Now that all of my illustrative elements have been drawn, I can bring them onto the double page spread and set them within a specific style to convey an infographic. This is something that I am really looking forward too because I want to see my original sketch come to life! But, during this process I soon discovered a piece that needed changing and developing, this piece can be seen below along with the completed infographic:
This is the illustration of the statue busts of both Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. The illustration is meant to focus on the two main love interests that Cleopatra is seen to have in her life, and while the illustration is strong as it is, I wanted to convey a more torn love aesthetic in my infographic, which is why I am so keen to include a broken heart shape that holds the two busts of Casear ad Anthony.
At first, I was confused on how to turn the original illustration into a heart shape, I was overthinking he process and tried to create a heart from the shape tools, when this didn’t work I tried to work with a ‘3’ on its side and connecting the points together with the line tool – this to didn’t work. Just when I was about to give up, I had a light bulb moment! I used an image from Google which was simply a black outline of a hearth and used the lasson tool to trace around the edge of the heart and remove the background to place both of the two figures in a heart shape. Once this worked, I then also deleted the heart outline, leaving the image above – a perfect heart with two figures inside!
Next was the struggle of trying to turn this heart into a broken heart. I was unsure on how to do this, so I asked Tim and my peers, who came up with a very simple way of creating a broken heart which can be seen below – excuse the small size, Photoshop saves it to scale:
For this broken heart look, I took to Adobe Photoshop, and followed the instructions given to m by my friend. I first needed to rasterize the layer, which then allowed me to use the Photoshop tools on the image. I then used the polygonal lasso tool, and created a jaggered line effect down the middle of the heart to create the impression of a break. From here I was able to pull half of the heart away and leave a gap within the break. This is exactly what I wanted, and once the heart was split into two pieces, I was able to rotate them slightly to create a bigger and more realistic gap for the broken heart shape.
Above I have included both the starting point of the infographic illustration and the completed piece with all the illustrative elements included. From here you can see how all the elements fit together to create an effective infographic design, as well as seeing how the broken heart looks within the final piece. Overall, I am really glad with how this infographic turned out, I think it works really well and suits the illustration style I have worked with throughout the project.
HND2 Baxter's Designs 