Color Swatches

 Going into illustrator I created several rounded squares, about eight, to house the swatches for my project, after grabbing some ideas from my mood board and Coolers.com I put together a pallet that tied together some of the themes and food styles of the restaurant. 

1. "Woodland"

A darker green that leans more towards the yellow segment of the color wheel, this color invokes the natural greens found in wildlife, as both Quebec and Lousiana are chalk full of wonderful colors of nature and plants.

Hex#- 585223

RGB- 88, 82, 35

2. "Cream Can"

A light orange that pops, while vibrant, it matches nicely with the darker nature based colors in this pallet, the light orange represents the soft reflections the sun casts on the many lakes, and ponds found in nature.

Hex#-F5BC60

RGB- 245, 188, 96

3. "Jaffa"

A more saturated orange, representing the orangey spices and Rouxs that Cajun cooking often produces.

Hex#- F58548

RGB- 245, 133, 72

4. "Old Brick"

This color takes some inspiration from the provided mood board of what the interior aesthetic and colors would be, darker reds and browns.

Hex#- 9A271F

RGB- 154, 39, 31

5. "Dove Grey"

A neutral grey that will be used as a supporting color to the much more vibrant yellows, and blues.

Hex#- 676767

RGB- 103, 103, 103

6. "Silver"

Another neutral grey, that is lighter, and can be used in a metallic styling, less of a supporting color and more of its own pop out.

Hex#- C4C4C4

RGB- 196, 196, 196

7. "Danube"

A light and soft blue, taken inspiration from the Quebec flag with a little less vibrancy.

Hex#- 5A86C5

RGB- 90, 134, 197

8. "Chathams Blue"

A dark and rich blue, meant to reflect the sky at dusk before nightfall to give the atmosphere a late night diner appeal.

Hex#- 174177

RGB- 23, 65, 119

Shapes/Themes

 Lines:

Sharp bold lines- Cajun food is all about bold spices, adding bold and loud lines to tie this association in.

Wavy and flowing lines- Using flowy and curves shapes can help tie other symbols and patterns into each other.

Shapes:

Sharp oval/curves- To match the shapes on the flags of both locations that inspiration was taken from.

Arches and arcs- Some of the other chosen shapes, patterns, and lines feature curves and semi rounded corners, reinforcing the patterns and shapes with maybe some high arches for doorways may help the atmosphere. 

Fleur-de-lis- A traditional French shape, featured on the Quebec flag and commonly found in NOLA.

Symbols:

Claws- Mudbugs, crawfish, and other sea bugs are a staple in Cajun foods.

Hockey imagery- Because this is a sports themes restaurant, playing off of Quebec's love for the ice sport, and Louisiana's growing intrests, adding some hockey elements will help tie the sports bar together.

Southern/swamp flora- Adding cat tails or Spanish moss designs will help emphasize the southern culture.

Patterns:

Fleur-de-lis- Stated above, a traditional French shape/symbol, having an inspired pattern based off this shape can unite the two different cultures together.

Cajun/Jazz inspired patterns- Lots of downtown NOLA like bourbon street feature 1920s jazz themed patterns from that era.

Typography:

Jawbreak- Creative market

Boge- Resource Boy

Looking for bold and sans serif fonts that reflect a sporty, yet keeping a clean and traditional vibe.

(NOLA- New Orleans Louisiana) 

MoodBoard

Mood board images sourced from Pinterest, edited in illustrator

 

Imagine- 500 word restaurant prompt.

 The first thing that hits you when you walk through the door is the scent—rich, buttery, and spiced with something deep, like smoked paprika, cayenne, and just the faintest wisp of caramelized onions. It clings to the air, thick and warm, wrapping around you like an old friend’s hug. There’s a slow simmer happening somewhere in the back, a broth that’s been coaxed into perfection over hours, whispering secrets of bay leaves and cracked black pepper. If you close your eyes, you can almost see the roux, dark as mahogany, bubbling in a heavy pot, a wooden spoon scraping lazy circles through its depths.

The hum of conversation rolls like distant thunder, low and constant, punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter. The place is alive but not overwhelming, the kind of spot where you could just as easily tuck into a quiet meal alone as you could gather with a table full of friends, each dish arriving with a new story to tell.

The lighting is soft, golden, as if the bulbs themselves have been dipped in butter. Candles flicker on wooden tables that have known years of elbows, spilled wine, and impassioned storytelling. The chairs creak just enough to remind you they’ve been here longer than you have, sturdy and worn, the kind that seem to hold the weight of memories. The walls are a patchwork of rustic brick and dark wood, with accents of wrought iron and vintage maps—one moment, you could be in the heart of New Orleans; the next, a snug Québécois bistro.

A plate slides onto the table in front of you, and suddenly, the whole world shrinks down to what’s sitting there: a golden-brown tourtière, its crust impossibly flaky, steam rising as it’s cut to reveal a filling rich with seasoned pork and veal, the warmth of cinnamon and cloves peeking through. A deep, velvety gravy pools on the side, waiting to be dragged through with each forkful.

Beside it, there’s a bowl of seafood gumbo, the kind that tells you someone in the kitchen knows their way around a stockpot. The shrimp are plump, the andouille smoky, and the holy trinity of onion, celery, and bell pepper melts into the roux like it was always meant to be there. A bite in, and it’s heat—not just spice, though the cayenne does its work—but warmth that blooms slow and steady, coating your ribs in something that feels like home.

Then comes the real indulgence: a plate of poutine, but not just any poutine. This one is layered with duck confit, the crispy skin crackling under the weight of squeaky cheese curds and a glossy, deeply flavored gravy. The fries, thick-cut and golden, are just sturdy enough to hold their own, soaking up the sauce without surrendering to it. Each bite is a perfect storm of crunch, melt, and rich, savory decadence.

A sip of the house-made maple-bourbon cocktail seals the moment, smoky and sweet, the ice clinking against the glass like a quiet toast to good food and better company. The night stretches on, plates scraped clean, laughter rolling through the air, the warmth of spice and stories lingering long after you step back out into the cold.

Creativity post 4

 Last blog post I used the creative exercise from a site that offers free sources to help build your line work confidence, this week I will be using the same site but a different exercise. For this weeks exercise the site talked about how chicken scratch lines are a bad habit to form- while the style is one an artist cane use for art pieces, it may ruin your ability to create smooth, strong lines. Typically, when I find myself losing interest in an art piece, I too make the bad habit of going from cohesive lines to scribbles. For the prompt they wanted me to do a series of small simple curves, using a heavy hand to make the lines thick and bold and to avoid using chicken scratch or scribbles.

Personally I thought this offered little to no challenge, and also was to similar to the exercise I did last week, so I took some inspiration from an artist on Tik-Tok, her name is Lizi Phoenix, she uses handmade paper and water color with a long pinstriping brush to create very pleasing patterns in her sketchbook, some are similar to the topographical maps. So I wanted to try my hand at this on my iPad. While my lines were not as neatly packed together as hers, this was a really fun challenge, to both keep my lines smooth and to practice line spacing, by hand.

Creativity Post 3

 This week for blog post 3 I wanted to find an exercise that would help me boost some creativity and thinking along with helping me get used to my new iPad, I am not familiar with Apple products so now drawing on one, with an apple pencil, has become a huge learning curve, however I'm quite excited to adapt to it. While searching online I came across a site that primairly has courses, classes, and blogs all to help digital and traditional artists to help build up their line confidence. These are exercises that I am used to, typically have been used for practicing line art with a traditional inking pen and paper- however now Id be using it for a digital purpose. With the apple pencil things are a lot smoother and glide more than a typical stylus, which has been the biggest learning curve so far!

Linked here is the Site

I chose exercise 3 for this week, however many of these are very useful, and help you build muscle memory in your wrist, along with helping you familiarize yourself with your drawing utensil. Exercise 3 has you doodle 3 fairly simple lines, and then going in at different paces to create straight and stabilized lines completely by hand (without a stabilizer) this is important to learn, as it helps you get used to what you are drawing on/with along with building line confidence to strengthen ones line work.

Here on sketchbook, as I wanted to completely freehand this without adobe's more digital tool based aspects, I created a small tutorial page on doing the explained prompt.

Zoo Portfolio project

 While I have been reading through the book assigned for this course, Against the Clock, at the end of each lesson and project there is a series of prompts that give you instructions to build content for your portfolio, after each lesson I have been going in and doing little thumbnail ideas of each project. For this project the book asked us to make a few logo icons for different sections of the Cincinnati Zoo, then listed off a list of different parts of the park to be included. In this project I drew out 3 different ideas and then rendered my two favorites.

So here I drew out three ideas, Sky, Arctic, and Ocean. Ocean had no direct inspiration, it started out as a doodle of a wave and some lettering and then slowly became an implied fish shape, with the wave being the arch of a tail, the fin out of water, and then the fins on the bottom of the surf board. In the end I did not render this one, as I felt it would have came out to cluttered, now after finishing the project, I believe that this one would have been a better choice over the Arctic. For the Arctic I drew some inspiration from one of my former jobs, Snowcat Ridge, while working there, I spent a lot of time breaking down their logo in my head, as I feel it captures the nature of the park quite well. In my design I changed the location of the trees and added some mountains, as long as adding shadows within the lineart, here I went with a sharper typeface, trying to make something similar to the Eagles logo from the NFL, later in rendering, this proved to be one of the most difficult designs to replicate properly, unfortunately it didn't come out as intended. For the last sketch, I did sky, this time drawing inspiration from several different "bird teams" the NHL and the NFL have a variety of teams with bird logos, and so I wanted to try and spin that into my own style.

For the final renders I did go into color schemes, just kept them black and white for now. Arctic, like I mentioned previously was the hardest to work with, I was quite happy with how the mountains came out, however the hand done letters were a nightmare to work with, as the pen tool did not want to cooperate, next time Id like to work more on getting a better overall shape in the logo, and to fix some of the clipping issues with the strokes, or maybe edit a pre-existing font. The sky logo was my favorite to make, the pen tool actually worked with me on this one it feels like, it made nicely curved, yet sharp shapes for the feathers- the overall shape is also nice, as it has nice spacing for the text. To fix this logo I would like to take out the cloud and have the Zoo title slightly overlap the image, and to fix some of the spacing between "sky" and the bird.

Tattoo Project

 For this week's project, we we're tasked to create a colored tattoo to reflect our personal selves. For this project I used a mixture of Autodesk Sketchbook and Adobe Illustrator.

For my tattoo I wanted to think about some of my other tattoos- as someone who spent a lot of time in the wilderness, camping, and drawing out wildlife, I have a few tattoos that represent the places I've been and explored, for example two of my tattoos are mudbugs/crawfish I got after my trip to lousiana and a rainbow trout for my visit to Maine. Different places in America have such a variety of wildlife to enjoy, which is why I love camping so much, there is always something new to see, and so I wanted this tattoo to be a part of my appreciation of nature. My all time favorite animal is Moose, they're large, clunky animals with no grace what so ever, majority of the time, they look as if they have no idea what is going on, which is something to relate to in my life! Moose, although goofy, have their own beauty in nature, crested with large antlers with unique growth patterns. Moose shed their antlers to regrow them later in the season, often building on their signs of maturity. When designing this tattoo, I wanted to reflect both the goofiness of the animal and the cooler aspect of their antlers- to signify that although sometimes, things are confusing and easy to get lost in, you can grow through it, it's okay to be confused. 

After gathering a few minimalist style tattoos for inspiration, and some refrences of Moose, I created a moodboard to refrence.

After some brainstorming and sketch sessions in Autodesk, I took it into Adobe and used the brush tool with a 6 level stabilizer, this helped it stay neat, while also letting me keep a good flow. Then I went in and filled it with a halftone.

Then I took it into Adobe Fresco, to try and gain some experience in the newer program, here I made a few clipping layers and added color to the design, I wanted to keep it a little saturated, as I prefer my colors a little more washed out. I also added a few accent marks with a darker brown and some whiskers.

Creativity Week 2

 Last week in class we got into groups and tried several different creativity exercises, a few were really challenging and some were fun to try out. For this week of creativity I wanted to write about those handful of challenges and what I took away from them!

The first exercise we did in class involved our names, we sat with no talking and did a series of different prompts, for example, writing your name upside down, reversed, reversed upside down, and then similar prompts but with the left hand, as we went through and did these prompts it seemed as if it had only been a few minutes when in reality it had been closer to about 20. It was explained that in doing this your activation the other side of your brain, which typically focuses on creatives an not so much on time, or the things around you, while locked into the project sounds around me also went away. I enjoyed this project both cause it taught me a few things but also cause it was a good practice on perspective and hand lettering things, which came as a surprise for me. Writing my name in a "mirror" version really made me have to think about what it would look like if I held my name up to an actual mirror. Id like to practice this exercise again, but I'm curious how things would differ if I were to do it digitally.

The next few exercises were done from LinkedIn Learning- these sets of prompts required us to get into groups and to brainstorm with one another. The first and last prompts were the same, asking us to create a list of different toys that could be used in a themed cereal. In this it helped us communicate with one another and build off of each others idea, the instructor in the video also explained how when a group brainstorms, they almost always come across a point in the session where they plateau in ideas, and resurge the motivation again after saying something absurd, to get ideas moving again. The first session asked us to create a toy for a Cowboy themed cereal, in which me and my partner only came up with about 11 ideas, and for the last one, which was a similar prompt, asking us to make a toy for a Pirate themed kids meal, in the latter half of the prompt we were able to make a few more than our last session, coming up with about 19. This was helpful to me in terms of art block, sometimes ideas simply do not come up, but using what this guy taught us, maybe now I can find easier motivation to surge ideas.

(I unfortunately do not have the photos from this exercise)

Icons Portfolio Project

 At the end of each tutorial in the book there are projects that prompt the reader to create things of their own- using what was learned in the previous instruction. I went with the project at the end of the first tutorial, here I was tasked with making up icons for a hypothetical park. 

First I went through and made my canvas size as required by the "clients" specifications, here I mocked up 4 icon spaces, as the book had taught me, after making sure things were aligned properly using my smart guides I went into the ZIP file to extract the images needed to make the icons. 

The images for the icons were in a PNG format, which after importing into Adobe and resizing, caused the resolution to drop immensely, so I took the images into their own separate workspace and recreated each of them using the various Pen tools.  One of the biggest problems I ran into was the negative spaces in-between certain objects, for example the rectangle in the picnic table and the triangle in the stilts of the scope. Each one I wanted to explore different ways I could cut the space out.

For the stilts I used the knife tool to make a rough cutout, then afterwards went in with the Pen tool set on a thicker stroke to clean it up, I do not recommend that method as it was time consuming and came out sloppy. For the table I went on a separate layer and created the blank space as its own separate object, then grouped the two shapes and applied the live fill tool- this was much quicker and came out cleaner.

After finishing the icons I copied them and resized them to fit into each icon box, I then went in and added colorful gradients and saved each version of the icons.

Gradient

Flat Color

Line art