The Anchored Tree

First and foremost, let's look to the main topic of my symbol which is Save Our Forest. Based on the image above, the main element in my symbol is the tree and the anchor. The story of my symbol is, deforestation cause global warming and therefore, we must preserve and protect our forest. With that, we will having a brighter feature ahead of us. Without the trees, we couldn't breath and there will be no shelter to protect us from the heat of the sun.

The tree represents the forest on earth. It is also the source of all living things on earth beside water. For the indirect meaning, the tree often described as shelter.

Anchor is an object, often made out of metal, that is used to attach a ship to the bottom of a body of water. There are two types of anchor which is temporary and permanent. The anchor works by resisting the movement force of the vessel which is attached to it.

The tree combines with an anchor so that the tree will attached to the ground stronger and hard to move it. The body of the tree is also a metal from the anchor to show how hard "the new tree" really is. Therefore, no one can chopped down the tree or move it by pulling out the tree, anywhere they like. The idea is that, no one can damage our forest because the people preserved it.

The circle is actually a shield that protecting the tree. The metallic colour symbolizes a strong shield.

The blue and red arrows is like a recycle symbol. It is also represents the continuity to preserve and protect. The colour red means the warnings when the number of tree is decreasing because someone chopped it down. Hence, we must plant new trees to increase it back to the optimum level which is represents by the colour blue. However, these process will not stop as there are always someone who wanted to chopped down the trees. Thus it is the circle of life.

The oval is the flexible ways to achieve our objective towards zero deforestation. The colour yellow is described as the bright feature ahead of us that can be obtained when we preserve and protect our forest.

Staircase Towards Completition

The 1st Beat
First of all, I take these samples to draw their shape by using pen tool. Drawing the tree is a real tough one for me. It needs a lots and lots of patience to draw the leaves and put some curves (which I still haven't mastered yet...sigh...) to make it a little more realistic.














Somehow I managed to draw the upper part of the tree. Well...I guess it's OK even though it looks a little distorted (n_n!). As for the anchor, I successfully managed to draw it without facing to much difficulties like the tree.


The 2nd Beat
After drawing using the pen tool for the elements in my symbol, I start to draw the body or base of my symbol. For that, I use ellipse tool to create 2 big circles.

The 1st circle I draw was the smaller one and I make it a little transparent to make other things behind it easier to see. From the circle, I transform another copy of it with a larger scale than the initial one. I didn't use any stroke yet for the circle.

When that is done, I transfer the 2 images (tree & anchor) that I draw using the tool pen earlier into the circle.
After I arranged the position for the tree & anchor, also with some resizing, it then fits into the circle. I put some strokes & use basic colours to help me see & identify the images better. At this point, I was thinking on how to put 2 arrows around the small circle as shown in my sketch. hmm...


The 3rd Beat
To make things easier, I locked & set the tree & the anchor into invinsible. Then I started to figured out on how to put 2 arrows around the small circle. I doesn't want to use the arrows that provided by the Illustrator because there's none of my interest (actually, I didn't found them :p).

Then, an idea pops up. To make things interesting, I try to transform the bigger circle by shearing it a little bit 1st.
As you can see, there's a 2 crescent-shaped inside the image. That is the 1st step of making 2 arrows around the circle. I use traditional way of doing it which is using pen tool and follows the circle shape many times as reference until I successfully drawn a beautiful curve (sigh...). Again, I put some some strokes & colours to make things easier to see.


The 4th Beat
At this part, I adjusted the crescent shape by adding some anchor point and reshaped it, so that it'll look more like arrows. To make the arrows on both side equal, I copy & reflect it 2 times (reflect horizontally, then vertically). About the tree, I put some layers of what-looked-like shadows so that it'll look more livelier & realistic without using any strokes.

On the anchor, I add something like 2 bars with spiral around it...Well, that thing is part of the anchor. I make it by using rectangle tool and rounded rectangle tool. Then I copy and reflect it so that it produces 2 equal shapes.
Now...The tree can be clearly identified, & so as the anchor. but this symbol is still not finished yet. There's still a lot of "touch up" to do, and colours to be added.


The Final Beat
Finally, I add yellow in the oval-shaped of my symbol. I use layers so that the colour will looked better than just simply added the colour with 100% opacity. For the circle, I use graphic style, bevel soft to make it looks like a shield.

After a lot of adding, adjusting, transforming, curving, layering, shadowing and colouring...Finally I've done my symbol successfully...with passion!
Whew...! Done it in 1 whole day without sleep...Well, I just hope that my symbol is acceptable. About the meaning of this symbol...I'll explain it in the next post.

2nd Sketch of My Symbol

This is my 2nd idea on creating my global warming symbol. I just came up with this when I watch Spongebob Squarepants the movie.


The area of global warming that I'll be choosing will be on deforestation and I'm not going to show the effects of deforestation on my symbol. I'm going to show what should we do to prevent deforestation, chiefly means that we should stop deforestation from continuing to
happen. So, My title is Protect Our Forest.

Here are some images that I've collected as a reference to create my symbol:

Reference on Global Warming

Global warming cause a lot of damage to the earth. Some of the causes are deforestation, melting ice caps, greenhouse effect, the use of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) and the thinning of the ozone layer. In result, the temperature of the earth increases.

Example of chlorofluorocarbon


A polar bear on an ice

Green house effects

Before & after

Deforestation

This movie shows the life of the people when the Earth is sunk in water and desperately searching for a land

But does global warming just have negative effects only? If we look into the bright side, our wet clothes can be dried out quickly. So, we can save time and doesn't need to use the traditional gas or electric dryer (which is not really good for the environment) to dry them up. Our time is money, so why not “work” at hanging up clothes and use some of that money saved to buy something what we really wanted? (like Sony alpha digital camera, PSP or PS3... ;p) You might be surprised how the money we save can add up in a month or a year!

The Meaning of the 1st Rough Sketch

Generally, my idea is based on the effects of global warming on human & animals. When global warming happens, the temperature of the earth is increasing thus cause a lot of living things in earth to suffer. The rise in temperature will cause the trees to get burned, humans feel hot & uncomfortable, animals died in thirst, & etc.

In my symbol, you can see something like a lion's head with a fire as its hair. This is because lion is the king of the jungle and it's represents all other animals on earth. So, the fire is the heat of the earth increasing and cause many animals to lose their habitat because of the forest getting burned by the enormous heat.

In the other hand, if you rotate the symbol anti-clockwise, you can see a human's head on fire. This shows that the effect of global warming cause mankind to suffer in the heat of the earth. But, if you look at the eye, it'll look that the head is smiling. I do it on purpose to explain it to all mankind that the global warming is the cause of their doings. So, do they feel happy to what they have done?

The idea of making this 2 figure to combine as 1 came from a science exhibition in Putra Sains Negara.

What Can U See..?

This is just a symbol I came up with on my leisure time before I came in MMU. Dunno if I can related it with the Global Warming issue...but I'll see what I can do.


It is actually a 2 in 1 picture (figured out how to see it. I'm not going to tell u.. n,n!). This symbol is an inspiration from Pusat Sains Negara gallery about a year ago. I will upload the picture that inspire me later (lol...if I can find the picture of course). Well, after all it's still just a rough sketch only...I'll improve it so that it'll be much more different than this.

Well...but since Dr Koo said make it simple and focus on 1 idea...I guess this symbol is unappropriated or maybe I need to change it into something slightly different.

p/s: the image is a little blurry...heh2..