This past week, I helped Tate with a quick watercolor bg. This time, it was a hill that one of the characters and the bunnies will be climbing.

For the rest of the week, I mainly focused on eanthro labs and updated a website banner here and there. It’s been a good experience to manage the eanthro project. It seems like everyone is doing well. I tried to give everyone a roughly equal amount of pages to complete, but some are just way longer than others.

I also got assigned to manage the Cascade updating project, so I’m currently in the process to organizing.

Stacy also mentioned I would have a project involving WordPress for him, so that’s pretty exciting as well.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/09/26/24831-2/

So for Russian, I did an animation and another water color bg this past week:

The animation was basically creating a plane overhead and having it fly from Russia to Florida and back. It was a pretty basic animation, I just used a motion tween and curved it a bit:

GIF

The watercolor bg was needed for a close up scene where the character examines a mushroom, so I made the grass and the bottom portion of the tree in PS.

Besides Russian, I also worked on the blog banner. I decided to deviate away from the Idea I had originally into something more abstract and colorful:

It’s still missing Jaclyn and Bridget’s portraits, but overall I am fairly happy with how it turned out. I’m still struggling with how to arrange the names so that they all show clearly (open to feedback!). I got the idea for the composition from several movie posters (like Avengers I.W.) where there’s the title in the center and all the characters and branching out from it.

We also got started on the eanthro vlabs project! Basically, it’s taking a bunch of older interactive virtual labs and transferring the content onto an updated format. (I’ll be holding a short training for it soon!) Each STA assigned to this project will get about 2 labs to update.

Here’s what the new website looks like:

And the old one:

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/09/19/24740-2/

So here’s my progress on the STA Level 4 patch! I’ve narrowed it down to the two versions I like the most (I’ll have to choose one before I submit):

And these are the many other versions I drafted in Illustrator before settling on these two:

So you can I went through several iterations of my patch design. I basically started with the general idea that I wanted to incorporate a simple, kind of retro looking hand–whether it be in the form of a fist or the number four. The fist, I thought, ended up looking slightly too cliched, and I liked the almost relaxed feel of “four” hand. The polaroid-looking design was me trying to get a retro feel, and even though I did like it, I couldn’t incorporate the colors well into that one. (Maybe it could work as a pin or something!)

After settling on the shield-shaped design, I played around mostly with colors and embellishments. This design was actually derived from one of my sketches in the earlier post.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how my idea came out even if it doesn’t get picked. I’ve never really designed a patch before, so this was a really fun and interesting challenge.

All of my immediate assignments are finished, so I’m basically exclusively working on the patch and banner right now. I sketched some more designs in my notebook with pencil this time based on some ideas I got off of Pinterest and Google.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/09/10/24550-2/

Admittedly, I’ve been behind on updating this blog since Summer ended. Ops… BUT, these past couple of weeks, I got a lot done!

Firstly, I continued to work on watercolor backgrounds for Tate and the Russian project.

I created an escalator lamp, that will be on the subway escalator as a character rides it.

I also worked on coloring the Moscow Street background. We wanted to match the colors with some of the other backgrounds, so we made the shading more maroon and added more details and shadows to the street and windows and doors.

Additionally, I made a traffic overhead image and side view image. I really like how the bright green turned out against the gray highway:

There was a need to make some posters for the subway walls as the characters walk/ride the escalator past them. Tate suggested using the already existing characters in making some humorous posters featuring them, so here’s what I came up with:

The first poster is an action/mystery movie poster featuring the Adventurer character. It says “Danger Coming Soon”

The second poster is an ad for the Cafe with the Cafe Owner giving a thumbs up and charming smile.

The third poster is a shampoo/beauty ad that features the waiter character standing in a field.

Besides Russian, I’ve also been working more on the UT Psych CE Logo, even though we put a pause on it for now. Here’s the last logo design I came up with:

I wanted to make a version of the logo that was more clearly leaf-inspired but still maintained the cut up geometric aesthetic.

Other assignments I worked include helping Valerie and Emily with their COLA IDs and designing the STA 4 patch and STA Blog banner.

It was kind of hard for me to come up with an idea for the patch. After quite a bit of scrolling through Google, I found a patch I liked. It was colorful, a little retro, and simple, so I modeled my design after it. I’m not entirely satisfied with these designs just yet, so I’m still looking for more design ideas right now!

I thought it’d be kind of cute if we had all of the STAs as stickers in a sketchbook or something artsy like that. In order to make it look more busy and playful, I added some doodles here and there. This is still just a work in progress though!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/09/10/24507-2/

This past week I worked quite a bit on Russian. Mainly watercolor backgrounds, but also had the chance to experiment with animating a swim cycle for the adventurer character.

Then I also worked on an illustration edit where I had to color in the people and orchestra:

I also started working on the UT Psyche CE logo; we wanted to be sleek, bright, and professional (using the UT branding secondary palette):

I also spend a lot of time working on canvasser with Rodrigo and Bridget to update all the older slides to the newer format.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/08/27/24297-2/