For the last project in my Animation for the Illustrator class, we could choose any piece of animation we wanted to base our illustrations on. I get very anxious when I am given that amount of freedom in a class, because I don’t like to show people things I like. It’s a social anxiety thing. After much deliberation, I chose Cardcaptor Sakura, partially because I love it with my whole soul and partially because it felt like a safe option compared to other things.
The titular character, Sakura, summons Clow Cards, each of which has a unique ability which can aid her in battles and daily life. The idea was that I would design a new Clow Card for Sakura to use. I agonized over what the card would be, but I settled on The Puppet, which can control people’s movements. I had twenty-six ideas in total, so it was hard to choose. I would like to make honorable mention of The Lighthouse, which would be a light guiding her to wherever she wanted to go, and The Gun, which is a gun.
The next step is where I got lost, unfortunately, because I wanted to make a fake screenshot of Sakura using the card. I spent the vast majority of my time on this project trying to forge a perfect fake, and I didn’t even add in the puppet strings until the end of that arduous process. As a result, the puppet strings seem to look out of place in the ‘screenshot’.
I tried my hardest to make it look like 90s cel animation. I chose a round brush with hardly any line variation for the line art, and when I had completed the image, I duplicated the line art, blurred it, and offset it, to create a ‘shadow’ behind the ‘cel’. I wanted the circle to look like it was created with underlighting, a technique that involves shining a light from underneath the animation cels to achieve a glow effect. To that end, I also made sure to let some of the glow light overlap Sakura, which I noticed in many screenshots. Lastly, I put a random noise filter over the whole image to give it that 90s look.
Only after completing that forgery did I draw the card design itself—at three in the morning. I decided to leave it rough because I was tired, and I figured it didn’t need to be polished to get the idea across. The card to the right of it is a sample of an actual Clow Card, for comparison.
While I did enjoy this project, it made me realize how much I censor my art and how miserable that is. I wonder what I would have done differently had I not been compromising with a hypothetical audience who throws rocks. I have made a sort of art resolution, a few months too late for new years, to design my art around what I want to make, not what I think will be palatable to others. I have been moving in a more earnest direction over the last couple semesters, and I will stick to that path to the best of my abilities.