This critique required us to assess four main points:

1. How our avatar fits into the virtual world of the OASIS from Ready Player One
2. Why we feel the drawing style used to depict our avatar is appropriate.
3. Why our graphic design and typography choices make our poster design clear and engaging
4. How specific Illustrator tools and techniques influenced your creative process

Take a look at the poster here!

My character, screenname “SopieSuds”, retains the same appearance and traits in the OASIS as she does in real life. She is logged into the OASIS mostly to go to school and earn a degree to hopefully make her and her impoverished family’s life at home better. She also takes advantage of the OASIS in which she carries around a high-tech tablet she would otherwise have no access to, which she uses for all her school activities as well as recreationally, and she also generates many trendy outfits for herself. She wears tattered, old clothes in real life but always loved fashion and trendsetting. SopieSuds is a longtime friend of Parzival, both in the OASIS and out. The two grew up in a harsh reality together, and in the OASIS she provides him a kind ear and an unconditional friendship. She is very close with her father, hence her username, as it came from her mispronunciation of “Sophie” as “Sopie” when she was little, and the nickname stuck with her dad. She’s a bright girl with kind eyes, and just wants to make her world a better place.

My drawing style is my own. I make a good artist outside of class, so I applied that to this project. I used a realistic approach, in which everything is proportional and humanoid, but also a bit of a cartoony style, such as keeping outlines and omitting certain details that may make the drawing more realistic. Video games in the last couple of decades have depicted both highly cartoony and startlingly realistic characters, so my character fits right in.

My type choices are simple yet effective. They are easy to follow and easy on the eye, and brief yet detailed. Each text box offers a bit of backstory and insight into SopieSuds’ abilities and traits. All the different colors and font sizes I used builds hierarchy in my poster. The titles of each piece of text are color coded based on what the text is describing, and located close to that trait or object. The mini-titles are bigger and more colorful than the smaller text that it describes. I also included a small paragraph on the bottom left summarizing a bit of SopieSuds’ life. I made the font blue to separate it from the text boxes. Her name is in big, blue and white letters on the bottom right, blaring and easy to see. I used MS WordArt to create the title.

I used quite a plethora of Illustrator tools. The one I used the most was the Blob brush, which allows the user to paint one single object that can be modified later. I used this for all my coloring and shading. This tool made it very easy to follow where all the objects in my poster were. I also used the regular paintbrush for the outline of my character and certain little details. I used a variety of different brushes and brush sizes as well. I used the gradient tool in her hair, sweater, pants, and tablet to add a little extra dimensionality to her, and put a blue and white gradient in the background. I chose blue because it is easy on the viewer to look at. I used the type tool for all my text, excluding the title, where I used MS WordArt copied and pasted right from Word. To italicize the mini-titles I sheared them about 15° horizontally. I also wrapped the blue character text around her pants and shoes to fit it all in the corner. I ended up having 22 layers in my project, as I used that panel quite a bit to separate every detail out. To draw my character, I used the Wacom tablets from the SPARK labs. These tablets are awesome and exponentially increased what I could do with this project. I am very pleased with how my project turned out, especially for my first time ever using Illustrator.