One day projects - week 2 - 'Happy Birthday'

One day projects - week 2 - 'Happy Birthday'

Daisy Jackson / 31/01/2022

For today's one day task, David assigned us the mini project of creating a 4 panel story involving the song 'Happy Birthday'. In comparison to last week, my creative thinking has definitely improved as more ideas rushed to my head during the brief.

Here are my plans:

Despite how morbid a lot of these ideas are, I find them quite comical as the characters themselves are very strange. I have always loved my lumpy style and wanted to encoorperate it into a few ideas. A lot of these ideas involved characters being crushed and the other character being left horrified. That is when I came up with my official idea of fruit in a blender. Unfortunately, these two pieces of fruit had no idea what was going to happen.

I decided to create the final piece digitally as I felt I could have a lot of fun with this and test out my skills. Often, I usually draw in simple colours. However, with this piece I wanted to involve blending and a sense of realism. I even messed around with the effects on layering (Gaussian Blur).

Here is my finished results:

Images of the process:

Context:

In panel one, an apple is singing 'Happy Birthday' to the other, unaware of what will happen next. In the second panel, milk starts to appear as a person is making a smoothie. In panel three, chopped bananas appear. This is when the two apples start to realise something is wrong. In the final panel, they have all been combined into a smoothie. I really love the simplicity of this idea and I am very happy I decided to choose this one! It took a lot of work for the background and adding layers (more than I expected anyway).

Problems that occured:

Despite using ProCreate for a year plus, I am still discovering new ways of approaching art. I definitely feel like I need to improve my layering process. However, it isn't confusing to me. Some may look at my layers and cringe but I know what I am looking at. Apart from this, everything went well and I am happy with the end results.

What I could improve on:

I love the style I used. However, next time I could try more realism. This is not really something I can improve on as everyone has their own style but it is something I could consider. 

What I am happy with:

I am extremely happy with the flow of the story as well as the comical aspect. As well as this, I have challenged myself digitally as I have tried to include textures (evidenced through mixing colours - apple texture) and even trying new effects. In the background, I used the Gaussian Blur which helped create more focus on the smoothie itself. It also adds a 'popping' effect. I am also happy with the style of the piece. There are no straight lines which adds more character in my opinion!