Process Documentation for Afternoon Cartoons Posters
CDF Project 4
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Using the cartoon festival idea I generated for an earlier exercise,
I thought about different poster layouts for the each of the 3 cartoons (Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Steven Universe).
In accordance to the theme of the Afternoon Cartoons festival (cartoons that manage to captivate both adults and children), I wanted to explore visually in these sketches:
- The parent-child bond
- Immaturity versus maturity
- What it means to be a role model
- Sharing youthful fun
Because the graphic was going to play a huge part of my posters, it had to hold strong implicit meaning.
But before I could move on, I had to decide on a visual style. I’m working with three different cartoons with three different styles, so I wanted to create my own cartoon style that were distinct from the three.
I drew a ton of cartoon faces and combined qualities to create the finalized style that is shown on the right side. The only characters I anticipated I needed were a set of parents and their son.
Using those faces, I tried to create draw out the characters bodies as well. As seen on the left side of the above image, I referenced the child character in the first layout sketch of Adventure Time. Initially I intended the son’s hand to be waving hello, but I have trouble drawing hands so instead I made him have a clenched fist. With the fist, it looked like he was holding something. I played around with the idea that he was holding a sword, but it didn’t make much sense with the familial theme I was going for.
Then it struck me: he could be holding his dad’s hands! There was not enough room to the left of the son, so I sketched the dad out to the right of the son.
With a distinct style established, I could finally move my workflow to illustrator.
First I traced out the character sketches using the pen tool.
Then I created a logo using some simple shapes and stylized fonts. A cartoon sun that was halfway set felt appropriate for “Afternoon Cartoons”.
I noticed the following color palette on Adobe Color CC because of its fun and lively colors. The pastel tone also worked well with a cartoon theme.
I applied the palette onto my first draft.
Some points about the decisions made here:
- The son and dad are dressed up as the Adventure Time main characters Finn and Jake. I wanted my character colors to stay faithful to the colors of Finn and Jake.
- I wanted to choose the yellow in the color palette as the primary background color because yellow is fundamentally energetic; however, the dad/Jake is yellow as well. So, I compromised and choose the green for the background color because it spoke to the gentle nature of parenting.
- The peachy red contrasted well with the pastel green to make the title stand out. I decided on a white festival logo because I did not want it to compete with the title. The specific event of the festival is more important to a potential viewer than the actual festival.
- I used a 12x12 grid to lay out my elements. I converged on this number when I was pondering the size ratios of the logo versus the title. I started out with the logo and title at the same width, and then to emphasize the title more, I wanted to take a chunk off the width of the logo and add an equivalent chunk to the title. Mathematically that worked out to a size 12 grid if the elements had equal margins.
- I thought the tagline “Your inner child with your outer child” was a really clever way to describe adults and children. The poster was also targeted towards the parents so it made sense to talk about their inner child.
In the interest of time, I leveraged the same characters in the Adventure Time poster to create the characters in the Regular Show poster. The only thing needing changing was the outfits and the pose. I referenced the second Regular Show layout I sketched earlier for the character poses.
Now for the challenging part: the dad’s hands. No one can replicate hands as well as nature can, so I found a photograph on Google of someone doing the same pose that I wanted…and I traced her hands.
After adding information about the event onto the poster, I was ready for the in-class interim critique. I changed the tagline to “Your inner child with your outer child watching X and Y,” color coded in anticipation of people who weren’t familiar with the characters of the shows.
The feedback I received was insightful:
- Indeed, people who weren’t familiar with the shows had some troubles understanding the posters. Some didn’t know “Adventure Time” and “Regular Show” were the names of cartoons. They thought “Finn and Jake” and “Mordecai and Rigby” were the cartoons.
- Others didn’t understand the significance of the two characters and their parental relationship.
- Some had trouble seeing that it was the same characters in both posters, just in different costumes. They thought they were looking at 4 distinct characters.
- I was using more colors than the project assignment allowed.
- People couldn’t tell what the event was specifically, other than the face that it was cartoon related. Was it a showing? Was it a costume event? Was it a father-son thing?
- Overall people found the graphics to be engaging and the layout of the elements to be strong hierarchically.
Before I could work on the third poster in the series, I wanted to address these issues.
I was allowed to use 3 colors in addition to black and white. And I had 3 posters with different character colors in each. If I wanted to stay faithful to the original shows characters’ and still fulfill the project constraints, I had to make some sacrifices and limit each poster to its own color. That meant in each poster, I had kill off one of the costumes have both of my characters wear the same costume. (This was a hard decision for me to make, because I follow the actual cartoons, and both characters in the cartoons were equally important.)
To fix issues of recognizing that it was the same dad and son in each of the posters, I had to increase the character consistency between the posters. I gave the dad a stubble-like beard that was recognizable and I gave the Adventure Time son the same facial expression as the Regular Show son.
I reduced confusion about the shows’ names by removing the “with X and Y” from the tagline, replacing it with “10 best episodes.” That makes it immediately obvious what the event was going to be: a showing of the 10 best episodes. To further clarify that, I added that the “Viewing begins at 1 PM” and that people could nominate their favorite episodes at [website]. I tied the costumed characters in with the showing by making the event free with costume.
I also added a small registered symbol to the end of the titles, to show that the title was a registered trademark, hinting that it was the cartoon names.
Underneath the festival logo was a great place to put a small description of the festival/event. People expect information about the purpose of the festival rather than logistics to be around the festival logo.
With all the minor issues addressed, I created the Steven Universe poster by duplicating this layout and slightly modifying the dad and son.
I noticed that the wig on the Steven Universe dad could be a bit visually confusing for those who might not realize that it was a wig. Simple solution: just remove it and show his hair.
I also noticed that the stubble-like beard could also be visually confusing. Simple solution: make it darker and more beard shaped.
And with those small changes, I was done.
Overall, I think I addressed well a lot of the issues from the first critique. In the final critique, there wasn’t really any confusion over the festival and events like there was in the first critique. People really liked the change in color scheme and thought the tagline was really clear. The only concern was that the logo was a bit hard to see in the red poster.
