Sarah Heal - Extended Practice: OUGD603 - Peter and Paul Interior Space Competition

It's been a few months since me and Roxxie last presented our work to the senior management team, graphic design and Peter & Paul, and even though our idea was rejected, we decided to pursue and finish the design as if it were chosen, and present it as a conceptual mockup in our portfolios.

Since the last post, this is as far as we got. Since then we took the design, scanned it and took it into Adobe Illustrator.

We did the initial digitisation way back in January, and sitting here only three months later I'm already thinking I would do it differently knowing what I know now. I traced over each letter using the pen tool and a mouse, when now I wouldn't doubt using my drawing tablet and playing around with line thickness to create the same effect, only it would take me a day, not two weeks!

I was responsible for the lettering at this stage, whilst Roxxie was more about the grapes, vines and leaves.

I then added the shadowing detail, again I would do it so differently had it been a few months later. I added the shadows as a bunch of shapes with gradients in them on top of the design. I don't know what I was thinking of! Because when it came to adding in the 'to' ...

.... I used my drawing tablet and added the shadows in Photoshop with the brush tool. Took about two minutes!!

And you can't even tell the difference!

I then moved onto the fountain. I started with the concave shell shape above the tap, by drawing a set of gradiented circles in a semicircle shape. I decided to use the pen tool to create two straight edges on each one, after seeing a teardrop tutorial in first year.

Then after messing about with the gradients, ended up with something like this.

Roxxie did the tiles design, but I rearranged the pattern so that the tiles were equally spaced apart like a tiled wall might be. I really liked the spacing she previously created, but felt like the rest of the design was already busy enough and perhaps this is a section we could pull back with.

The design so far. The yellow thing bottom left was to become the tree.

After using the pen tool to 'fill in the gaps' of the vine, it was difficult to make the tree flow seamlessly. I wanted the type to be left kind of on it's own, meaning that the bush had to become thinner near the top of the design. I took colours from the image on the right as inspiration for the fat branches for the tree on the left. I decided at this point to import the whole design into Photoshop to add textures and to add leaves and drop shadows.

We wanted the drain pan of the water bottle filler sink to be like the bowl beneath a wall tap. So I took a mash of different images like this one, layered them up and took pieces of each one to create a textured design.

I also used loads of different brushes to add splashes.

I planned out where the leaves were going on the vines and tree. I mainly wanted the leaves over adjoining sections so the transitions of tree and thinner vines wasn't so harsh. Here you can see all the other textures on the tiles and tree trunk, complete with a little grass. I put in a drop shadow on the tree itself.