphic Designer and then start another journey a professional one!
- My only advice to the people who is uncertain about the possibilities, is to keep working hard and never forget your dreams, if you follow them there is only one way to success!
ILLUSTRATIONS
Here are my characters
The main character on my story is me.
And my only second character is my design teacher who also encourage me to pursuit art as a career.
On my story the most variable thing is the backgrounds and situations that I go throw.
STORYBOARD
PRODUCTION METHODS & WORKFLOW
To begin with, I took all the questions that were provided to us and I answer them to I could have an idea about how my script would go. I tried to create three paragraphs to represent my past, my present and my future. Something that later on I would share on my Creative Journey.
After this, I started to sketch the drawings that I will use as a base on Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Draw. I replicated the images that will represent my story clearly.
For my next step, I actually draw my final pieces that I would use on the video. I decided to make the simple but representative so the audience will easily understand the situation.
While I was doing my images, I also started to work on my actual script, just to make sure that my images were related to what I was going to say. That way the flow of the video would be easier to follow and understand.
After I had all my pieces and my script ready I went to Adobe spark and start putting together the slides on the video. I also added the music and as my final big step I recorded my voice to narrate the story.
To finish up my project I just add some final details and that was it!
HERE IS MY
JOURNEY
CONCLUSION
This project challenged me in a lot of different ways, I had to learn how to draw digitally in order to represent not just an scenario but a whole sequence of events. I think overall this video represent pretty well what I went throw in order to find myself, it talks about my experience. I had some problems when developing the images themselves but I would say they came up the way I expected for the most part. If I would had to change something, I would probably add more events to the story, since I think it is quite summarized. However, I think it was successful to inspire students to keep following their dreams, which was my initial objective.
