Assignment 5: Colourful Asia

• Theme focus: …cultural, political and social aspects of Asia
• Form: Postcard (both front & back)
• Size of actual artwork: A6
• Please avoid design of touristy postcard (i.e. picture of a sightseeing scene)




Description

Four ghosts from different countries across Asia - The Aswang from the Phillipines, the Yurei from Japan, the Chinese vampire and the Pontianak from Malaysia and Singapore.

Explanation

My opinion is that foundations stones of a culture is laid firmly within its superstitions. For example, the Chinese celebrate Chinese New Year with loud fanfare, literally painting the town red with red decor everywhere. Legend has it that they do so to frighten away monster known as "Nian" that comes around at the same time every year.

Ghosts, demons and other supernatural phenomena is one kind of superstition and I believe that this is an interesting way to showcase the cultures of Asia. While it is true that such a concept may not appeal to everyone, and may even frighten some people, the supernatural has its own unique draw. The horror genre is popular among movie goers and as well as in other media. I think this postcard would be very suitable for people who celebrate festivals such as halloween. Still, I wanted to soften the image of the ghosts, so I went for a cartoony look, giving them a different sort of appeal

Creative Process
The key part of my design is the ghosts, which will be the focal point of the postcard. Hence, I spent a lot of time on character design, researching the appearances of a number of ghosts. Since I wanted to do a cartoon version, doing a trace was not practical, so I did sketches of how I imagined the cartoon versions would look like and scanned them into my computer, as shown below.



The following color explorations were done to determine the most suitable color settings for the image, as shown below.




I chose the fourth one as the red sky created a very eerie unnatural setting while still maintaining a good contrast with the characters.