The object of this assignment was to create a mock cereal box. Much like the dollar bill assignment, this was another that, upon seeing it, I knew exactly how I would link it to DS106’s theme.
When first starting this project, I made this rough sketch in Procreate to illustrate what came to my mind then I thought of “Bob Ross cereal.”
I thought the most obvious route to take with “Bob Ross cereal” would be a kind of cereal with small, tree-shaped marshmallows to emulate one of Ross’s signature phrases “happy little trees.” The next thing I did was work on the text for the main logo. I knew that I wanted the text for the “happy little trees” portion to have a 3-D effect, so I found a font I liked, changed the settings so that it would be an outline only and then I copy/pasted that block of text diagonally behind the initial block. I then connected the two sets of text using diagonal lines while erasing any portions of the second dayer that appeared behind the first layer to achieve my desired effect. Finally, I merged both layers into one and used the fill tool to color each letter.
The “Bob’s” portion of the logo was far less difficult. For that, I switched to a calligraphy brush and freehanded each of the letters. Next, I decided to do was draw and color the bowl and spoon. This wasn’t terribly difficult either. I decided to color the bowl blue in order to match the lettering from the logo and as for the “trees” that would be floating in it, I simply drew one and copy/pasted it enough times to fill the entirety of the bowl. Lastly, I colored the background using the same brush that I used when I follow along with an episode of The Joy of Painting. I thought this would be a nice touch to better connect the artwork on the box to Ross himself. I made the background of the image mostly brown with an empty white space in the center, above the bowl to represent Ross’s famous Afro. The end product looked like this.
Despite being “finished” I was unhappy with the result. I felt that the image was too dark and that the white spot did not evoke Ross’s look. I decided to revisit the ThisweekinDS106 blog, since the branding on there included a silhouette of Ross, in order to see how I could improve my design. After looking at the logo, I realized that using the dark brown to represent the afro would probably be more effective. I also realized that, if I changed the color of the bowl to dark brown, that could help visualize Ross’s beard within the image. While I am disappointed that this decision did make my final product a bit too derivative of the DS106 logo, I at least think that changing the bowl’s color was a stroke of genius. I then added a small bit of landscape, sky, and (of course) a tree and my final product looked like this.
