This week on GDII: Flashlights, paper cuts, and books. Lots and lots of books.

Hello!

The past 2 weeks have been very crazy, one because of the quarter coming to an end, but also because  of spring break! I've been very busy, so this is overdue, but I hope it's still relevant.
We got to choose an issue that's happening with people in all parts of the world, and find ways to fix it all. And yeah, long story short, I was really, really excited to choose a topic that's really, really important to me.

And that topic's reading.

Whether it fills your head with dread, takes your breath away with awe, or some other third thing, hold on there friend, hear me out, please. Things are going to get a little tense right about now.

The amount of adults who say that kids and teens have stopped reading as much as before do have a point. In the last 10 years, 

And although the number has dropped a bit more than expected, it's barely scratching the surface. From my experience, tons of teens still read, be it with comics, or their own books, they're always open to reading something they like to pass the time.

But what about our newer generations?

Recent studies from a survey made by Neilson Book data have stated that only 32% of kids read every day, making up about 60% of children reading books every week. There are lots and lots of reasons why kids have stopped reading as much, but some of the main targets called upon by adults are those of electronics taking away kid's wants to read things. After all, kids wouldn't possibly have time to read when they have loads of apps and other things.

The positive of it all is that reading has not died in younger generations. Of the 32%, reading is still one of the few things that can kill boredom next to watching TV.
What IS surprising is the fact that while the amount of older kids reading is few but staying strong, the number of kids who STOP reading when they reach their teens is dropping, and fast.

There are still many ways parents can help these kids to start reading again.

This week on GDII: BEAR ATTACK! *screams* (also known as repeating pattern designs!)

Here's something new for this blog, a whole new project we've been working on for the past 2 weeks!

We were given the task to make a phone case for our phones, and boy did I have a lot of fun choosing the color palettes and drawings for this.
Here's the main things on how the phone case came to be.


INSPIRATION:
So my inspiration for this case came from a lot of things.
And by a lot of things, I mean a lot.

In the beginning I had a whole idea for having an underwater background full of whales and seaweed. And I was really excited because of the fact that whales are some of my favourite animals. But with the time crunch, I opted going for a smaller, simpler design. And that simpler ideas was to use my second favourite animal, a bear.

I got inspired by the animated show 'Shirokuma Cafe', which is a show about a panda bear that's hired to work in a cafe with a polar bear. It sounds really weird, but it's such a lighthearted and crazy show that I can't help but love it.

I was also inspired by other phone cases I saw on Zazzle.com! I really loved the colors for these below, and I liked how the images were clustered together to make a pattern instead of having too many gaps in between. The colors were also really nice!

A few of them are here below! Each of these come from amazing artists who worked very hard to put it on zazzle so go check them out here, here and here!

And now for the...PROCESS:

For me, I know for a fact I have an obsession for color palettes. It sounded really nice too, since I was making the case for myself! So for the most part, I gathered up a lot of color palettes and slowly (a bit reluctantly too) minimized the amount of them all to just 4.

The three I chose came from www.colourlovers.com, and each of these color palettes belong to each artist respectively.

Here they are!

To start everything off, I started sketching some bears. Once I was happy I took a photo of then and took them over to Adobe Illustrator, where I traced it until I was happy with the lines. I messed around with the line colors and later traced a body over so I could pick the right colors and then it just snowballed from there. Lots of meh colors and really cool combinations happened, which was ridiculously fun.

After that I just got all the bears I liked and put the bears in patterns.

As you can see, there were a lot of bears. A LOT of bears. So it took forever to try and fix the colors up to something I liked. A lot of button mashing and layers happened here, some of which I do NOT want to remember. Ugh. WIP below.

And yeah when it was FINALLY done, I set to work at making it a all fit onto the template I had gotten prior. I organized everything and the resulting case design was uploaded onto zazzle again.
Woo!


There was a lot I learned while making this case, a lot of it being to be organized with layers and colors and just trying to make it less complicated than it was already but I was happy. And I still am happy with how it turned out!

So yes, yada yada, thanks for reading!!!