Brief

Create a complex graphic artwork for a wall in your school, studio, home or office. Ensure the wall design is themed on your own ideas and is based on images and pattern. Use the video tutorial in the previous step as a guide. Finally photograph the wall and superimpose your design. Include the design and the image of the wall incorporating the design in your final submission.

Full Response

Reflection

Although I was more pleased with how assignment 3 turned out, I actually think this was the best assignment of the course because it gave so much creative freedom and forced me to consider spatiality as well as how to create the graphics appropriately.

Response
Juvo is my partner’s business and earlier last year I created the branding and her website. When the brief asked us to select a space that we could make a connection to with the graphics we created, I immediately thought of her office. She works from home and all the walls in our home are bare white. We’ll eventually decorate, but until then I thought I have the perfect blank canvas to enliven her home office with this brief.

Approach
The first thing I did was to measure the wall. The reason for this is so I could create an Illustrator file at the correct aspect ratio. This important to prevent a stretched or compressed fit when I eventually overlay the graphics onto the photograph I would take of the wall.

After that I started to think about what graphical components I would create. Obviously the logo should be present, but I wanted the graphics to tell a story. I also wanted to utilise the pattern tools we learned about during this week’s live lecture.

My first idea was to create an entirely pattered wall with objects you would associate with dogs (as Juvo specialises in canine behaviour). I created the usual iconic symbols of: bone, water bowl, kennel, paw print, etc. It quickly became apparent however that it was going to look quite boring and not particularly imaginative. It didn’t tell a story either, it was just a collection of imagery repeated across the whole wall.

For the website (that’s still in development), I am going to create graphical illustrations that portray human-dog interaction, with the focus on visualising the dog. Illustrations work so much better than photos because unless they are shot professionally, they tend to look very amateurish. I am not a photographer, plus taking photos of animals is a tricky business as animals tend to do what they want. That said, I am not an illustrator either so I decided now would be a good opportunity to experiment creating graphic dogs! I quite quickly decided on a slight abstract style, making each dog out of geometric shapes and circle quadrants.

I wanted to create 10 graphics, one for each of the 10 cornerstones Juvo is built around. However, I haven’t got the time to achieve this before my self-imposed deadline. I therefore opted to take the 4 different dog designs I had managed to create and arrange them in a relatively interesting composition, each with their own thought presented.

I stuck with the dog accessory pattern background and then exported the file ready for application to the photo of the wall in Photoshop.

Making of
After only a minimal amount of experimenting with Photoshop’s tools for composition, I eventually managed to create a piece of work I am quite pleased with. To help explain the process I undertook, I have created the ‘Making Of.png’ file which explains how I managed to composite the graphic artwork onto my wall.