The quote this time is "her heart was a secret grade and the walls were very high" from The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I picked this quote in particular because 1) it had few enough words to work into a graphic design/illustration and 2) was articulate enough to describe how I felt about some things in my life.
So, as usual, I first experimented with how I was going to place the words. Initially, I wasn't too concerned with scratching up other thumbnails of different word placements because I wanted to work quickly and just experiment. I tend to have a tendency on being overly concerned with the details from the start and just drawing loosely allowed me to just relax and have fun.
On one hand, that method was pretty nice and I was able to get to the guts of the main drawing fairly quickly. On the other hand, I forgot there was a reason why I developed my detailed habits in the first place; it made me stop to consider things more carefully and to double check that I wasn't going ahead with something that was going to bite me in the butt further up the process.
tl;dr: my nonchalance bit me in the butt.
Once I got to the final lineart after a lot of lining up and working with composition (which was fun in its own way with all its structure and straight lines), bumps started to appear immediately. I noticed that "secret garden" was hard to read as it was so condensed and, when I asked various people to try to read it, some kept confusing "high" as "nigh." Haha, numero uno of any graphic design is to make your content legible and, egh, already failed a bit with that.
So I tweaked a few things like outlining "secret garden" in some attempt to make it more legible and made the h's taller. I also centered the words better and added more decor in the areas that felt a bit too bare. I knew I wanted to create a fluid wildness in "secret garden" while the "walls" were to be strong, but unbending with a certain delicacy set into each crevice (check: medieval manuscripts).
I also saw that the S in "walls" was hard to determine because, unlike the word's W where it had some buffer space at the edges of its design, S didn't have that. I think it caused "walls" to look like it was aligned to the right rather than center, but at that point I was like agggggggh and barreled on because, again, practice and learning curves ahoy.
Now there was the coloring process and I fought with it, as usual. I tried to follow the three color rule (where you choose three different colors and basically stick with them to have a decent color scheme) of red, yellow, and green, but I kept fidgeting around with "walls", feeling that the work as a whole was a bit too red heavy and, well, boring to look at.
So, instead, I said "nah" and "I do what I want" to the three color rule. I changed "walls" into blue and added touches of greenish-blue to the tiny details around the bricks of the word while making the borders more golden for contrast. It came out pretty swell, I think, compared to the original color idea.
Overall, I'm pretty happy how it came out. Even with the mistakes I made on the way, the work as a whole is pretty, I think, with its colors and designs I decided to draw the words into. It can be better, sure, but drawing this was a nice change from the typical illustration stuff I do.
So, yeah, couple of lessons learned:
1) plan/be paranoid in the beginning no matter what
2) letters won't follow your so-called rules of "yeah, that looks alright"
3) legibility is super important because if no one can read what you made, then whaaaaat
4) color rules are irrelevant if breaking them makes stuff look better
These lessons are probably nebulous and prone to change all the time. Next week, I bet those same lessons will just laugh in my face as they frolic away into an alternate universe where they'll decide to maybe work. Yep.
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