You Either Crumble or Bloom Poster

You Either Crumble or Bloom

Animated Poster

by Eggy Egea

I have a humongous pile of unfinished personal art. ADHD definitely play a role, and seeing that stack used to make me feel worse.

While sorting through it, I found a thumbnail sketch for You Either Crumble or Bloom. I was tired of crumbling—I wanted to bloom.

Something in me snapped. I decided: no new projects until I finished the pile. That’s a hard rule for someone with ADHD. My brain craves novelty, challenge, urgency—none of which this piece had. Until I thought: what if the flowers swayed in the wind? Suddenly, I was hooked again.

Did I just hack my creative rut? Maybe! Either way, I finished the piece in a week.

I loved the thumbnail, but I decided that it would be better if both “crumble” and “bloom” used the same sans serif lettering. It would make my process quicker and would show a connection between the two words.

This is the most time consuming part of the process: vectoring your artwork. I don’t recommend following what I did if you’re a beginner, but here I skipped creating vector line art and quickly jumped into vectoring the meat of the letters. Then I added guidelines to fix anchor points and bezier curves. Afterwards I made “crumble” and “bloom” look 3D to add depth and increase contrast.

I recreated the thumbnail sketch’s flowers in procreate, but this time I wanted the flowers to grow through the letters of “bloom.” Then I vectored the flowers in Adobe Illustrator. I found that the number of flowers were distracting, so I simplified it a little bit. Then I added a graphic pen effect to “crumble” to make it look more like it’s, well, crumbling.

One of my favorite ways of picking a color palette is taking pictures of beautiful palettes in real life. This palette was based on a storefront I walked into that week.

I used Adobe After Effects and the Bend It native plugin to animate the flowers to sway in the wind. Then tweaked particle playground to add a falling debris to “crumble.”

And voilà—I finished it! It’s given me hope I can finish more soon.