The color palette for this project was determined by the colors needed for the four 'wind' tiles. Because I chose to use the four symbols of Chinese mythology, I needed them to include black, blue, and red. Green was also a necessary color because many of the tiles are based on bamboo or other plants.
Traditionally, the ones tile of the bamboo suit is depicted as a bird. My heritage as a Taiwanese-American and my love of birds led me to design this tile around Taiwan's national bird: the Taiwan blue magpie.
The next tiles I chose the redesign were the wind tiles. Traditionally these tiles are just the cardinal directions written in Chinese calligraphy. I wanted to keep the calligraphic aspects of the tiles while changing them to be illustrated depictions of the four symbols of Chinese mythology, which also represent the four cardinal directions: the black tortoise of the north, the azure dragon of the east, the white tiger of the west, and the vermillion bird of the south.
I created the design for the black tortoise first, but after illustrating the other three and making the designs more calligraphic, I changed the line weight. These were originally sketched on paper, then traced in Photoshop, and image traced into Illustrator.
The next tiles were the 'blank' tile, the red 'zhong' 中, and 'fortune' 發財. ‘中’ means center, the tiles traditionally meaning the center of an archery target so I depicted this as a traditional bow and arrow and 'fortune' I depicted as a Chinese money tree. With these tiles I was not concerned with keeping the calligraphic style so I illustrated these with the minimalist, vector style that most of the other tiles were designed with.
The last tiles I designed were the flower/season tiles. These tiles are based on the four flowers of Chinese art, also known as the four gentlemen: the plum blossom, the orchid, the bamboo, and the chrysanthemum.
For the last four tiles I was designing I chose other flowers to depict the seasons. A lotus, representing summer; a peony, representing autumn; tung blossoms, representing spring; and jasmine blossoms, representing winter.
