Based on what I had researched in my third blog post, I wanted to work on familiarizing myself with the Adobe Suite. Although I have worked with Premier Pro and After Effects before, I’m not as comfortable working with them as I am with Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. After Effects is more used for shorter videos or animation, which is more relevant to social media, so I went with that. It was also something I wanted to dabble in for quite a while already, and decided now would be the perfect opportunity to improve on my skills.

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I wanted to start small and make something personal, so I thought about making wallpaper for Google Chrome. I was inspired by a Korean artist called @aube_blue on Twitter and a picture of tulips I happened upon on Pinterest. I wanted to create a sense of serenity whenever I launched the browser to do my assignments, so it would have to be calming to look at.

 

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Figure 1: Inspiration | Source:  @aube_blue on Twitter and @anahi on Pinterest

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I wasn’t exactly sure where to start, but I knew I wanted to build some sort of scenery so I started by looking at pictures of more tulips and had the idea of making a field of flowers. I started with loose drawings of tulips, then added bluebells (I’m not sure how accurate to nature this is, but I just went with it), and traced everything on Adobe Illustrator. I ended up with 3 elements: two tulips (I’m pretty sure are of a different species), bluebells, and exactly two blades of grass. These were duplicated a few times, then arranged until they looked semi-decent. 

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Figure 2: Initial sketches and Tracing outcome arrangement

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Then I duplicated this until I got a whole row of flowers. To make it more flower field-esque, I added a gradient background for the sky. I felt like it looked pretty empty so I added a second row of flowers above as well.  

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Figure 3:  First Draft

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I didn't quite like my first attempt, as it just wasn’t fitting the image I had in mind. I liked that there was texture, but the lines were too thick. It was getting pretty late at this point so I decided to just sleep on it, and try to fully imagine what I wanted it to look like. I started on it again the next day and added the same gradient effect the sky had to the flowers. I messed with the line weight slightly and it ended up looking better with thinner lines, but I still wanted to have some sort of texture or organic movement conveyed. I played around with the effects until it looked like this:

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Figure 4:  Rows of flowers (2 variations, one with still lines and the other with organic movement)

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It was starting to come together at this point, so the rest came about pretty quickly. The sky still looked empty, so I added some clouds and butterflies.

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Figure 6: End result on Illustrator

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Now that the final image was done, I moved it over to After Effects and applied a wiggle effect. After some struggling, I realised I had to separate each item into a separate layer and apply the effect one by one, as the point of movement was different for each object. I was frustrated that I had to redo everything, but I was also equally stubborn to see this project through and gritted my teeth through it. Eventually, after 2 or 3 times of going back to Adobe Illustrator to fix this, I managed to get it (mostly) right. 

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Figure 7: Final results

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I’m happy with the end result of this, but I missed out on some details in this, which I plan to fix when I have more time on my hands later on. Overall, I think I’ve really enjoyed learning about this, and I’m definitely more familiar with the Adobe Illustrator to After Effects pipeline. A key thing I would do differently would be to:

1. Organise my objects by layer and not type. I made the mistake of only looking at the layers panel and organizing everything, which just messed up the whole image.

2. Group my objects early on. When I was tracing the objects, I didn’t group the whole flower together. Basically, the leaves, stalk, and flower were on different layers which made things very hard to find and animate.

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This project brought me more clarity on how I work, not just in a designing sense but also my creative process of how I come up with ideas and overcome challenges. I find that I am more aware of when I am overwhelmed and when I need to take a breather. I also figured out that I tend to get too fixated on the idea I have of something in my head, which could be good and bad. It could be good because it drives me to be better so I can achieve that, but it also means I can get very inflexible. This would make it difficult to work in teams, and also means I may overlook or dismiss alternate outcomes.

 

Documenting my process helped me realise that this characteristic of mine didn't need to apply throughout the whole project. I did have an initial idea of how I wanted this project to turn out, and I was fixated on it which made me change my original draft. However, the second draft turned out different than expected even though it was not exactly what I wanted. It wasn't better or worse, just an alternate outcome which I ended up liking anyway.

 

I'm aware this isn't something that can be changed overnight, but I'm much more aware of this tendency when I work now, especially in groups. It keeps me on my toes, basically, and I try harder to be more open-minded when I work.