Matcha Cake, 2021
Janice Hu
18.7 in x 14.6 in

For my project, I made a short animated GIF. The animation starts out pretty simple. Someone takes a bite out of the matcha cake and the cake starts losing parts of itself to show the inside of it, kind of like half of it is melting away sideways. At the end, the word YUM pops up. I included that at the end because I felt like it was better to end the GIF like that rather than not have anything. In my opinion, having the words pop up made it less bland.

I used a reference that I will include below (cake by Cooking Tree). Like what we did with the portraits, I repainted the cake in a different style, though I did not layer the paint on the picture and did not trace. I am not familiar with Photoshop and did a lot of digging around for resources to use it efficiently, making me step way out of my comfort zone. I am also terrible at coloring digitally, so this project pushed me to do a ton of coloring.

There was something I always wanted to try, and it was coloring without lineart, which I did for the plate. It is weirdly my favorite part of the project. I ended up picking a matcha cake because I enjoy having desserts with my friends and having long talks, and matcha is one of my favorite flavors and reminds me of when I went to Japan and tried the matcha tea. I also loved the inside of the cake.

Some other techniques and tools I used were clipping masks, destructive and nondestructive ways of editing, and using the frame animation timeline to make my gif.