Advertising: Planning

    After doing a more in depth research, I knew what I wanted to advertise and which direction I wanted to go. I wanted to advertise the Ottawa International Animation Festival and I wanted to make my advert somewhere in between the poster from 2020 and the ones from 2019. I thought it would be really exciting if my advert was for an online version of the OIAF, since all big events are happening online this year. 

    Firstly, I decided to think, what makes this year special, unique. Of course it is the virus and the pandemic. I really wanted to incorporate something about Coronavirus in my advert. I started thinking more about what we started using that we were not using before, and those things are face coverings and hand sanitizer. 

Then I came up with an idea to take a picture of a hand sanitizer and add a creature sitting on it, therefore I would have some silly approach to it, like the OIAF posters from 2019. I started sketching my thoughts and this is the rough sketch I have created. 

I am aware this is a really rough sketch, however that is enough for me to know what I want to create and how i want it to look like. I drew myself a grid, therefore I could use the rule of thirds in the layout of my ad. I placed the hand sanitizer bottle, the creature and the text escaping the bottle in the line intersection points. I knew this action would bring more attention to those things in the poster and that was my goal. 

I started my project by drawing the creature sitting. I wanted to make the the color of the monster contrast extremely well with the background color, therefore I used a complementary colors circle. 

I did some sketching of the character and then created it in the Procreate app on my IPad, I also used my Apple Pencil. 

To draw this creature I used brushes: Crayon Narinder (for sketching and outline) and Ligne Simple (for coloring). It was important for me that the drawing would look cute and bring people's attention to itself. I think I did a really good job with this one. Also I highly enjoy drawing characters, therefore making this kind of creation in this project was right up my alley. Apart for drawing the monster I also had to create the text escaping the sanitizer. I wanted to handwrite that text, because that would be my way of relating this poster to the actual 2020 poster. As visible in my previous research, the text there was not just a normal font, and that made it more interesting. It was not very clear to read, but the way it was written in, was making people pay more attention to it. 

Once again using Procreate, I created a bubble of text handwritten by me. 

I did the writing with a Ligne Simple brush on these settings: 

I turned up the SteamLine to make the writing more smooth and more professional. Without the SteamLine being turned up, all my little hand movements that were not planned, would be visible. 

All that was left to do was put those images together in photoshop, add final text and change the background. 

I will write a separate post about my editing process and what tools I decided to use. I have used photoshop in the past, but it has been a while since I had access to it, therefore it will definitely take me a little bit longer to understand what tools are located where.