Grim Beauty

Nurhidayah "Nex" Refulus

Design Studio 2

Grim Beauty

The brief was to create an illustration that conveys a message through the topic of Hidden Treasures of WA. Grim Beauty is a series that depicts Australian bird skulls and Native WA flora during the four seasons (Sumer, Autumn, Winter and Spring) being fused in a style in which is elegant and unique. The aim is to showcase the various rare plants and flowers that grow in the landscape of WA through the theme that death can be beautiful and not dark as it is usually depicted. The main goal is to use and develop skills and collaboration with the audio students into image-making and motion graphics through digital and traditional applications such as Adobe After Effects and Photoshop.

Meet the Artist

NurHidayah Refulus (Rin)

Heya! The name's Rin. I am an artist/illustrator that's completing my fourth trimester in Bachelor of Graphic Design. I was always visually expressive throughout my youth and loves exploring different styles of media and art. My style and identity is my love to use my creativity to delve into mostly the disturbing and macabre themes or topics and put in my own twist to create something beautiful.

Skills

Logo/Brand Designs
Collateral event Designs
Character Illustrations
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Indesign

Motion Graphic & Audio Collaboration

GRIMBEAUTY_YAGAN_RIN_REFULUS.mp4

I've collaborated with audio student, Yasharu to create an audio that sounded ethereal, calming "fantasy like" with lots of wind instruments and foliage (bird calls/noises) for my motion graphic piece. The reason is that I want the viewer to feel at peace while looking at the illustrations.

Grim Beauty OST (louder).wav

Yasharu Perera

EMAIL: 1017459@student.sae.edu.au

Posters & Infograph

Logos

Mockups & Collaterals

Inspiration

The inspirations were mainly from various artists online and on Social media with the main theme of fungi, floral and animal (mainly bird) skulls and a theme surrounding death. I felt like this would be the perfect opportunity to create something out of this. I was also majorly inspired by the exhibits from the Museum of Western Australia and Darwinian Illustrations that I found online.

Colour Palette: pastel colours upon a dark background for contrast.

Art Style: Darwinian/Scientific styled Illustration for elegant aesthetics.

Planning and Sketching process

Below here shows the earlier iteration stages of Grim Beauty. I wanted to create a display of both flora and bones that I saw from the museum exhibits and inspirations that I wanted to fuse together.

I then created my intial draft to transfer to a digital illustration. I used various techniques and tools to make using adobe Illustrator.

Drafts and Final

These here are my initial digital drafts and final. I've used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create these illustrations. I wanted to create it as elegant and beautiful as possible while keeping the theme of death in it. I changed the illustration assets of the skulls and refined it from "cute and kawaii" to "elegant" to match the aesthetics and name of Grim Beauty.

First draft

Used block pastel colour
sketched flowers to fill in space
vector art on Skull and flowers
Used Adobe Illustrator

Second draft

Replaced sketched art with vector art
Changed layout to be symmetrical
Used Adobe Illustrator

Final draft

Kept symmetrical layout
Added more and new design assets in (feathers, updated skulls)
Same design assets implemented in posters, infographic and motion graphic
Used Adobe Illustrator (gradient on skulls)
Used Adobe Photoshop (details)

Motion Graphic Development

It's been a long and hard journey of development but in the end, I was really proud of how everything turned out with the help of feedback from the client, facilitators and peers from class and screentests. There were also a lot of changes towards some major assets and the layout of the motion graphics as well.