Spring 2026 STA Roster Poster: Layout and Texturing

This past week has been all about layout and texturing. After making some graffiti assets which could be used as filler content and title work, I began to work on the formation of the STA frames.

What I quickly realized is how cluttered the image looked with the brick wall background, so instead, I switched back to the plain grey concrete wall in order to make names more readable and for texturing to be just a little bit more efficient.

After making more space for future STA’s, I will work on the department names and how to present them as part of the artwork as a whole.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/11/13/55292/

OCTOBER 2025

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— Final STA Pop Art Poster —

After many iterations, we finally reached a final design for the STA Pop Art Roster Poster!!

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— Summer Marketing Pre-Roll Animation —

My first group assignment in a while!! I’m excited to work alongside Kyra and Lila (again!!) on this project. We are to collaborate on creating an animation advertising summer classes offered at UT while emphasizing that this is something you can do without it impeding your summer.

Our first task was to create environments for different scenes. I was assigned work from home and office space environments. I was also tasked with creating an illustration for the UT tower.

Office

Work from Home: Kitchen Space

Tower

As the list of assets required for the pre-roll were getting finalized, we proceeded to create and rig the characters that will show up in the animation. I was tasked with two students and a boss character!

Character 1

Character 3

Boss Character

Overall, it’s nice work on an animation project again! As I get closer to graduating, it’s become prevalent to me what skills I want to be better at, animation being one of them. I look forward to seeing what the rest of this project has in store for me as I go into my final semester!

Summer Marketing Pre-roll Animation

Project Details

For this project, I am working with Lila and Shanda to create a 30 second animation that advertises UT’s Summer Online Courses. The animation will play before online courses held in the Spring. We decided that most of the animations will be done using the puppet tool in After Effects and that we will have one frame-by-frame animation at the end, since this is most time consuming.

Stage 1: Asset Creation

Character Designs

Our first step was to create all the assets, starting with characters. Lila found some base templates from Adobe Stock, and Shanda and I modified them to fit our needs. We added the dark outlines to the outside of the characters, and changed some of the clothingAbove are the five characters I edited.

Backgrounds

We also divided up the environments we were making. I was tasked with creating the park background that includes the Austin city skyline.

Putting Everything Together

The last step of the asset creation stage was to put the characters into the environments and prepare the Illustrator files for After Effects. This meant that each moveable element (character’s limbs, eyes, head, the dog’s tail, etc.) had to be on it’s own layer in Illustrator.

Stage 2: Frame-by-Frame Animation

While Lila and Shanda began the After Effects animations, I began working on the final call-to-action scene of the animation that shows the 3 main characters in front of the UT tower at graduation.

Here is the rough draft I created to establish timing:

And a cleaner version:

Next, I exported these frames as PNGs and moved them into Illustrator, where I can begin vectorizing each frame with the character models.

Spring 2026 Roster Poster: Sprites!

This week, I worked on adding non-tag graffiti elements. I did a few fuller, bubble style graffitis as well as some sprites and small characters. For many of these, I found inspiration in my hometown of Medellin, which is absolutely full of graffiti. I found some of these characters on the areas located on the map below!

All of these are in downtown Medellin: the bottom circle near the government, the middle one near the famous Plaza Botero, and the top one in the neighborhood surrounding the University of Antioquia.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/11/06/55258/

-Spring 2026 Roster Poster Changes-

This week, I went through and started making a new iteration of the Spring 2026 Roster Poster, with a different direction this time. This time around, I aimed at a more realistic, brick wall environment that seemed more textured and like a real wall with graffiti on it, instead of just textures.

This has allowed me to make the elements within the design much more grounded to the its environment, as seen especially on the title and the base for the STA portrait frames in black.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/10/30/55242/