Blue Period Phone Case
The Book
Blue Period by Tsubasa Yamaguchi has quickly become one of my favourite manga of all time. The manga centres around high school student, Yatora Yaguchi, and his exploration into his newfound passion for art. As we follow Yatora through his journey into the art world, we see him struggle with the challenges of being an artist as well as develop an understanding and appreciation for the art and artists around him. I found this manga deeply resonated with me as I believe it would for many other readers who also chose to pursue creative endeavours. Reading this manga made me realise that some of the challenges I went through studying Industrial Design are common throughout the whole art world. Things like trying to find an edge in a field where the only limit is your creativity or having hard work simply dismissed as natural talent, are things I realise now every artist feels and tackles with at some point in their career.
The Page
There is a moment in Blue Period where Yatora is struggling to find the energy to continue his journey. He knows his art is lacking but struggles to understand why or how to improve it. Upon explaining this to his high school art teacher, she suggests he paints a F100 to reinvigorate his spirit. Reluctantly taking up the challenge, he decides to revisit the prompt of a painting he scored poorly for. He ponders the meaning of bonds and becomes inspired to paint a metal furnace showing the malleability and strength of bonds as personal connections. The page I used was the last page of chapter 10, when Yatora finally finds something captivating within his own art.
The Process
To make the artwork for the sticker, I first took a scan of the page and brought it into photoshop. Here I separated Yatora, the canvas and the background. I also took a scan of the back of the phone case to act as a guide. Next, was the matter of creating the composition. I wanted the circle of painting to match the MagSafe ring, so I centred the canvas in the middle and resized it to be larger than the MagSafe ring. Next, I moved Yatora such that his head was in the middle of the circle and redrew the missing parts of the background. Finally, I brought in the title and author to fill up the empty gaps.
Initially, the sticker was composed of two parts; a coloured background transparency that went under the case and a black and white foreground sticker that went over the case. This was for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it was to make a 3D effect and make Yatora and the titles pop. It was much easier to position the sticker, since a tiny bit of error was unnoticeable. And finally, it allowed more room for error in printing since printing with white toner was already challenging and any mistake would only mess up half the design. However, I found air bubbles were too obvious in this design and so had to opt for a different method.
The final method was to print just one coloured sticker that was sticker over the back of the case. This made air bubbles much less noticeable and though initially alignment was hard, the foreground and background couldn’t be out of alignment anymore.
