Moodboards? More Like Mad-Boards!

Okay, from last friday's seminar, we were told to design some moodboards to represent who we are as multimedia practitioners. Moodboards are basically like digital collages of yourself, but they don't have to be digital either, they can be made up of traditional stuff like newspaper cuttings, random objects, and sketches. I decided to produce several moodboards, all being digitally based with pictures used from the internet and my collection.

If you have read my previous blogs, seen some of my work, met me or somehow saw the presentation I was supposed to do for tuesday (but couldn't because I fell ill >_<), then you may think I'm probably hard to summarise clearly, I certainly think so to be honest. Condesing complex, more massive things into smaller, simpler things isn't one of my specialties as far as I know, so instead of creating one moodboard, I thought of doing around 4 or 5, each one based on a theme that I feel strongly about. Unfortunately, things did not go quite to plan actually, instead of doing 4 or 5, I ended up making 8 moodboards! I got so into making them and found it so enjoyable, I couldn't resist making more, and thus time and exhaustion are what eventually stopped me from making even more. If you read my blogs, then you probably will have noticed a "moodboard" that I made in the recent past, I called it "My Visual Collection", but after learning about moodboards in that seminar, I realised that it could probably be classed as a moodboard in a way! Here is a reminder of what it looked like anyways, it was a collection of items that I put together that I believed summarise and define who I am:


If you would like to know anymore about the items featured, and how they relate to me and such, feel free to look up the blog I did for this anyways, titled "My Visual Collection". To be on the safe side, stick "Identities" with the search tags too.

Anyways if you look below, this is a screenshot of the background for my Anime Moodbox. The trouble is though, like with the later moodboxes, I designed some pretty cool backgrounds, but then they went to waste due to so many images covering them up! >_<

And if you look below, you can see the first version of my Anime Moodbox anyways. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, there's a white border from one of the pictures causing some visual nuisance in the picture, hence I had to remove it. Also, I didn't completely like the choice of colour for the background, as cool as it looked, it didn't suit the pictures that I used on it after I had edited them in a certain style for this moodbox.

Therefore, I decided to try changing the colour of the background too, and I ended up finding a better colour I think for it neways. I also decided to add more colour to the characters for the final version of the moodbox, as due to the coloured glow I put on the pictures, the whole moodbox lost it's black and white graphic style feel to it anyways. Here is the final version of the moodbox anyhoo with a screenshot of it and it's background on it's own.

Funnily enough, the characters I've chosen for my Anime Moodbox, are ones I feel that I have strong connection with when watching anime, and that I can understand what they're going through and why the feel how they do and such. I believe these characters personalities are all similar to mine, as I have a very varied, complex and random personality to be honest lol.

Moving on anyways, the theme I chose for my 2nd moodboard was Eastern Asia, which I doubt I really need to explain anymore why, as I think I've mentioned my life long passion for it enough times now in most of my work at least^^. Here is the screenshot for the background neways:

This time, my creativity started kicking in again like it did on the Frenzoo avatar website (look for my blog on that too :P), and I used this floral brush to try and create a giant flower which you can see above you. The brush I used, was literally one half of that flower, so I enlarged it to fit the page, and then "painted" the right half of the flower with it. Since you cannot flip the brush itself to make it face the other way, I had to improvise and I did that by flipping the actual image horizontally, then painting the second half in the same way as I did with the first half in the corresponding area. Flipping the image back to normal, and that's what you get up there!^^ I also created a white layer the same size of the background, and placed it above this background layer with a reduced opacity to create a sort of "tinted" effect on the background.

I got creatived with the images for this moodboard too actually, I added a "Softglow" effect to that ninja on the left to give him that slighty radiant look he has, which I believe works quite well. With the kung fu master in the red next to the ninja, he originally wasn't in colour actually. It was originally a graphic novel style black and white picture (noir style), but I felt it didn't stand out enough compared to the other pictures and their variety of colours, so I chose to add some red into his life as I believe it does look pretty good and still manages to retain somewhat a graphic effect, not as much as if it were completely black and white though of course.
With the geisha woman holding the umbrella in the bottom right corner, I accidentally managed to delete her silouhette whilst removed the background from the image, but this turned out to be quite useful, as I then noticed that the background appeared where the silouhette was, but in the same shape as it. Hence on a whim, I moved this Yin and Yang picture I was about to use, behind her and voila! It turned out a pretty impressive and eye pelasing result I think! :P

Like with the Anime Moodbox though, I wasn't convinced that the background colour was suitable for the job again, hence I decided to experiment again to find a a better colour.

As you can see, I not only recoloured the background in 2 different ways, but I eventually arrived at at the decision that a blue colour was the best choice for the background anyways. I forgot to mention by the way, I placed characters from the Hiragana script in Japanes and they spell out my name, Karan Bhalla. The romanised version of the characters is literally, Ka-ra-n Ba-la, although I don't think it's the exact translation of my name in Japanese but ah well.

And now for the 3rd moodboard anyways, which is based all around Animals. The screenshot of the background is below:


For this background, I decided to use a specific set of floral brushes to create it, with usage of several shades of green to try and add some depth to the picture. I only made a final version of my Animals Moodboard anyways, as to save time and such.


Like with the backgrounds, I went for a green colour scheme to help the images blend together and create more consistency within the picture. It did take a fair bit of fiddling around to get the right shades of green and all that with this moodboard anyhoo, it definitely was the 2nd or the most toughest one to make out of all of them, with this one only posing a mild challenge at the most :P. I am quite happy with the way it's turned out, especially with how well the animals blend in together with one another as well as the background.

With moodboard no 4, I went for an African theme anyways, as Africa is where I was born and raised, until my dad's side of the family started causing trouble and them my momma said your packing your bags and we're moving to UK! I got out of the cab and said, " Smell Ya Later!". Took one look at my house and realised I was the Fresh Prince of Lame Parodies...I Mean Nottingham! Sorry, I couldn't resist there, after realising how I worded that first sentence there XD. Here is the screenshot of the background for it anyways...ahem:

I used some new tribal brushes that I downloaded, as I love tribal designs, and I decided on a blue theme this time, as blue is my favourite colour neways, and it also reflects the calm, carefree life I had back in Africa. I used my trick of flipping the image again here anyways, to mirror the brush patterns in the picture.

I didn't want to overcrowd this moodbox too much with pictures, as I did want to show off as much of the tribal designs I did as possible. I chose the same blue theme for the pictures anyways to help make them blend in together as one image and also to blend with the background too. The meerkat with guitar and cowboy hat was a nice find anyways :P.

I'm afraid I cannot show you a screenshot of the background of the next moodboard which is the Games one anyways, as I messed up bigtime on it by forgetting to save a final version of the original gimp file of the moodboard, and seeing as the only version of it I saved was a JPG file, all the layers get merged together into one, so I cannot open that and show you the background like that, sorry. I do have good news though, me being the pre-emptive, clever git I am, I had arranged all the pictures on the background so that most of the background was still visible! All I can say to that is...thank god! Here is what the final version of the Games Moodboard looks like anyways:

For the background, I decided to go for a graphic style after all due to the brushes I used, as I think you can see why I chose it from the picture. These characters are from games that I'm very passionate about and feel quite a connection with like with the anime characters anyways. I decided to keep their colours though because of the wide variety of graphical styles and the unique colour sches on offer here, I just had to show them off lol.

With the 7th moodboard, I decided to focus on an area I haven't mentioned much before, my love for Nature. I'm a massive fan of landscape scenes as you can see below, I formed a moodboard using some of the pictures from my collection of Nature wallpapers. Yes I said some, not even most here XD. To be honest, I think I've created some pretty nice wallpaper here, I've been struggling to find a nature wallpaper that I want to keep as my background on my desktop for a long term basis, as I keep changing it to a different scene every now and then lolol. This moodboard however solves the problem, due to it combining several images into one, it means I get to enjoy the beauty of several nature scenes at once rather than just the one :P. Go me!

After this one, we have the final moodboard which is definitely, the biggest, most random, most demanding and most epic one out of the lot. This one is like a general moodboard about me, it's focus is self identity, and I've shown several anime and games characters as well as some of my avatars, my official logo for my work, and some people who inspire me. This isn't the complete list of people who inspire me anyways, if I did make one of those, I swear I'd collapse from exhaustion or my brain would self destruct from the sheer, unimaginable number of things in a moodboard at once!

I hope that didn;t shock you too much!^^ This is my grand finale moodboard, the mother of all moodboards I've done and so on. This was a beast to make unsurprisingly, but definitely a lot easier than intially expected, as I thought it would take absolutely ages due to it's sizeand complexity.

Oh yeah..I forgot to mention something...This verison is...the SMALL VERSION!!! It may not appear so intimidating since it's been reduced to fit in this blog, but I can tell you this comes in at around 774 KB, and it's dimensions are 800 by 1112 pixels! It's bigger, badder older brother, is the real beast, with a file size just over 2MB and it's dimensions being 1600 by 2224 pixels! I can tell you know, the larger one was the one I originally built too! Yep, I officially can be classed as mad now lol. Anyways, I'm going to call it day now as it's 1:45 am and I'm freaking knackered beyond belief, I've been awake till 2-3pm average everyday so far mostly because of uni work, so yeah, all that lost sleep is really getting to me as well as the hours spent making thse moodboards! -sobs-

I hope you guys appreciate the effort I went through to make these, I know I made them sound easy, but the sheer endurance toll they have on you alone is a real nightmare, I seriously should try and get them done in the daytime especially, lack of sleep is never a good thing! Meh anyways, if you have anymore questions about the moodboards or whatever, feel absolutely free to ask me in person or on her or anywhere else you can contact me, and please make sure it's a sensible question too...See ya anyways!