In my PSA, I wanted to convey the mood of adventure. In my illustration, I created sand dunes at night with a person walking through them, seemingly on a long voyage. I was inspired by White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, where all the sand dunes are sugar white and under the moonlight become a beautiful shade of blue that makes it look like another planet. This contrast of what the sand dunes look like at night and what we usually associate with what the Earth usually looks like sparks a feeling of an other worldly adventure here on Earth. I hope to inspire people to live for the moment and strive for adventure. I used blue tones for the dunes rather than a usual yellow or orange to show that this isn't normal and is intriguing to the viewer.
To make this, I mostly used the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator to make the dunes and the person. I purposely made the person very vague with little features to show that it could be anyone, including the viewer. For the sky, I used the shape tool and created a custom gradient to show the different colors in the sky during the dusk hours of the night. I edited the sky by adding film grain to make it seem more realistic and to make the mood seem darker. The hardest part of my PSA was creating gradients for the dunes to show how the light from the Moon was hitting the dunes. Another problem I had to overcome was making the transitions from one dune to the other seamless and seem like it could be real.
Related website
