The design that I really liked the idea of was the one I sketched, this seemed the most appealing and more suitable to the design idea I was originally going for. The only problem with this design is that the left side looks empty at the bottom. I originally had the idea to place the People's Republic of China symbol onto the design but as I will be screen printing the whole design, I'm sure that the details wouldn't show through since it will be too small. The idea of this design is so that it shows the rat being surrounded by positivity. This will show that people born in the year of the rat would be somewhat surrounded by positive energy.
I was considering whether to write the word rat underneath the design but most people that I asked preferred the one without as they told me it looks better when it is simplistic and minimum. I do agree with this the rat design is obvious anyway so there's no need to re-inforce it by adding the word.
Then I tried filling up all the shapes with the word repeated just as a reference, so I could see what it would look like if all the shapes were filled. The look of the design with all the words doesn't look particularly pleasing as my eyes only gravitate towards the words rather than the rest of the banknote. I made the '¥100' point size bigger and rotated it vertically so it would be easily seen. I went back to the current banknote and the '¥100' was repeated 3 times just on the front. I thought that if I made the value larger in size, people would have no issues in seeing it clearly. Especially as the '¥100' is segregated from the design as has nothing around the area to distract someones attention, it would be easier to see.
I then experimented by filling most of of the design with red and gold but with the rat outline in black. The design looked overpowering and slightly obnoxious as the colours may look too vivid when I screen print.
Final design
The final design turned out much better. The black balances out the boldness of the red and gold as it is darker. The decision to make the centre part clear/unprinted is because I am wanting to print onto nice cream stock so I don't want the colour of the stock to be completely muted or else it would be pointless to used coloured stock. Also, as I am thinking of using textured stock, I really want it to show though on larger areas.
The rat design and the writing was created to look more like an illustration and being hand-drawn. I tired to make it look like a typical Chinese-style drawing where it is very minimum. Traditional Chinese drawing/writing is created by using a a single standard paint brush where the brush is really thick at the top and tip is pointed at the end so you can really get the thickness or thin lines you want in a design. The paint brush is typically used with ink so I wanted my design to look like it's been created by using ink; also with the flicks at the end of the design to make it appear like a traditional Chinese drawing and like it's be done by hand with a paint brush.
I chose to use the octagon shape (bagua) for the design instead of the diamond shape as this shape looked more proportionate and better to put the rat inside of. The term 'bagua' means eight symbols in Chinese as the shape symbolises the equilibrium of the opposite; one side cannot do without or else it would be un-balanced/unequal.
The words that I have used on the design are 'luck' (left) and 'prosperity' (right). The reason I had chosen 'luck' as one of the words is because every time I go to China, I see these words everywhere but 'luck' seems to be the most popular as ultimately, luck is all we need. I then chose 'prosperity' as this is a generalised word that can be manipulated how you want so it could be prosperous in wellbeing, wealth, success, comfort or security etc. I though that this word could be use to whoever and whatever they wanted from it.
No comments:
Post a Comment