For the illustration project, the intended audience of my illustration project is all the youth in the United States. My project aims to promote blood donation among youth to give them a sense of what blood donation is like and how much impact one can make by just donating a tiny amount of blood that is harmless to the body. The reason that I choose youth as my audience is that they are energetic and have a higher chance to satisfy the requirement for donating blood; another reason is that if a donor started donating in their early life, they are more likely to develop the habit of donating and potentially become a lifelong donor and keep contributing to this campaign. A lifelong donor is very important because the blood supply is always in shortage in medical fields.
For the image of the illustration project, in the headline, I put down “donate blood” to be straightforward about the topic that the campaign is on. Under the headline, I placed a fact that one donation could potentially save 2 people that need a blood supply to demonstrate that
even a single person can have such a big contribution by donating blood. To emphasize this, I constructed 3 heart shapes and each of them contains a shape of a person in it. In the middle heart, there is a smiley face in it which represents the donor. Many people have a false assumption that blood donation is painful, but in fact, it is not at all; donating blood can even speed up metabolism which is good for our bodies. For the hearts on the side, one contains a female shape and the other contains a male shape. This is to emphasize that one donor can help two-person. Both the shapes are dark and contain red lines throughout their bodies. They are in darkness because, in real life, donors might never have a chance to see the person that receives their blood, they might not even know the sex of the receiver. And the red lines represent their blood veins, this is to show that even tho donors do not know who receives their blood, essentially they are saving lives and their blood will be inside the person that they save and carry along which I think is romantic. At the bottom part of the project, I made a drop of blood into a blood pool to show that every drop of blood matters, and with all the blood together, it makes it possible for life to sustain.
The illustration has 3 main parts which are the heart, the person's shape, and the blood drop along with the blood pool. I constructed the heart by first drawing a square, then I rotated it by 45 degrees. Then I used the pen tool to select the 2 adjacent sides of the square and drag them while holding the alt and shift keys. This made the perfect heart shape that I wanted. For the person’s shape, I also used the pen tool to outline the body and then used the paintbrush tool to fill the part with black color. When making the blood drop, I followed a tutorial that teaches how to make a drop of liquid that has the effect of bubbles and light reflection. I first drew out a drop of blood using the pen tool, then I drew a circle within the blood and filled it with white color. Then I used the anchor point and dragged it up to apply a soft bending and adjusted the position so that it looks like light reflecting on liquid. The blood poll is where I spent the most work. I first drew a straight line with the line tool, then I selected the effect of distorting and transforming, then selected roughen so the line became a wavelength. Then I went to the object and chose the envelope distort and picked the fish curve. Then I selected the most right point of the fish curve line and dragged it up a little Then I went to the effect and picked 3D material and revolve to get the effect of how the surface of the water looks like if liquid drops on it.
What I learned from this project is that there are many ways that you can apply an effect to the shape that you are working on, and you can create the effect through a different method, it is all about putting time into it and exploring the different options that are available to you. Then picks the best one that you think it would perform and convey your idea most effectively.
For my next project, I will try not to procrastinate the project and give myself enough time to make changes. I will plan ahead when I am doing the next project and finalize the topic instead of changing everything in the midway and not having enough time to get feedback from my peers.