Ass 1 - Further into the element designing

After coming up with the tiling and puzzle idea,I decided to make my puzzle pieces cleaner and more professional. Here's an example of the progress :

#1 is what I started off with with all the puzzle pieces and then the progress was made. I'm still unsure if I should use the pieces with the rounded square edges (#2) or use the 'naked' pieces instead (#3) for my final composition. However I'm pretty set on the designs themselves and would be using this and four other designs to make my final composition.

Ass 1 - Element Creation

8-bit graphics are made up of individual square tiles that make up an image/picture. So of course I have to incorporate that into my elements. Playing around with the tiles made me interested in turning them into puzzle pieces,similar to what we see in TETRIS. So I came up with the following idea :

Of course there's a bit of touching up to do to make the designs more polished and interesting. This is a rough idea on how my final elements would look like.

Ass 1 - Finalizing goal and design

After some consideration and feedback,I realised that the music piece I picked has that old,retro game feeling to it and what better feature to back that up than the 8-bit graphics prevalent in the eras of Nintendo and SEGA gaming.

Here's a few examples :

Thus the elements I will be going with for the final piece composition in class would be 8-bit retro elements.

Ass 1 - Research and Inspiration

I am still a little stumped on the kind of graphic elements I should come up with,I enjoy the instrumental I picked very much but I still feel a disconnection between the music and the illustration I need to generate. I decided to look at some examples of abstract illustration/graphics online and found a couple that really stood out.

I am also aware that the aim of the project is to create something that's non-objective and not something that can be identified. I find this challenging as my personal work and the uni projects I have done in the past have all been of a certain object or representation of something from real life. I looked up the works of Rozanova as his works stood out as being non-objective. I would need further understanding and deciphering the legacy of non-objective graphics as I have little to no familiarity with such style.

Ass 1 - Doodling

Here's just a couple of doodles I made in class using some of the tools in Illustrator I hardly use before. These include the Flare tool and some effects like Film Grain and Gaussian Blur.

Another doodle that I did while experimenting with the spiral tool as well as utilizing the pen tool to make objects such as the butter knife seen above. I really like the idea of quirkiness and fun to my projects and that is why most of my doodles showcase that.

Ass 1 - Deciding on a piece of music

When it comes to music, I like upbeat,fun and ,almost,whimsical sounds. Examples of such songs would be :

- Katy Perry's "The One That Got Away" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG6KmYJ4CyQ

- T-Ara's "Roly Poly" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syVamYo_vGs

- SISTAR's "Shady Girl" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prFYzQEaeKg&feature=related

These songs really get me up and going and I feel like with this project I would like to choose a sound/beat that I feel a really close relation to,so I'm going to use an instrumental of one of SISTAR's songs "How Dare You" as I adore the exciting and fun vibe the song gives off and also the fact that I am a huge fan of the group and would love to incorporate their sounds into my work.

The link for the song is as follows :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l66VVD-gCR8 

And I would be taking the bit from 0.10 to the 0.30 mark as I feel that that is the most significant part of the whole song.