My primary audience is people who have thought about switching to paper straws and believe that using paper straws makes a huge difference. These people seem to be quite concerned about the environment as they actively seek to change their lifestyle to save the Earth. However, oftentimes, they seem to be unaware of the unintentional consequences their choices make. My audience has likely seen the environmental damage straws have done, especially to turtles, so my project will focus on this idea. It will suggest paper straws aren't particularly better than plastic straws for the environment.
For this project, I took inspiration from NFTs, and tried creating something similar. NFTs are also often associated with negative environmental impact. Although it may be relatively tricky to notice the inspiration from NFT, the purpose of it is to further convey my message. The illustrator project mainly conveys three shortcomings of paper straws: greater resource use, greater energy use, and similar negative environmental impact to plastic straws. Straw usage often correlates with turtles, and with the blue background, the turtle represents the environment and the effects using single use straws have. Next to the turtle is a cup of paper straws, representing the sheer amount of paper straws one must go through for just one drink, especially because of its poor durability. By putting the straws next to the turtle, it communicates the overlapping negative environmental effects of paper straws and plastic straws. The turtle is wearing a shirt with a tree on fire, portraying the negative environmental effects paper has and the amount of resources it takes to make the paper straws, reiterating the fact that there is not much positive impact in changing to paper straws over plastic straws. The lightning pattern in the background reinforces the idea that paper straws require a lot of energy to produce, once again exemplifying its negative environmental impact. The turtle provides a few facts about the impact of paper straws on the environment, and by showing it in big letters at the top, it verbally conveys the illustrations.
The first step of creating this graphic was to make a turtle. Following a tutorial, I got a picture of a turtle and outlined its head with the line segment tool to create a polygon effect. I then colored in each shape created by the line segment tool with two tools: the eyedropper tool and live paint tool. I used the eyedropper tool to get the color of the turtle’s head from the picture and then used the live paint tool to fill each shape. I also used both tools to make and color the turtles neck and arms. I then created the body of the turtle with three more tools: the rectangle tool, circle tool, and pen tool. Following additional tutorials, I was able to create a flame, a tree, and a lightning bolt, which all used the tools I already used to create the turtle. For the straws, I used one of the in class tutorials involving image tracing to make the image of the paper straws seem more paper like. I made a blue rectangle to use as the background and arranged it to the back. Finally I used the pen tool, rectangle tool, and selection tool to create a speech bubble. This allowed me to easily use the text tool to type some facts about paper straws.
From this project I learned a lot about using Illustrator, since this was my first time working with the program. I learned how to master the various tools to create various shapes; these shapes were not just confined to the basic ones but extended to many unfamiliar shapes. While my photoshop project didn’t really need text, this illustrator project did; I learned that when designing a poster or graphic, some text can often be necessary, while photos do not tend to require text. Text seems to be very important in many situations to clearly convey a message. This project really opened my eyes to the importance of getting feedback, because people can get the wrong idea about the message.
Next project, I will continue to get outside feedback and use as many resources as I can to learn the software. Since there was less time to work on this project, I was a little more disappointed I couldn’t spend as much time learning about illustrator compared to photoshop. I also forgot to save the project file and only exported the image, so I would definitely like to save my file next time.