EX 2: Chess Poster

FACULTY OF ART AND DESIGN
DIS1103
digital processes for art and design

EXERCISE 2: CHESS POSTER
Brief:
Design and produce a black and white poster (artboard = A4) that displays your design for an original chess set. i.e. King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn.
Your design solution for the individual pieces must be translated into positive and reversal versions (black/white pieces). Creatively, you may wish to approach the design problem from a more formal or conceptual angle.
The week 5 lecture will describe the structure and symbolism of the chess pieces.

Method:
1. Research the history and design of the chess set.
2. Create the various chess pieces in Illustrator
3. Design the chess poster incorporating the chess pieces you have designed

Objectives:
• intermediate use of Illustrator drawing tools
• exploration of the design and art of chess
• design objects suitable for reversal (black/white)
• basic layout using Illustrator

Criteria:
1. technical proficiency (5)
2. design of chess pieces (5)
3. layout (5)

Deadline: Week 7 (20-24 April)

Final

I added the bird prints walking over the face of the tree stump to break up the circular shapes a little. I also felt these needed to be darker and a bit more obvious than the twigs.
The fig 1. 2, 3 and 4 refer the scientific names of the deer, owl, bear and fox, and is a text book reference, adding a kind of diagram dimension to the woodland mandala. After all how could I leave out the library book images which taught me so much in the beginning of this project?

Adding depth

Cam warned us about the mandala appearing too flat, and taught us some tricks like using different transparencies and shadow effects. So I put these to use in my own mandala:

Firstly I filled two of the nest twigs with the cell pattern. As well as linking nicely to the outer layer, I hoped it would help to give the effect of the one twig laying over another by the viewer being able to differentiate between them.

And lastly I copied and skewed the shape of each animal, filling it with a lighter colour and applying a transparency effect.

But it needs something more

There's just not enough stuff on the mandala!
Which is why I came up with this twig, and by rotating and reflecting it I came up with some different ideas:

Those ones kind of look like antlers don't they? and the circle shape reminds me of a nest.

And every nest needs birdies!

Here is the nest formation applied to the mandala, plus some strategically placed birds. I think the twigs are effective in joining up the four animals and filling out the mandala. But the animals are still looking a bit lost and lonely against the neutral background.

Tree Rings

I created this image of tree rings for the background because the harsh and calculated circle tool wasn't cutting it for me. I also learnt a bit about what each distance between the rings means, but I won't bore you with that. I know I said I was going with an "atlas green" colour palette, but it doesn't set off the warm tones of the animals, so why the dusty pink? Much more cuddly and natural, don't you think?

I added an outer 'bark layer' to the tree stump by creating a new swatch of my previous cell pattern and filling the outermost circle with it. And being the enclosing circle I also thought this was a neat way to symbolise that all things, no matter how big or small, are made of cells.

I also felt like the animals needed something directly around them to kind of anchor them. From this I developed some really simple moth shapes, repeating the same natural hues already found in the mandala, repeating and rotating them around each animal in a random way. It's a bit better.

But it still looked too flat. Finally I varied the tones in the tree rings from dark to light to dark to light, making sure it wasn't too perfect and still with that organic quality. I like the way the dark central tone now provides a clearer focus for the mandala, while the light outer rings also help to anchor the animals and kind of joins them up in the blank spaces in between.

Cells

Today in class I used my textbook micro-organism images to whip up a cool pattern:

At first I wasn't exactly sure what to do with these cells, but I had spent so much time drawing each dot in exactly the right place with the pencil tool (I hate calculated computer patterns) because I knew it was important to keep every aspect of my mandala as organic as possible, if that is possible in Illustrator.

I figured out how to create new swatches and in doing so I was able to apply the dot pattern to the fill of any shape!

After a long and labour intensive Illustrator session..

Here are all four completed vector animals:
and here they are standing in their mandala formation*:

* note that I wanted to keep the sizes of the animals equal, but also to have a sense of size relative to each other, so I struck a balance between the two. I also placed the owl a bit higher than the fox, because the owl would be up in the tree and the fox on the ground.
I also tried to vary the brown hue, to make each animal a bit different and a bit more of an individual. So the fox is a bit more orange/red than the deer and the bear is a bit greeny and the owl a bit more pink.