Remember The Giving

HDTV 1080

Adobe Illustrator

One day every year and every year each day, we remember. Canadian troops have faught for us, and are still fighting, and each day we remember; and every year, on the eleventh month of the eleventh day at the eleventh hour, everyone remembers together. Remembrance Day is such a beautiful thing. Its a day where people of all ageees, races, religions and more come togehter to remember and relect on all that Canadian Troops have done for us.

The purpose of this assignment was to create a poster to reflect and encourage people to reflect on Canadian War hero’s and history through the use of symbols and text that represent Remembrance Day. For my piece, I decided to create a simple but meaningful piece that had truth in the quote and feeling in the piece. I decided to focus my picture on an image/symbol that was strongly associated and remembered with  Remembrance Day itself; the poppy. By choosing a simple thing, I feel I created a meaningful piece that shows emotion with the depiction of the poppies and the framed text.

This piece was created on Adobe Photoshop; However, it was created in the format of “HDTV 1080”, as a collection of images in a Remembrance Day Video. This format created a very long page, which made it an unusual format to work in, but, I felt as I created a visually appealing piece that made great use of the large space. Firstly, I drew a handful of poppies, hand drawn, a painted them with different shades of reds and greens. I then drew a simple frame that would later encapsulated an original quote by myself. This frame was placed in the right side of the page to create  one of the principles of design, balance, to balance the poppies on the left. By placing the frame to the right, it allowed to page to have asymmetrical balance and have the page be seen as equal in visual weight in both sides, making it visually appealing. I then drew my quote; this was done by hand drawing various words like, “give”, “&”, and “those”, and various small detailing, like lines, circles, waves and more. I then used different text fonts to crate another principle of design, unity. By using fonts that were either bold or soft, the words balanced each other and connected as they were all similar. Lastly, I arranged all the words in the frame in a creative and interesting way to pull people in and have their eyes follow the movement in a visually appealing way.

During the creation and completion process, various elements and principles of design are seen and used to make the piece more successful and pleasing to look at. The principles seen are unity, emphasis, movement, and balance. As stated above, unity and balance are created to make the piece seem as all the pieces work together and belong and that the peace as a whole balances each other perfectly. Emphasis can be seen in one part of the piece. It can be seen in the text. I made the words I felt as most important in the boldest fonts, or changed them to make the viewers eye pulled into that aspect. This is seen in the words “Remember”, “giving” and “lives”. By bolding them and capturing them in a different way, it shows that they are seen as most important and the words that should be focused on. Secondly, movement; Movement can be seen in the in the text. The quote flows together and moves in different way along different fonts and shapes to pull the viewers eyes through the piece. Movement can also be seen in the poppies, as they have all been drawn at different heights and shapes, allowing the viewer to look into the “depth” of the handful of poppies, to look behind stems and pick their way through the bundle.

The elements of design seen in the piece are line, colour and value. Line is most strongly seen in my piece in both aspects of it. It can be seen in the poppies in their light outline, giving them their own defined shape and space, allowing them to stand out and not blend into one another. It is also strognly seen in the text. The words that are drawn are heaviely outlined to make them stand out and be defined to help show their impact and meaning. The text as a whole is in a thick stroke to help the words stand out and not disappear in the page. Both colour and value are seen in this piece aswell. For the poppies, all the reds are the small, but their values were altered each time I selelcted a new colour. By doing this, I was able to create shadows and depth and feeling in the poppies, rather than if they were a solid flat colour. With this in mind, the overall colour choices elswhere are all of the same lightened hues/values. The backrgoud itself is a pale yellow (a light hue or value of yellw), and the colour in the frame was aswell a light hue but of pink. This allowed the picture to be very easy on the eyes and not seem so intense to look at, amking it more visually appealing.

As a whole I feel my piece is very successful and portraysa poster that allows people to felect on Canadian War Heros and history itself through the use of symbols and text that represents Remembrance Day. However, there is one flaw or weakness in my piece. During the creation process, I wanted to and planned to fill in the frame with colour; but, as I went to do so, the frame was unable to fill with colour and was unable to be fixed. This changed my plans as it wasgoing to be colourful but simple to stand out in its own unqiue way, rather than it standing out for the white being such a high contrasting colour. With this in mind I ended  drawning in designs into the frame itself to fill with colour to add some interest into the piece. Overall as a complete piece te white turned out well in the fact that it balances the darkness of the texts and stands out, allowing peoples eyes to be pulled in. I am, overall, very pleased with how the completed piece looks.