Me, Myself and I - Phase One
What? Use two of your love/hate and convey the message via your name
Brainstorming
During lecture, I had a hard time deciding on my two keywords so I wrote random love/hate and penned down possible ideas for each of them. I had art, music, the night, bears, tigers for love and maths for hate. I struck art, music out as I believe they are popular choices and I had played with those ideas before. Eventually, I chose two love - "the night" and "cats" (derived from tiger).
Research/Drafts
The Night
For "night", I love its serenity and the darkness that are mystifying at times. Hence, I had random concepts including the moon, stars, street lamp, shadows, crows, owls, fireflies. In my first drafts, I got stuck with moon/stars but I felt they convey that I love astronomy, the galaxy or moon/stars in particular instead! Hence, I scrapped it and moved on to shadows.
1. The "Y" and "G" was changed notably as the hanging leaf stalk and apple/worm felt out of place. I replaced it with the stalk growing out of the branch as capital "Y" and the bird which was more fitting and added to the tranquil ambience. The foreground are intended to be only shadows (solid black) and the moon will glow faintly. I also had an alternate sketch of a small "i", using a dewdrop on the leaf but later thought the dew won't be visible as shadows.
2. Next, I moved from the gentle night to the lonely night street. Initially, my idea was an indoor night lamp but the impact was not as strong to portray the emptiness as a street lamp.
3. While searching for my street lamp, I saw several photographs of beautiful night skies illuminated by skyscrapers and it felt like a strong image to resemble the night. Hence I tried to play around with the buildings to form my name.
I make sure the buildings are of varied sizes and designs to make it interesting. Initially, the "N" was simply two short buildings with a bridge between them but I replaced it with a drawbridge. I had the most problems with the "Y" because of its empty space below the curve (that looks like "U") and buildings simply cannot be floating in midair! It was then I realised from my researched photographs that there are also smaller buildings in front of the skyscrapers. So I thought, if the foreground buildings are of a lighter shade than the ones in the background, it will create the illusion of the "empty space" (as seen in my draft).
4. For my fourth, I wanted to include night creatures in it and decided on an owl (crows came close in votes but i hate them honestly and they are not exactly nocturnal). However, if I were to only use owls, it may appear I love/hate them so he sits on a night background now.
Cats
I had fun using various parts of their body to form my name! There are less research work compared to my previous design since cats are one of my favorite characters to draw (they come in hourglass figure, scary/evil, cute, fat etc.)
1.
2. I wanted to use something in relation to cats in this for a change of concept and fishes immediately pop up! So I used their bones to form my name. I got stuck at "G" for some time as it just looked wrong and the fish seemed unfinished (left). I manage to improvise with a small "g" and the tail (for the fish and "g") turned out way better! I also had to include cats somewhere so I drew half of it like it's walking out of my drawing board after its good feast!
3. This draft derived from my sketch of cowering cat which looks very much like an "n" to me. I didn't want to draw more cats in various postures for other alphabets and complicate my sketch so I used fences instead. Again, I wanted a different perspective so the ground is round. To put more emphasis on the fence that are alphabets, they have pointed tips (others are flat) and a slight 3-D feel. The signboard was initially an arrow but later, I thought a beware sign is more interesting.
4.
.. And in case people didn't catch my name on the drafts (hopefully not though), it's "Ying" - which is part of my chinese name.
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