I started graphic designing and impressed myself with my own work
Welcome back to the Skye Show; today I welcome you with a bunch of stuff that I do in the place of my responsibilities!!
(For real, I spend way too long getting distracted by literally everything.)
As you have read from the title, I started graphic designing—more specifically, when the COVID-19 quarantine was just beginning to take place. I was supposed to be writing, but I wanted to put some of my creative energy elsewhere for once.
I don’t really have that much experience with photoshop aside from making colorings or gifs, so I started with this Twitter thread where I remade Baekhyun’s City Lights album in the style of other albums.
For example, I remade City Lights to look like Halsey’s Badlands:
Red Velvet’s Be Natural:
Taeyeon’s Something New:
A lot of the stuff I did in that thread (which I did last month) was really simple, and when I go back and see all the layers I messed around with, it’s clear that I didn’t know how to do a lot. I was using opacity settings instead of messing around with blending modes and vice versa. I felt pretty accomplished and a lot of my friends started saying that I actually good at graphic designing despite not having any real experience with it.
I’m still really proud that I made—“recreated” is probably a better term—all of those albums covers even if they were really simple.
Apparently, they were good enough that some crazy people trusted me to make graphics for them.
One of my friends asked/persuaded me into making a cover for her story, so I gave in because I wanted to design something of my own instead of simply recreating it.
This was the end product:
I’m proud of this graphic because I think this is the first time that I actually got to design something for someone else. My friend also ended up loving it and using it for her story, which made me even happier.
Another one of my friends asked me to make a graphic for her fluff fic, so I did it because I was glad to do something in a different genre.
This was the end product:
(blue/yellow version + red/pink version)
When I finished this graphic, I was shaking from how excited I was that I made something original for someone else.
Unlike the previous graphic, this one also tells a story (because y’all know how much I love symbolism). In my friend’s story, Baekhyun is a single dad with a daughter. So in the graphic, his daughter leaves little sketches and notes for him—and he responds with a drawing of himself as he writes his daughter “I love you more.”
I got a lot good feedback from a surprising amount of people which of course led me to think that I could do more.
(Spoiler alert: I did more. A lot more.)
In the past few weeks, I had been thinking about that album thread I did of Baekhyun and knew that I wanted to do it again but on more creative terms. I decided to do something similar except for Red Velvet—except that I wouldn’t be recreating pre-existing album covers. I wanted to do something original, so I went ahead and did just that.
I recreated Red Velvet’s albums in the style of other design styles. (full thread here)
This was a specifically difficult thread for me because of multiple reasons:
- My design style (that I think I have yet to fully discover) tends to be more simplistic than it is manipulative. I don’t quite see myself going ahead and recreating Avengers: Endgame movie posters, for example. I’d rather play around with typography and textures.
- I didn’t know much about what you can do with photoshop. Prior to last month, I was making colorings and gifs on photoshop—and that was pretty much it.
- I’m pretty ing basic.
Still. I wanted to try, so I did—thanks to the help of some very supportive friends.
I started with Ice Cream Cake in 80s retro style:
Then I continued with simpler design styles.
Russian Roulette in comic book style:
The Red Summer in Memphis style:
At this point, I didn’t want to make more simplistic designs since the whole point was to get creative.
So I made ReVe Festival: Finale in a retro-futuristic style:
Fun fact about this design is the symbolism. The sound wave is actually the first five seconds (give or take) of Psycho!
Pretty cool, right?
So, at some point I got delusional…
Because I wanted to do pixel art.
Pixel art is honestly an underrated graphic design style since it’s so meticulous—at least when I was doing it. It takes a lot of work to create something big, complex, and impressive—but it takes just as much work (if not more) to create something small, simple yet somehow also complex, and equally as impressive.
Pixel art’s difficulty is different from making a poster with a lot of manipulation. Instead of worrying about layers and layer styles, I was worrying about placement of ing pixels. Pixels! Like, actual, literal pixels.
Nonetheless, I’m like a rock. I’m stupid but I’m pretty persistent.
I ended up following through with my own promise to create pixel art (albeit on a very small scale).
This is Summer Magic in pixel-art style:
Scroll/click below for a higher resolution!
This was one of the harder graphics that I made because pixel art isn’t as easy as it looks. Creating each Red Velvet member was super fun and cute though which made it all worth it in the end. I wanted to create a background (sort of like Pokemon from the first five generations), but I thought creating little sprites for each member was enough—and I wanted to format it like a starting screen for a game.
For my final design, I decided to do RBB in 80s synthwave style:
By fart, this was the hardest design because of the lighting and the overall aesthetic of synthwave. I think I spent more time on this design than I did with the pixel art sprites—which is saying a lot. I ended up liking this design though, so I think my time was spent well in the end.
And yeah, that’s pretty much it for this blog post!!
I hope everyone enjoyed me talking about what I’ve been up to during this quarantine.
Honestly, I’m really proud of myself (even if that sounds weirdly arrogant from a noob designer) because I didn’t think I could do anything like this two years ago—when I first got photoshop. I’ve come far, I would say, and I’m impressed I even pulled through with actually making and completing a few graphics. I thought that maybe I would start making one and give up halfway through, but nope; I did it. I ing did something I like and can show to people which is the best thing ever.
I think that if I ever stopped writing, I think I would move straight away to graphic designing since I find it just as enjoyable to do. More people can enjoy a nice looking visual than they can enjoy reading through pages of words as well.
Let me know what you guys think, and add me on Twitter! I have more ideas up my sleeve <3
Until next time!
—Skye
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