my mom as a Japanese City Pop singer (favourite so far)

So, this is an art cover piece of my mom. The inspiration for making this piece was a tribute to the 80's and 90's Japanese City Pop that I've been listening lots to since I made this piece, as well as the artist Night Tempo for making remixes of these songs. My mom actually used to work in Japan when she was nineteen. She was an assembly worker, and she helped my grandparents financially, and so did my relatives working overseas.

For this piece, I used Illustrator for the background, and Rebelle 6 (not Photoshop) for drawing my mom, and the cover name.

The background was simple enough; I used a simple yellow gradient for the background, created halftones, added some shapes, as well as using blending modes to, well, make it look better. Same goes for the cover name; with my good handwriting skills, and a calligraphy brush in Rebelle, I wrote my mom's name, saved it as a .png, then I vectorized it, and coloured it in yellow in Illustrator. Then I gave it a solid drop shadow to make it more visible, and that's pretty much it.

Drawing my mom was a bit more complex though. I used an image of my mom during her birthday at the restaurant in the village, then traced it, mainly because I suck at drawing, and I have yet to formally learn human anatomy. I used watercolours and marker brushes in Rebelle to color the skin, the clothes, and the hair. I also used an ink brush to outline my mom's face, and the glasses she wears.

I think the disappointing part was that I couldn't figure out how to draw the comic-esque style that Night Tempo has for its covers. I believe they might've been done in Photoshop, or in a painting program, because as far as I know, Illustrator struggles computationally with the tiny halftones on the shadows of the faces in these covers, which is why I painted my mom in a different software instead.

bliss (final project)

This one is my second favourite (one that would've been my most favourite if I've finished the last scene on time). The reason I went for this idea for my final project was because I wanted to learn more of After Effects, and to express in video form, what bliss feels like to me.

I took some inspiration from Louie Zong's background paintings. The reason was because his art style has a simple, yet very grounding and really aesthetic visual for me. Unfortunately, as someone who has yet to really learn how to paint. I took a lot of time experimenting, and trying to figure out what worked, and what didn't work. I may have deleted some scenes I've made in the first week of doing the Final Project, because, well, they looked bad.

Thankfully, I persisted, and I was able to make some great backgrounds. I also took the time to figure out how to make Video Timeline animations in Photoshop, and in doing so, I discovered an artist, Olof Storm, who actually animates in Photoshop, and helped me through his tutorials, and his processes that were really useful in the animation space.

I think the most infuriating part of doing this final project was the computers being slow, and After Effects being pretty complex, and sometimes unintuitive user interface.

Rendering was a big issue, especially if you add effects that can really hinder the time it takes to render each of the scenes. Add in some basic motion blur effects for just three image layers, and you're in for a 30 minute wait.

Another that I wanted to do but couldn't, was the 3D functionality in After Effects. I discovered this through Olof Storm's tutorials (here's one of them). I tried creating a camera, and changing the view to 3D, but it lagged so much, it was practically useless.

Honestly, if these computers had a slightly better CPU, and a dedicated graphics card, I would've done a lot better, but, oh well.