Soap Box Project (Forest Fires, Climate Change And Deforestation)

Context: Soapbox = An improvised platform, as one on a street, from which a speaker delivers an informal speech, an appeal, or political harangue. and this means that we have to create a project on something that the world is forgetting about a lot and that it isn't taking seriously.

For this project i wanted to do something thats been in the media quite a lot and that is deforestation and climate change and with this comes a lot of arguing the reason why it is bad for the humans that are living on earth but its also bad for the animals that are going homeless because every year around 15.3 billion trees are cut down to keep up with the human demand for wood this also means that 137 species of plants and animals are lost each day due to the demand for wood. This can be seen in the united states because in 1997 33% of the United states was covered in forest however in 1630 the United States was covered by 70% of forests and only in 367 years we have lost 37% of trees in the United States over the course of 367 years.

Who is this project for?

This project is for protesters who are battling to save the planet from deforestation, climate change and forest fires because governments are no longer doing their part to protect their land and the forests from things such as forest fires.

Since this project is aimed at protesters theres really no age group that this fits in but if there was i would say from 10 - 90 because they could argue that the younger people deserve their voice to be heard when it comes to natural disasters and with what we should do with it because its their future.

a young persons voice has been heard and her name is Greta Thunberg she's currently battling climate change with the governments to help create a better future for young people and to help clean up the toxic gasses in our air.

Currently as of Monday 13 jan 2020 Australia are experiencing forest fires all over its nation and its because the government have ignored the bush fire risks all over and they've even ignored people who are in the paths of the fires and as a result millions of acres have been torched and entire homes have been swallowed by flames more than 26 people have lost their lives about half a billion animals have been killed in New South Wales during the fire season

Some Images of the fires

Heres Some Statistics On The Fires

• About 2.35 million acres of land have burned across Australia.

• 480 million animals have been killed in the fires.

• 26 people have lost their lives as a result of the bush fires.

• The fires have claimed 1588 homes and damaged 653 more and that number rises every minuet.

• The military have deployed 4000 reserves to help combat the fires

• Australia currently have the worst air pollution in the world due to the raging forest fires

The fires are going to burn for months and the Australian prime minister made 2 billion Australian dollars available to help fight the raging fires and aircraft like the ones you can see below will help tackle the issue quicker and this is why i've decided to create a soap box project around deforestation and climate change because with more of the trees we take down its making the planet warmer because less and less co2 is being taken away from the atmosphere and thats making our climate change making the air warmer and making forests burn and making sea levels rise.

The aircraft they use to fight the fires.

The media is calling an Australian island "kangaroo island" apocalyptic because of the amount of fires making all life in the area dead and the images you could see above of the fires you could see that nothing would survive them.

Recently an aircraft that was fighting the fires went down the plane crashed in an active fire zone south of Australia's capital Canberra 3 people lost their lives and they where all american over in Australia to help fight the fires.

My Ideas On What To Do

My first idea on what to create for this project would be a poster of some sorts containing facts or even an image showing a tree with a cross through it or even do both now while i'm researching this some ideas popped into my head about the deforestation thats happening and what i would do is on one side you can see a nice big rainforest and on the other side you can see building equipment and trucks ready to move the logs to a plant to be processed so thats my first idea.

My second idea is creating a badge for people to wear and it could be branded with a company that is currently trying to plant 20 million trees and the organisation is called "TeamTrees" this had been promoted by many popular celebrity and public figures and the big names of people who have donated are Elon Musk (SpaceX CEO And Tesla CEO), Susan Wojcicki (Youtube CEO) and Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO and Co Founder) these are only some of the names that have donated to this cause even Elon Musk donated $1M to the cause which translates into 1M trees planted from Elon Musk.

My third idea for this project would be to create a promotion piece for a company that plants trees E.g "TeamTrees" so maybe a poster for the company promoting the idea of donating to a great cause for the company and also the planet. Americans plant 1.6Billion trees a year and every year its improving also non profit tree planting organisations are responsible for half of that number.

Lastly My forth idea was for forest fires due to climate change and i wanted to show the importance of aircraft in the design since i'm better at creating aircraft and i'd probably say that its one of my strongest designs to do so for this idea i wanted to create a fire fighting aircraft thats capable of dropping fire repellant on forest fires and for the image of the aircraft id use the Boeing 737 Max 8 and i would modify it slightly in the design so it looks like its dropping water or fire repellant.

Idea 1

For my first idea i want to create a poster and in this part ill go more in depth on what i want to do for my project and even give some little sketches on what i want to do. so for this i want to create a poster that shows the extensive deforestation on earth and even include facts on the poster

ideas on the poster:

• Make it colourful

• Make it eye catching

• Make it interesting

• Make it truthful

For the background i want a simple coloured sky with some clouds or maybe non at all and below that i want a split page poster so on the left side is going to be a rainforest thats full of life and on the right of that you would see trees falling down and getting collected by big heavy machines and on the right side it will include facts that are truthful like "137 species of plants and animals are lost each day" and on the left side i will include facts for the trees like "Trees take in all the harmful carbon dioxide that humans produce to create oxygen for humans to live and breath" and the thing is we cant hid from this because the generation of every child you see will have a world that you didn't have and their world will kill them.

In the first idea i know its going to be challenging to create a design that shows a rainforest and i thought the rainforest could be full of life instead of just trees so i've decided that the rainforest is going to have sloths swinging from a tree and even birds flying away over the wasteland of the harvested land.

Now for the design as a full idea i'm thinking about what i could add when the design is finished and i'm thinking of textures showing that one side is full of life and thriving without a human in sight so maybe i could have a poster that uses two textures and this would show me going out of my comfort zone to create a nice poster that has a true meaning behind it.

Drawings

So as you can see below here is the sketch that i did for this project for my first idea and here is how it came out and i think its a simple but effective drawing because it shows what i need in the design and it doesn't crowed the page with too much detail

You can also see on the right that the people who have cut down the trees have started digging up the ground to make rooms in the ground to store stuff you can also see some heavy machinery on the sight as well as some caravans for the workers and its clear to tell that this is a logging site because of the stack of logs randomly placed around.

The line down the middle represents the good and the evil side and its clear to tell what the evil side is because all of the trees are gone however on the left you can see that it has life on that side and you can see birds flying away from the rumble of the saws cutting down their nests and homes i'm planning to put a lot more into the design when i take it to the digital stage.

Here is some ideas that i have searched in preparation for this project and below you can see the images that i found.

For this idea i want to aim to create 3 posters so it would be easier to get all of my ideas in so i can reflect on them much more easier because i would have a lot more stuff to talk about.

Design 1

Below you can see the poster i have designed and i has come to the part where i don't feel like it is fitting with what i'm doing so my thought is to add bulldozers taking down trees

Here you could see my idea for it but i decided to stop because its something i didn't want to go forward with mainly because it didn't look how i intended it to look so it just lost the thought for the design and i didn't like that it did so below you can see another poster/design that i decided to do because i needed an alternative design.

My idea has been inspired by this design that you can see below.

Below you can see all of my steps i used to create this final image with my work that was inspired by the work above so the steps below is what i went through while i was doing this and you can even see that theres information next to the screenshots.

My first step to creating this poster was going to be drawing this out and thinking about all the steps i would need to take to make the poster look how i wanted, i wanted to add a texture at the end of the design so i would have to exaggerate the colours so they would fit with the texture when it comes to me adding it.

In the drawing you can see that i've decided not to add 3 to 2 rows of trees and thats because it would of clashed with the bottom ones and i didn't want to merge the drawings so i added a placeholder text to people would know what would be there when its designed.

So here you can see the base of my work i started out by drawing out a tree line and i then copied the original twice i then flipped the middle to make the work look different and not the same.

For the sky i decided to do a light pink because it was going to represent a sunset in the wilderness and i thought over it and i decided to keep it because i thought it fit the design well and i r really didn't think it would need to change because it would more than likely change when i apply a texture over the work but over all i'm happy with how this part came out and if i was going to change it i would of added different trees for each row.

Now here you can see that i've added a couple of things and that is that i've added a mountain and some low cloud to make it have an impact on the people that places like this still exist but very soon it could become a fairytale of the past and some people would remember when there was massive trees for miles in front of a big mountain range.

With the cloud i wanted to make it seem like the trees spanned for miles and rose above the clouds so i decided to add some low cloud and make it seem like "fog" this also helped the idea of how big the mountains where.

In this screenshot you can see that i added more cloud to make the impact on the person who's looking at this work greater i've also made the mountains look 3D to some extent by adding clouds going through the mountain range and this was my first attempt at trying something like that and i think for my first go it was better than expected.

With the text you can see i've added a "ban tree logging" symbol to make people realise what the poster is about even if they didn't read it and i've also got text next to it telling people what its about just in case the poster catches their eye.

(Texture)

Here you can see the final image with the texture over the work and i decided to use this texture because i've used it before and the work that i used this texture with came out better than i expected so i wanted to see if it could do it a second time and i think it looks a lot better with the texture on because the swirls make it look like the forest is on fire however you can see the flames because no one talks about it.

Heres what i used on the texture to make it look like this.

Below this is the final image.

Idea 2

My second idea would be the use of a promotional side to the whole event thats going on so i thought i could make badges with the hashtag "TeamTrees" with a background that is colourful and eye catching i will also create a flyer with this design on and this would make people check it out because its a massive fundraiser thats happening all over the world so if people got a flyer to donate or even donated 1 pound for a badge with the hashtag on or even on the badge it could have "#TeamTreesDonator" or "#TeamTrees" and this would show people that they have donated to the cause.

Now for the flyer and the badge the design is going to be quite simple because the design is doing to be on both of the things but the badge will be chopped down to fit the hashtag onto it. This wouldn't only create a better look for the world for donating to a charitable cause to fix the planet it would bring people closer with nature teaching people that you have to care for it.

Now for this i didn't really draw anything out because i already knew what i wanted to do and this was to create a circular logo that can be put on a badge for people to wear to represent team trees

However, i decided to draw out a quick image on what i wanted it to look like.

With this i wanted to make an idea in my head on what to do and as you can see below by the finished image it came out similar to the drawing because i already knew what to do with the design however i did get a bit stuck on some parts when i was creating this and that was easily resolved within 10 mins.

Heres the finished design.

So when i started designing this i thought of making just a logo that would be made into a badge but at the end of the project i'm going to pick 3 of my favourite designs and get them printed out.

For my first go at designing what i wanted i decided to go for a circular logo design since most platforms have circular logo placements so with this i had the idea of adding a hill in the background of the logo and this gave me the idea of adding two outer circles so the most outer one would be black and the middle one would be white so it separated the white background of the social media platform from the logo now when i did this i thought it wouldn't work as well as is did and above you can see in the final image it made it come out a lot better.

Now heres the image coloured i didn't know if i wanted to stick with this colour scheme but in the end i went way for an hour and had a break and i thought to myself that the background and al of the colours looked better than i thought but there was obviously a lot missing from this so i decided to go back to the outline and add some trees and some more hills.

When i added the trees and the hills i knew somethings where missing and this was my full idea and in the background you can see that i added the sun to make it seem all colourful for kids below you can see the outline of the artwork/ logo and you can see what i did when removed the overlapping lines on the outline.

With the outline i used the command ctrl + K after i grouped all of the outlines so it could fill the insides of the design, after i did that i went to google and looked for a "colour calculator" and with this it gave me a lot of the colours that i was looking for when i was designing all of the parts.

For this design i used s couple of trees of the internet and what i did was imaged traced the trees and combined them on a path and once they where all together in the way i wanted i rasterised the image with a white background then i imaged traced it again but only in 3 colours i got rid of the background and made it all the same colour then i rasterised it again when it was coloured the same colour and below is my final outcome after i imaged traced it and got rid of the background.

This is what came out after i re image traced it and i only put it on a path like this because it would fit the arc where the text is and when it got combined with the outline you could see what it looked like.

Lastly with the design you can see that i've added clouds and the text "TeamTrees" which is an organisation that plants 1 tree per one pound or dollar that is donated to them, as you can see this has came out much better than the first one i coloured.

As you can see here i've decided to do a black and white version of the design and as you can see it makes the whole design look different and you can really see what would happen when we have no trees left in the world its also a design that could be for a webpage so when it turns night this image would pop up and when it was morning the coloured version would be live on the website.

Idea 3

My third idea would be to create a poster of a plane like its a blueprint for a firefighting aircraft.

Now for the blueprints i decided i was going to look at commercial passenger jets and from the design i would turn it into a fire fighting aircraft now with this i've never done it and i wanted to challenge

Here you can see that the aircraft design for the blueprints was quite simple when drawing it out and i didn't want to spend much time on this because i already knew what i wanted to do but i wanted to make sure i knew where the placement would be in order to create a blueprint like poster.

Aircraft blue print designs that i've found:

I wanted to make the design look similar to this but without all of the facts on the page and without all the measurements because i didn't want to crowd a design with numbers and writing i wanted a simple design that you could see at least 2 prospectives

For the designs its self i wanted to have just a standard background with little detail so it wouldn't take away from the main designs that are placed on the print.

Below you can see the idea that i went for when i was designing the background.

So with this background i decided to keep it simple to original blueprint designs but i wanted to change it up and make it like so people can hang it up in their house as a poster without having a lot of numbers and measurements in your face for the people who don't want that.

For the label i wanted to add a specification to the poster so i would add the planes make "737 - max" and since there was no firefighting aircraft with this model i wanted to create my own so it wouldn't create a feeling of its already been done by another designer.

Also i've decided to create it as "fire & rescue" so its shown as a firefighting aircraft instead of just a passenger jet.

For this side i decided to add a side view of the plane so that you could see the plane itself and how its laid out this is different to what i'm used to because i usually have the plane coloured in and i wanted to challenge my way of producing an outline to make myself better at producing an outline for colouring and this means spending about 1 hour drawing out the aircraft in adobe illustrator this will also help me get the lines spot on and give me less of a chance with an error.

Now for this part i wanted to add a front facing view to the poster and thats to show what the front of it would look like if you where head on with the poster and this would be visible in normal plans too to show the designers and the builders if it looks the same as what it does on the plans however i'm not going for a full design i'm just going for a design where you can see the front and the side view of the aircraft.

One thing i would of like to of done is i would of like to use the space up wisely because i've been left with a lot more space than i needed and this made the design look a lot more spacey and i just wanted to make sure it wasn't crowded with a lot of designs.

Here you can see i wanted to do a coloured version of the plans and i really had to think about my placement of the colour fro the aircraft because if you look at the front of the aircraft you can see that under the wing is black/ grey this would mean that the side view would have to show that it was white black and grey also you can see on the vertical stabiliser and the horizontal stabiliser that they are black too so i would have to incorporate that in the design to show i've thought about colour placement.

(the horizontal and vertical stabiliser are at the rear and they are fixed wing to provide stability for the aircraft)

Idea 4

My forth idea i've decided to do a plane dropping repellent on a forest fire and i didn't know how to do it because i thought about doing it from over head so it would look 2D but then i had the thought of doing it from the perspective of looking from the ground so below you can see my sketched idea and what my thoughts on it was.

• Show the effects of climate change

• Show the importance of aircraft for fires

• Show the dangers of wild fires

This is what ill need to include on my design if i want it to look the way i need it to i will also need to show the effects of climate change in the poster because with the planet heating up it will put trees at risk of setting on fire i also want to add a fire repellent to the design which would usually come out of the fire fighting aircraft to the design and have it shown to be dropping onto the trees that are on fire below.

Now with this i could do it in a 3D design or a 2D and with the 3D design it would be from the perspective of the trees and it would show the plane going over head dropping the repellent on the fire and with the 2D design i would have it from the perspective of it looking down on the plane dropping this repellent with smoke rising above it.

Heres my idea and in the background that would be the smoke coming from the trees that had rose up into the sky below this you can see some of the ideas that inspired my decision to do this and this will include videos and photos.

Here you can see all of the aircraft that i looked at when designing this and i thought about using an aircraft that has never been used for firefighting wiled fires so i decided to go for the Boeing 737 Max 8 and you might know this name from the news as is has previously been grounded due to 2 fatal crashes that happened within a couple of months of each other below you can see the plane that i outlined and detailed.

Now that you can see the plane that i decided to do i thought how i could turn this into a fire fighting aircraft and you can see at the bottom of the plane near the tail theres a part sticking out of it so i thought about using that for the aircraft to dispense the substance that is used to fight fires underneath this paragraph you can see the plane outlined and a plane coloured.

Now when i was colouring the aircraft i had to think about how i was going to make this look like an aircraft that fights fires and i decided to use the colour we associate with fire fighters so i went for the colour red now the only reason i have white on the aircraft is because almost every plane you see thats given to companies is white and i wanted to keep that in my design now that you can see the outline and the coloured version side by side you can see that i've thought about shading of the aircraft when its in flight and the most visible part of this is the belly of the plane.

So with the background i decided to have a background where its all smokey from the fires that the plane is supposed to be putting out the fire i also wanted to split the smoke up so everything would be visible when all of the outlines got taken away.

For this part i decided to keep the plane here as it reflects on its angle that it would make when its about to dump the payload onto the forest fire i also wanted to keep it like this so i could show off the shading on the plane with the angle that its at now.

For the colours you can see how the red contrasts with the darker colours i wanted the background to be darker so the plane can be seen much more clearly.

Now with the part you are seeing here you can see the repellent thats being dropped to stop the fire now i wanted to show it from the perspective that its been dropped and that you can see the crash of it hitting the floor but i thought there was something missing as it didn't look right.

i had this idea of putting trees in the picture to make it look like the plane is going over a forest fire but as you can see it really didn't look like the forest was on fire.

So here i added the fire to make it look like it was on fire and this was really my first attempt at doing this in a perspective to where you could see the plane coming over head dropping its payload on the forest fires.

Heres the final image of my idea that i decided to do and if i end up having more time ill create the same design but with a different perspective.

I've had some thoughts with what i was going to do with this design since i've already done the 3D design i'm going to have a go at the 2D design now with this in mind ill have to plan the trees out and i would need to figure out how i would have fire on a 2D level that wouldn't look like an eye sore so what i could do is have sections of the forest that have been removed due to the fire.

Heres the full 2D design that i did and i think it came out amazing.

As you can see here i created a poster with 3 planes dropping fire repellent over the fires to starve them of oxygen to stop it from burning and below you can see the reasons why i did the things i did in this design.

Here you can see my idea that i wanted to do when thinking about the outcome and what i wanted to show in the outcome the first thoughts was to make the background a hill side and i decided to stick with this idea for the main design and you can see below thats the outcome.

I first started off by creating this background and its men't to replicate an image of the surrounding areas from the sky and this gave me the idea to add patches of dirt to make it seem like the fires have burned all of the trees away and with this it creates an image in peoples head that we need to do something to stop this from happening over and over again due to climate change.

Here you can see that i've added the fires and the planes with the route i want them to take across the page and i felt that there should be two types of planes with different designs and i decided to create a bigger plane with two smaller planes to drop repellent onto the fires and this gave the image that they flew in a formation to each target a couple of fires so each plane should target two fires.

Now you can see in this image that i've added smoke coming from the fires and i've decided to do this because every fire has smoke coming out of it and i wanted each fire to follow an airflow off the page so it would look like there was wind taking the smoke away over somewhere to a city or somewhere thats thriving with life now this would mostly go out and all be safe when the planes go over.

Here you can now see the "repellent" thats bing dropped onto the fires now you can see that three planes are dropping it and i wanted this to make it look like it would cover everything in the area with red repellent so thats why i added three planes and its really rare to see three planes going in a formation targeting fired and you can see the text telling people to stop climate change to save the forests.

With the final design that i decided to do you can see that i've added two textures onto the design to make it pop this really makes the whole artwork come to life with the texture because it makes the design look like its men't to be there and even on the smoke and the planes you cant see that the texture adds layers to the design you can also see that the texture makes the background look like a mountain.

The Textures I Used

Final Image

With the final image you can see that the textures make the ground look like a mountain and with the rusted metal you can see that it adds a smokey texture over the poster making it darker overall and giving a slight orange look inside the smoke so this makes it look like its fire under the smoke.

For the final image wanted to add a poster to go with it that would represent the 3D and the 2D one and when i started designing this i didn't think about putting it on the blog until i made it look a lot better with textures that where used i wanted to show this image because it shows the different aircraft thats used to fight fires.

For this you can see that i've decided no to show a drawn out image because i was experimenting with designing a new look for the plane and when i did this i decided to add smoke and the fire repellent i wasn't expecting an experiment to come out looking like this but overall i'm happy with the outcome.

To start off with the design i created this plane with a background but at the time i only had the plane so i wanted to see what i could do with the designing part since i wanted to look at an image side by side and say yes this is the same plane in real life but just in graphic form on a poster with this i decided to have a try with the shapes on the tail at the back of the aircraft and i thought this made the design look a whole lot better.

For the second part to this i decided to add the smoke dropping out of the bottom of the plane with the title "stop forest fires to save our planet" i think that the smoke makes the plane pop out more because you can see that the smoke is darker than the plane itself so it makes the jet stand out from the background however i felt that something was missing when i was creating the design.

the part that i found that was missing from the design was the smoke to simulate that there was a fire going on and the plane was tasked with dropping the repellent over it so it would protect the trees to stop harmful co2 gas entering the atmosphere to bring down the earths temperature so we can battle climate change too and this poster i didn't plan on using but it came out better than expected.

Links That I've Used

• Forest Fires

• Fire Fighting Aircraft

• Forest Fire Map Australia

• 737 MAX 8

• Forest Fire News

• Aircraft Blueprints

• TeamTrees

• Forest Fire Posters

• Deforestation Posters

• Climate Change Posters

Essay On My Whole Project

(How does forest fires, climate change and Deforestation influence and affect your work as a creative practitioner?)

Forest fires and climate change influenced my work with one of my interests in aircraft and thought my work you can see that I’ve researched on how they use the aircraft when fighting the fires and you can also see that the designs are based on showing the extent of the fires that have damaged the land in Australia I really wanted to show what they did and how they played a big key into the combat on fires and with the aircraft its helped a lot of people and some of the key moments in making sure that the fires didn’t rises co2 emissions. The smoke from the forest fires have now reached south America and every day the forest fires burn the co2 levels rise.

Climate change has influenced my work with the designs you can see it’s about the trees getting removed and I was going to do it on deforestation but at the last minute I decided not to do it because I wanted to show the main issues with the impact on removing them because with every tree we remove the harder it is for the world to become a cleaner place and one issue with doing this is that I didn’t include facts about the co2 being sent into the atmosphere and I didn’t get the full story on what was happening.

Forest fires and climate change affected my work because of the events that where happening and the number of people that it brought together and this is shown by the movement “Team Trees” where CEO’s of big companies donated 20 million dollars between them and some of the people involved where the CEO of tesla and space x Elon Musk and the founder of twitter and the current CEO of YouTube they all donated to help make the crisis of climate change make a massive impact and this affected my work greatly because of the amount of stuff that was happening I decided to include it into the blog I was creating for the work and the events of the forest fires affected my work a lot because of the people and animals that where effected by these fires and how deadly they are, the fires all started because of rising heat and climate change so I wanted to make it clear that the fires where only started because of the rising temperatures and that’s only because of the climate change and companies that are non-profit such as “Team Trees” can make a big impact on the future.

Deforestation has affected and influenced my work by making the people view the news and images feel sorry for the animals effected by their homes being cut down and this is a big influence to me because I wanted to show the outcomes that can happen when logging is taken place e.g. small fires that get out of hand and cause a forest fire that’s uncontrollable.