Title: We Are Lake Ontario Poster

Client: We Are Lake Ontario

Year: 2017, 2018

Overview: The purpose of the project this was made for was to create a poster for the “We Are Lake Ontario” project, depicting either the beauty of the Lake, or the problems of pollution that it has that we need to “fix”. I chose the latter of the two for my focus. I focused on how trash or recyclables with State University of New York at Oswego (SUNY Oswego) branding can sometimes be found in the lake, such as bottles, in addition to general ideas of pollution. The poster shows a beautiful landscape of the campus from the lake, with the foreground filled with trash.

Audience: The main target for this piece was the SUNY Oswego Students and faculty.

Goals: The goals of the poster were to disgust the audience of the thought of trash in the lake, as well as make members of the audience who may have littered the lake feel ashamed or guilty of contributing to the pollution. Thus, it would make both sections of the target audience less likely to pollute the lake, which would be the final goal of the poster.

Research: I focused my research on the plastic pollution of the lake, to help narrow down ideas. Things I had found during said research included the amount of plastic pollution that normally occurred in the lake, as well as data about how our school is one of the only college campuses on the coast. This in turn started to give me ideas on the concepts I would use in my thumbnails, hence how the final piece is depicted.

I also did research for the style I would use in the piece which I could use as reference in the project. For this project, I looked at the work of Xuan L. Xuan and Brett King, which became the main stylistic influences of the style in my piece. In particular, I used basic shapes combined with textures to create visual interest. It is also noted that in order to get a closer rendition of the campus, I looked up pictures of the campus online, one of the results being the reference image below from the public domain, which gave me the idea of having the piece show the campus from the lake, rather than the other way around.

Xuan, Xuan L. Giant Panda. 2017, Behance. https://www.behance.net/xuanlocxuan. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

 

 

For the more hands on research though, we had to create a multitude of thumbnails of differing ideas and layouts. These were narrowed down by peer critique, with the top three made into larger sketches, and then narrowed down by peer review again so that I had a finalized idea of what the final piece would include. The final sketch was a rendition of the campus from the lake, with the foreground including a solo cup and plastic bottle, which not only referenced the idea of platic pollution, but also the campus and students there, which was one of the reasons I put the name of the college on the bottle’s label.

Thumbnails

   

Concept Sketch

 

Process: After the completion of the sketching phase, I then brought the final concept sketch into Photoshop and then proceeded to paint over it, making the intended illustration while refering to the reference photo, the concept sketch, and my visual research.

For the first version, I made it mainly to get critique on the initial colors of the whole piece and the layout of the items in the lake: the bottle and the solo cup. At this time, I was thinking that the cup should be floating on the lake since if water was put in it, it would sink. However, during the critique, I learned that people thought it didnt really seem as a part of the foreground, seeming to be floating off the page. Besides that, other things people noted included a need for some of the colors to be changed, a need to add the textures I had planned on adding, some note of lighting in the landscape, adding more items to fill more of the foreground, and lastly, adding a reflection of the campus in the water to give the lake more of that ‘feel’ of water.

After that, I then proceeded with the planned addition of textures and the recommended revisions given to me during the critique. I also went further and added a gradient to the lake, giving a dirty and polluted feel to the foreground. However, during the final critique of the original project, people saw it more as sand than muddy or dirty water, which I put in my notes for later on.

A few months later, I then added that revision as well as making a color change to the sky to give it more contrast and saturation and giving a shimmering effect to the water, further adding the ‘feel’ of water to the lake, thus resulting in the final version of the piece.