OUGD603 / Extended Practice: Alice in wonderland for MAC - Design development.

OUGD603.

EXTENDED PRACTICE.

Alice in Wonderland for MAC cosmetics.

Today I began building up the illustration that would grace the front of the entire packaging line. I plan to create the illustration using the dimensions from the largest box (eyeshadow quad). The composition can then be scaled down and moved around to suit all smaller boxes. I started with what I believe to be the most recognisable part of the illustration, The mad hatter, this is how most customers would recognise the collection, and associate it with the film. 

In terms of style I had already decided that I wanted to do a volume of colour against a plain background, instead of traditional like illustrations seen in the Lewis Caroll original story. In terms of illustrative style I wanted to keep them as life like as possible, as the film is not an animation, for the most part, but based upon life like characters played by actors, of which some are then edited later on in filming to appear wacky and wonderish. In order to do this, I created a vector illustration by tracing over a photograph of the mad hatter, often colour picking from the photograph to create a more authentic reflection.

As I was tracing the vector illustration I started to notice the combination between digital illustration and realistic textures. I thought the collage style combination was effective and again nodded towards the idea of realism. I tried the combination of vector illustration for facial features and photograph for his hair. I found the fusion of these two styles made the character even more significant as he is well known for his wild orange hair.  

I moved onto the next section of the drawing, the teacups balancing on top of the Mad hatters head.

After watching the film I noticed that Burton had stayed true to the roots of the story, born in the late 1800's and used traditional porcelain cups as props for the party instead of anything over colourful and garish. 

This inspired me to create illustrations with some colour, however look back more so at traditional porcelain and hand painted pieces. Below are some of the images I was inspired by:

I created the illustrations of cups/teapots to look like they had been placed in an unorderly stack, balancing ontop of the mad hatters hat, but also reminiscent of the mad hatters tea party in which these fragile pieces of porcelain are thrown across the table. 

For illustrations of the mushrooms I was again inspired by the wonderland in which we see in the film. I attempted at first to create a combination of vector illustration and texture from the film, However I felt there was an in balance, too much of the pairing being photography and so I subtracted a section.

I instead, illustrated the top section of the mushroom, and kept the stem of it as a photo texture. I took the texture from the mushrooms within wonderland.

Next I began to illustrate Alice, wearing her famous blue dress, another icon from the film. Alice appears much smaller than other details within the illustration to reflect her passage in the film. 

I then began to think about however, being such a small ornament on the box, how Alice's face would be detailed. The only way I thought it would be possible to capture such detail, is to use a photo of Alice's face rather than trying to illustrate such finite components. 

However I felt that when I did this, mixed with all other illustrations on the box, the overall design began to pull towards looking too photograph based rather than illustrative which I had originally aimed for. Since there was no other way which I felt that such minute detail could be captured, I felt it was best to totally remove this section from the design. 

Instead I moved onto illustrating the floral section seen on the drawing of my design. I knew that I wanted this section to have a painted effect similar to the cups/teapot, and so to make it easier / less time consuming, I took a picture of a painted peony and image traced this into illustrator to work on.  

When I image traced the image above into illustrator, I found that it came out very detailed... When sized down a vector illustration with such detail can begin to appear to look like a photograph. (Shown below)

For this reason, I traced over the flower, and began to soften all lines of the flower and remove intricate ones. This helps the illustration to feel more illustrative and painted and less photo based.

I carried on this train of working until I was happy with the final outcome. 

I then began to position the flower in the bottom left corner as shown in my drawing. However I felt that with one single colour, the overall design didn't encapsulate the bright colours of Alice in Wonderland. Doing a variation of colours would help to solve this issue.  

I created a system for colouring in the flowers more efficiently, creating a pallet of single colours in 5 different shades to build up base, highlights and shadows.

I played around with the positioning of the different colours of the flowers until the balance felt right and more colours were injected into the design.

I pasted in the logo to look at the overall design. I was very happy with the illustrations and felt that the combination I had chosen were very reconisable, even to those who had not seen the film.

I thought about background colours, and the only one which I felt would compliment, brighten and highlight the large amount of colours enough was Black. I felt that the plainer / less colourful the backdrop the better the design would be. I didn't think that white would work because, white has completly different connotations, such as purity and light, whereas the film is quite dark, curious and enigmatic. Black is also the signature colour choice for the original MAC packaging, and is what seems to grace their most successful special collections such as Venemous Villains and Rocky Horror picture show. 

In terms of the logo I was quite inspired by the overall aura and atmosphere of the film. I felt that although there was a resonate sense of fun and, obviously wonder throughout the entire film, it often left a somewhat ambiguous and uncertain after taste.

As seen above I have collected a few images that influenced the style and colour of the logo. When we are shown Wonderland, we are often shown a place of bewilderment, of bright talking flowers, towering mushrooms and obscure characters, however this is often juxtaposed against misty/foggy backdrops and very frequently a 'dark Wonderland'. And when one really thinks about the film, as if it were to happen in their own life, It seems somewhat a mysterious and scary prospect, and surely more of a nightmare, than a dream.

From this thought I came up with the idea to do black on black text on a black background. However I began to think of the obvious problems... How would the text be visible if it were to be the same colour as the background? I could make the text visible by changing the texture, such as printing the logo in a black foil. This would mean that the difference in texture, high shine foil against a satin card, would help to separate the logo from the backdrop, whilst still hanging onto the Ounce of ambiguity and mystery I was looking for.