Finals Development (7-9/9)

For my final three illustrations, I chose online articles to show how my images could work on screen as well as in print. Because of this, I considered I may need to simplify the images so detail doesn’t get lost when viewed on a small device (on a phone for example).

7. Tiny Houses

• This relates to my research into Scandinavia because it is about living in a small space. 
• The first roughs I did were of interior spaces, thinking about how to get every element of the home featured within this small box. But the layout was not working and actually made the home look too spacious which wasn’t relevant to all of the article content. 
• Instead I chose to show the exterior of the houses as this didn’t give away an opinion about life inside them.  
• This article discusses opinions of people who have lived in tiny houses and there are some positive and negative responses. I felt like this should be reflected in my imagery through colour. 
• The combination of orange and blue kind of shows a warm and cold side of the houses to reflect this. 

8. Indoor Gardening

• This relates to my research into IKEA because a lot of the information about living in a small space suggests bringing plans inside. This could also be related to apartment living and not having outside space. 
• From my research I realised the contrast between the geometry and natural forms in Scandinavian homes and wanted to emphasise this in my drawings. 
• I took inspiration from terrariums which seem to be very on trend at the moment and used their angular shapes to contrast with the natural curves of the plants. 
• I used these angular shapes to also draw some plant pots (viewed from above), it plays with the perspective of the image and shows the components aren’t all being viewed from the same angle. 
• Seeing as this was an image of strong contrasts I thought I would experiment with a bolder colour scheme. This is overall a more modern approach to Scandi design. 

9. Essential Oils

• This article relates to the calming and relaxing atmosphere that has cropped up so many times in my research. It’s more about wellbeing and looking after yourself which the Scandinavians seem to be good at. 
• I wasn’t sure what all of these things actually looked like so I did some sketches from reference before moving on to layout ideas. 
• I kept things simple and tried to take the stripes approach like I did with my previous food illustration. 
• I created my own colour scheme this time, merging numerous images together and selecting the relevant colours from each. I am getting more confident with colour. 
• Stripes experiments - the first attempts were just too overwhelming. This was meant to be promoting stress relief and sleep and it wasn’t working. 
• I simplified things down to just one block of colour behind each image which was much more effective. The colours help determine what the content is and the low opacity makes this more subtle and gentle.