Project 4

Shape & Color

Tyler Davis

Published in

CDF S19

4 min readApr 24, 2019

Idea:

Naruto adaptation

Theme:

Adventure, comedy, fantasy

Inspiration:

During college, several peers suggested that I start watching anime. After three years of exploration, I would consider Naruto to be my favorite. One thing that is unique about this show is that ninjas form teams of 3. Considering this project is about trilogies, I thought that it would be an interesting concept to have a book for each character on a given team. During each series, the main characters happen to be assigned to Team 7. Each set of characters on Team 7 has very distinct eyes (some of which are unique to their abilities) that I thought would be interesting to highlight.

Author:

Masashi Kishimoto

Author Description:

Masashi Kishimoto is a Japanese manga artist known for creating the manga series Naruto. From an early age, Kishimoto was interested in writing his own manga, citing authors Akira Toriyama and Katsuhiro Otomo as his main inspirations. As a result, Kishimoto spent several years working to write his own shōnen manga for Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine. Since Kishimoto's conception of Naruto, it has been adapted into three anime and multiple films, video games, and related media.

Sketches

My two original sketches included both sets of characters from Team 7. I tried making one with full detail, and one with a minimalist look. I ended up settling on the latter, especially because their eyes were more interesting. To draw more attention to their eyes, I decided to use only half of their face with a dark background.

Design process

After I settled on the characters from Boruto, I tried adding detail while still following the minimalist theme. This proved to be difficult, but I was able to add depth to the image by adding shadow to their hair rather than other features such as the nose or mouth. If I had more time, I would like to play with color more. Luckily, each character had very unique colors, but since color was a main component of this assignment, I should have given it more time and attention.

Iterations

Due to an unfortunate event, my illustrator files were lost…sorry :/

Feedback

During our interim crit, I received very useful advice. While I was unable to incorporate all suggestions, I made adjustments to the background image, font, title positioning, headband positioning, and facial details.