This was one assignment that I had a great deal of trouble doing, and caused me no small amount of anguish as well. When I first saw the theme “Colorful Asia”, I was pretty much all “Haha, this should be fairly easy, I have so many nice photos of Asia.” And then I read the fine print: “Avoid touristy landscapes”, and I cried a little.
Following that, I tried to think of other things people commonly associate Asia with, and one thing that immediately came to mind was food. I quickly browsed through my laptop in hopes that I had some super secret food photographs stashed somewhere, but alas, it was not to be. All I could find was a photo of an empty bamboo steamer, and scratch my head wondering why I had a photo of that in the first place.
The next thing that came to mind was our many diverse races. Once again, I looked through my photo folders, but came up dry. And the thought of gathering 100 strangers of various races just to take a single photograph seemed like a pretty good way to shave some years off my lifespan, so I decided that I couldn’t do this for the postcard design.
I started to get desperate, and decided to try and throw something together using images off the internet (which was quite obviously a stupid move on my part). “Colorful” invoked the imagery of a rainbow in my mind, and so I looked for Asian objects and food of varying colors to create a rainbow.
At the end of everything, this was the design that I came up with:
But of course, using images from the internet is a big no-no, so I had to redo the postcard assignment. I racked my brains again, trying to think of what I could do for the assignment, and I finally decided on temples. A representation of the incredible richness of our culture, the amount of temples in Asia is nothing short of staggering. And some of them are so rich in history that if history could be converted to cash, a single brick alone would probably be able to buy me a brand new Ferrari.
I looked up pictures of Chinese, Hindu, Muslim and Japanese temples, and started working on a design for the postcard. Initially, I wanted to simply draw a single building, but with clear influences from all 4 kinds of temples, but I soon realized that there was a reason why I’m not an Architecture major. With that idea down the drain, I decided that the simplest way to do the postcard was to segregate it into 4 equal segments, and draw a portion of each temple in each segment.
This is what the postcard looked like when the line-art was done:
I then selected a whole range of bright and vibrant colors to really bring out the theme of Colorful Asia:
The major lesson learned from this assignment was the importance of colors, how they work and how they complement one another. Postcards are not easy to design, especially since the canvas is so small.
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