Personal Project: First Responders
By: Ariel Marie
With the CoVid-19 Virus spreading like rapid fire, some of us deemed an essential worker, working hard and taking a risk to make sure parts of our nation still function. During these terrible times many of us are making sure we lookout for ourselves (where there is nothing wrong with this), but we must say thank you to the people that risk their lives to keep our nation running. The ones that are protecting us, serving us and helping our health deserve to receive some appreciation for their hard work and dedication to come to work everyday and put their health on the line to help us all out.
With this idea in mind I wanted to design something that can show the most appreciation for their hard work in the simplest form. While searching on the internet for ideas to show love to the first responders, I had discovered that there were many versions of a first responder flag. I decided to make my own first responder flag based on the first responders that I mainly wanted to show appreciation to. The military, police, firefighters, EMS, nurses, dispatch/security and corrections were the first responders that I wanted to choose to display. Starting with the flag wanting it to be the background, I opened a 2550 px X 3300 px blank canvas changing the background color to black. Take a start with the stripes I made 7 stripes at the size of 3101 px X 313 px and set them at a 11px distance between each other, coloring them came with ease making sure to know where I wanted each stripe to be displayed. The colors I chose were, Green for the Military, Blue for Law Enforcement, Red for Firefighters, Blue with White Stripe for EMS, White with Red Stripe for Nurses, Yellow for Dispatch/Security and Silver for Corrections. Using a vector image of a star, I made 50 copies to place them in the left hand upper corner of the flag to represent the stars on the american flag. Making sure a layer mask is placed to hide the stripes from under the stars, this flag was lacking a lot of character. I searched the internet for a grunge texture and a concrete texture that would add character and not take away in aspects of the flag. With the grunge texture, I set the blending mode to Multiply with no change in the Opacity and the Fill. The concrete texture was such a great character trait that I wanted to add, but with just one copy with a blending mode set to Darken with a 45% Opacity and a 97% Fill the flag was missing a spark, so I decided to make a copy of the concrete texture layer and changed the blending mode to Linear Light with a 83% Opacity and 79% Fill. I wanted to give the flag a look of war, so I added a Linear Burn layer of a blood splatter. With one final touch I was ready to move on to my poster that I wanted to produce, adding an effect around each star using an inner and outer glow, stain overlay, a stroke and a bevelment to make each star seperate from the background giving it a bit of life.
Making a new document, I imported the flag so I may start my design, placing a gradient under my design to liven up the darkness of the flag. Using Illustrator, I used image trace to trace an image of a doctor, police officer, firefighter and soldier to show as much detail as I could but still making a new image silhouette. Placing these new images into Photoshop, I added certain effects to this grouped image such as an inner and outer glow, a stroke, a satin overlay and a color overlay of white I wanted to set my grouped images apart from the rest of the flag and define it. Placing another layer of the blood splatter on top the other layers, added a bit of a shadow the the original blood splatter with a Linear Burn with a 47% Opacity and 16% Fill. “For the Heroes of America” became the title of my desig and finding the quote “Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.—John Wayne” added more character to the poster. After asking my friends how they thought of my progress so far, many of them didn't quite understand what the flag was and what it stood for. So I decided to add a First Responder Logo to the bottom left hand corner and typed up which each strip stood for. With a few minor adjustments and layer masks placed the project was done.
