Studio Practice: Vector Postcards

Notes - Chose seattle needle and eiffel tower for familiarity, after that the next most recognisable are the atomium, the crystal palace and the unisphere, but since im also doing the sunsphere (which is tall and thin) i had to choose a landark that was also tall and thin otherwise they dont fit together as a set, so i've chosen a little known monument called hanbit tap from a 1992 expo in korea.
Green because focusing on green stuff
sunsphere simpsons reference
crystal palace with smoke
composition

I spent quite a long time trying to decide on a concept for the postcards. Initially I planned to involve food from different countires, combined with famous city landmarks, such as in the thumb below of the Leaning Tower of Pizza, but making it out of pizza made the landmark pretty unclear because there was cheese where all the detail should be. It just looks like a rectangular pizza, so I gave up on this. Because I'd been drawing a lot of critters lately I thought about drawing animals or pests associated with different countries. I tried pigeons for London, rats for Paris, Tarantulas for Sydney and Godzilla for Tokyo. I wasn't totally pleased with this idea because it was very problematic to compose, since I wanted to involve both tiny animals (with the exception of Godzilla) and large landmarks, so if I drew both to scale you would obviously not be able to see the animals, but when I tried making them similar sizes it looked uncomfortable and clumsy.

I went back to using recognisable foods and tried creating repeat patterns using them, so I tried tessellated pizza, croissants in waves and swirls and dotted sushi. i did like this idea but i felt it was a bit basic and could be pushed further. Also the food represented countries more than cities, and since it was a repeat pattern I would just have to draw one thing and then rearrange it multiple times, which felt like a bit of a cop out.

I decided to do more research into themes I could develop but by this point I'd spent too much time thinking about silly ideas and no time at all developing Adobe Illustrator skills, which was what the brief seemed to be about, so I stopped research and just started on one of my ideas.

I chose the research I did into World's Fairs because they all had a monument of some kind erected for the occasion, many of which still stand today and are very famous. Here I listed important ones such as the Eiffel Tower, the Seattle Space Needle, the Crystal Palace, the Millenium Dome and so on

I planned originally to do the crystal palace and depict smoke emitting from it (because, like many worlds fair monuments) it mysteriously burnt down, but the other three I'd chosen (Eiffel Tower, Space Needle, Sunsphere) were all towers, so for the purpose of continuity I changed that to a lesser known tower, the Hanbit Tap or Tower of Grand Light, built in 1993 in South Korea. This defeats my intention of making them recognisable as I can barely remember where it is, let alone others be able to recognise it, but for the sake of composition I chose to overlook it.

I pretty much knew how I wanted the monuments to fit on the page so I only tried a few different thumbnails, particularly as by this point I'd spent too long thinking about it and was running out of time to make them. I tried some other monuments but none of them fit as comfortably into the set of postcards as the lesser known Korean tower.

Most of the visual decisions I made took place on screen so I have little evidence of them.

I started with the space needle as it looked easiest and I'd never used Illustrator before. Its made with the pen tool as it was the tool I had the least amount of understanding of. I used a photograph of the landmark and using the pen tool traced all the individual shapes of the structure and pieced them one at a time back together onto a plain background. Because the drawing was quite complex I chose to do each one in different variations of the same colour. I think it simplifies the images and makes them appear more like a coherent set. The first two colour choices were arbitrary but the third was orange because its called the Sunsphere and is a coppery colour, and the last one green because the focus of that fair was sustainability and the environment.