Day: November 15, 2017

First and foremost, I personally enjoyed this project, creating a character and coming up with a back story and try to make it fit into a set story was fun. For my character the first thought/ inspiration from the book was Daito and Shoto. When I read the description of their avatars being samurai like and carrying swords I instantly related because in most video games I play that let me create characters I always tend to make ninja like avatars to play as. My character is named Shadow and he is a 25-year-old male who was taught by his strict father the ways of the ninja assassin that has been passed down since before the Oasis launched. Shadow’s father also known as “Black Kistune” passed down the black diamond that is infused into the user’s forehead until they die or transfer it to their next of kin. When activated the black diamond transforms into a black Kitsune mask that grants the user the ability to hide within the shadows and manipulate them at will becoming “Shadow Kitsune”. Shadow at the same time embraced his mother’s love and kindness until her sudden death. Shadow being taught the ways of the avatar assassin struggles from following his father’s footsteps or going off and doing what he wants to do, which is go on the egg hunt and become a Gunter. Shadow uses his mastership with the blade and various ninja tools to play the game fairly like he wants, but finds himself at times using the Kitsune mask to one up other players.

My drawing style for the project is appropriate with what was asked for I believe. My character is made from scratch and shapes drawn in illustrator. Normally I would of like to have drawn my character on paper make it nice and pretty on how I want it to look and then image trace it, but not being able to do that was a bit of a challenge and I enjoyed it. My character goes with my back story very well, although I feel like I normally would have wanted to present it with the mask on I wanted to show an actual person behind the mask to show more of my character. I tried to keep my character close enough to look like a ninja/assassin and somewhat of a Gunter too.

With the poster design, in my head I wanted to incorporate my character and have a sunset background. Sunset background and Japanese aesthetics just popped in my head. Also, I didn’t want to have a lot of text just enough to get the main points of my character. I also didn’t just want to place the text there, so I created a scroll and place it on the bottom of the page to give reveal the info I wanted. Kind of like a Japanese scroll the unveils passed down information, only this time its unveiling my avatar. I place my character’s name on top and in bold black letters to show hierarchy. I used a lot of the basics from the tutorials like the pen tools, shapes on shapes, the line tool, the white cursor move tool, and then towards the end of the project I started using the pencil draw tool and just drawing the objects due to the frustration that some of the parts I wanted in my character were not coming out the way I wanted. So, the pencil tool was extremely handy, plus I have a laptop with touch screen so drawing the pieces and objects were pretty easy.

After reading a couple of chapters from Ready Player One it was not hard to fall into the world of the book. An online world of 80s pop culture and video games, sign me up.  Being born in the 90s and having a mom that was all about the 80s I was excited for this project. For this project I wanted to include a bit of a 80s feel and include a bit of 80s pop culture images. I wanted to go with the Dystopian feel right of the back and first thing that came to mind was 80s Horror and weird imagery. For some reason the imagery of the prom from the book I wanted to put into my project and so I found an image with a few couples and just placed them around the collage and made a few alterations. I wanted to include a small tribute to my mom in this by including references of her favorite scary movies “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13^th”

After working on the tutorials I was playing around with a few things on Photoshop and one thing I enjoyed doing was making a person look like they were dissolving. While it was fun and the actual work could be used on itself I just wanted to include it in the collage with other works. Gas mask, crumbling buildings came to mind for dystopia so I tried to include it in my collage. For the feel of the collage I wanted to make it feel like an old black and white movie that you would see late at night, kind of like a twilight zone feel.

I used the quick select tool a lot in this project selecting and grabbing pieces from the images I used and putting them in my collage. I used a bit of Gradient maps to change my layers to a black and white feel like I wanted. My dissolving man I used the dispersion effect that I picked up I downloaded a brush online and used it for the dissolving effect.