Blog

Another month passed and I haven’t blog about anything for the pass few weeks. My blog feel like a dead town so I am going to write about a design competition that I participated recently to keep my blog alive.

The competition I took part is known as “Show it Don’t Hide”. It is a design competition organized by CCorner with the support from CUTOUT Magazine. The competition is to design a cover art for CUTOUT Magazine and the winner will get a 2 years subscription to CUTOUT plus their winning artwork to be featured on the cover of upcoming issue of CUTOUT Magazine.

Sketching

When I found out about this competition, it was already near submission deadline and I realized I don’t have much time left to design something new. So, I reuse one of my old character design which I did for “BOXIES”. Initially, I draw a boy jumping with his skateboard and a nice soothing blue sky, green fields, mountains in the background. After going through some random sketching, I decide to make the boy siting inside a flying CUTOUT corrugated box.

Trace and Colour

The following image is the first draft of artwork traced and coloured in Flash. As you might have noticed, I had “cut out” a lot of details in the background, the green fields, white clouds and mountains. I also remove the birds and make them to flying magazines. I feel that it will tell a better story if the boy is flying together with the magazines instead of birds. The cloud and sun in the background is actually a copy and paste work from my earlier artwork. That’s the good thing about vector art.

Final

When everything is near complete, I bring the artwork to photoshop and do some final touch up such as colour correction, and blur out some part of the background to simulate depth of field effect. When I compare these artworks again, I prefer the one with the original colours. Not sure why I adjust the colour that day.

I really like this concept of a young boy sitting in a flying box. Maybe I will redo this artwork in a painting style. I can even see myself doing a short 2d animation base on this idea.