Journal entries, plants [WEEK 5]

Drawing and Digitizing the plant -

For the journal entries we thought it would be interesting to have them appear as if the main character had drawn the sketches of the plants themselves. To achieve this I decided to draw the plant first in my sketchbook using pencil, then i brought it into my drawing software and neatened up my sketch so it still kept that sketchy look but is more polished to go into a game. Then i used the colour blending modes to add some desaturated colour to it to sort of emulate that watercolour look. I also gave the plant a name, Prunus Saharica, Prunus from the family of plants that plums belong to, and Saharica to distinguish it as being the new Saharan variant. 

Traditional

Black and white digitized

Colour blending layer

Flavour text " A sweet stoned fruit with leathery flesh, the Saharan Plum can be found amongst thick ground foliage. Its fruit is edible and its sweet scent can be used to lure bugs and beetles."

Here i used a similar technique to create the Thistle cucumber plant.

Flavour text " With a hard, thorned outer shell the thistle cucumber uses its spines to trap small animals. It uses a neurotoxin to kill its prey then absorb their rotting nutrients through the soil. The cucumber's flesh is inedible."

Creating the journal concept -

Previously i had made some rough layouts of how the pages might be set up and my team decided that this set up is the most readable of the bunch. Alone this looked quite nice but i wanted to really give the impression the pages are apart of something larger, so i created this book backdrop that I will be able to use as a base for the journal entries we as a team will be making. I went with a very scrapbooky feel with papers sticking out and warping pages and a slightly worn yellowish tone to the paper itself. I also incorporated some of the buttons into the book design sort of as post it notes or page markers so that they blend in with the overall aesthetic of the book. I then roughly cut around my drawing using the lasso tool and pasted it onto the book, i wanted it to look as if it had been stuck onto the page in a sort of collage manner. Then i just added the plant name, text and rarity. 

The font i used is : Tw Cen MT Condensed at size 36.

Team feedback -

Niamh - "The only think I could say is to curve the image and text sections to match with the curve of the journal if that’s even possible"

^ Regarding this bit of feedback unfortunately this is a limitation of my software that i can't curve text, however we were able to find a solution by saving the document as a .psd so that Niamh would be able to use photoshop to be able to get the desired result.

Niamh - "Ahhh I can always play around with it in my software. I’m pretty sure fire alpaca lets you save files as photoshop files. If so I can use that to edit the layers on my end"

Niamh - "Maybe have a version where the writing is straight onto the lined paper? Just to see options"

Kanban -

Although my Kanban hasn't changed this is just one of 6 journal entries i will hopefully be creating, two for the small, two for the medium, and two for the large. To create all of the entries i predict it will probably take me about 1-2 days as the sketches are the most time consuming part, other than that the text did not take me long to do. As i have the blank journal as a separate layer it also means I don't have to redraw it each time.