This poster was made as a way to show that plastic can be recycled and not thrown away. There are many reports on how not only how little plastic ends being recycled but also being recycled in an effective way. The style of art I went for is Pixel Art, or what many others would consider it Retro Game Art. This style was chosen as it would capture a young audience that may not know much about recycling.
Early Work/Concept
The image above was my early prototype of the style I chose. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the pixels and become familiar with how it will all work. It was very basic and did not have a lot of detail but it soon escalated as time went on. I had a clear idea on having certain checkpoints and a pathway as well as a recycling truck and an aluminum can.
First Draft
These were the first few "sprites" that I made. The reason they are called sprites is because they can be placed anywhere independently around the screen pixel by pixel. As you may have noticed, they have a lot of detail as I went for 16-bit-like aesthetic that may have seen from 90's video games.
Tiles and Other Sprites
Here are the many tiles and other sprites that are shown above that I made for this poster. Unfortunately, I was not able to utilize all of them given the amount of content already in the poster. These tiles and sprites took a lot of time and thought to make as for the single tiles, I needed to make sure that it becomes a pattern. I am overall happy with what I made for this project.
Font Choice
As I went further along with the project, I needed to pick an appropriate font choice but my choices were limited as they needed to be Bitmap-based. After trying a few fonts out to see what would work, I decided to instead create my own. I used a neat program called BitFontMaker2 that allowed me to create pixel fonts online and convert them to an OpenType Layout. Each character was made in a 6x6 grid with the top row left empty and the outermost left and right columns empty as well with a few exceptions. It was an interesting experience for me as I had never created my own font before.
