Public Service Announcement
This year, our first major project in Design was creating a PSA. We chose our phrase from brainstorming that was previously done in English for our personal essay.
In the center of my PSA, a bowling ball is crashing into seven bowling pins. Above the scene are the words “when life comes your way”, and below it reads “just roll with it”. The bottom text has an effect to make it look like it is wavy and has movement. It also has a slight shadow for emphasis and the illusion that it’s popping off of the page. The completely red background is garnished with a dark red border, encompassing everything. I hope to instill the message in anyone who looks at this image that sometimes, the best thing you can do is just go with what you’re given as things are often out of our control. I chose red as my primary color because it’s bold and grabs peoples’ attention. It also plays off of the theme of bowling because of the iconic red stripes commonly found on pins. The ball represents you as a viewer, and the pins are anything in life you want to accomplish.
Using the core value of “adaptability” that I previously brainstormed in English, I thought of the saying “Just roll with it.” One of the first things that came to mind was bowling. Now that I had my idea, I turned to Adobe Illustrator. The biggest thing I struggled with was how I wanted to represent the theme of bowling. At the beginning, I was thinking about using linear perspective, but decided against it. Instead, I came up with the idea of using negative space in 2D. Later, I received some feedback that “just roll with it” was a little too simple. This prompted me to add “when life comes your way” to the beginning of it. But now I had to decide on how I wanted to incorporate the new text into my image. After jumping back and forth between a few ideas, I settled on bisecting the top and bottom sections of text by placing the image in the middle.
Aboriginal Art
For this project, we were asked to represent our origin story through the traditional Australian Aboriginal style, while following certain requirements like including our spirit animal and star sign. I chose a koala as my spirit animal because I felt like it represented me well, and it also helps that they’re cute. Being born late in March makes me an Aries. This is represented in my piece by the constellation the koala is holding onto, as well as the ram symbol in the bottom left. Aries is a fire symbol, which prompted me to use the corresponding aboriginal symbol as the background. The stars in the top left and bottom right reflect the detail of me being born during the night. In the top right is the symbol for friends. I think that the people that we involve ourselves with serves as a basis of origin for who we become in the future.
The progress of this project was pretty slow due to the level of detail required. There’s a massive amount of dots, many of which have one or even two additional layers. It was worth it though, as the effect it gives off is very stunning. At the beginning of the project, I was just planning to leave the background as pitch black. I later decided to switch it to varying types of red, which really complements the green hues featured in the koala. Towards the end, when I had all of my symbols created, I was struggling with composition, but was able to settle on one I was pleased with by getting feedback from my classmates.
Overall, I really enjoyed this semester of Design. I think I grew a lot as an artist, and I’m looking forward to learning even more during the rest of the year.