PPP Visual cont.

I continued my candy skull designs and produced a larger scale one that is a more refined design. At this point we had a group crit and I was told that I had been neglecting the research side of my project.

I began my research and drew from it as I read it and stuck it in my sketchpad for easy reference.

in this one I learnt about the alters that are set up to honour the dead. There is the deceased favourite food, some shaving equipment, flowers and photos/pictures. 

Below is a pattern i made while playing with a compass.

I decided to try out making moving alters by automata. Toys made with simple cogs for a wound up movement. I couldn't find any instructions on how to make more complicated ones so i just used the design i already knew; making things move vertically.

Some possible patterns for decoration of my alters.

on an earlier page i had drawn this paisley looking pattern, so i decided to scan it and use it to test colour schemes. I used the hue/saturation button to get a bulk amount of possibilities quickly.

Here i decided to design the front of a box like a coffin with the skeleton on show. I made the skeleton with my earlier candy skull experiments in mind so that i could use my favourite elements.

I had a separate idea for a product, a moving page, like in a child's book. Where you would spin the circle and the background behind the grave would change. My initial idea for this was to convey the meaning of the two days in the festival. One would say night one and there would be child ghost and the second would be day two and there would be adult ghosts. My next challenge if i was to pursue this idea would be to design ghosts that are recognisable as what they are but also so that there is an obvious distinction between a child ghost and an adult.

When i built the first box I came across certain problems in the design. I made a grid so that i could work out a solution for each problem and amend it during the construction of my next box.

My two boxes. The one on the left, when turned, will have the ghosts bobbing up and down and spinning. The spinning was an accident but i liked it. Unfortunately to fix one of the previous problems I made it so that it couldn't spin at all. The second box moves up and down. I planned to have a small bouquet of flowers on the shaft that would sit neatly in the box then pool over it at intervals as the handle is turned.

I never finished this design because i went to my tutorial before it finished and we agreed that this was a different skill set and that to get the boxes up to a professional standard would take a lot of time and effort that could be better used to refine an illustration.

I Kind of felt like i was back at square one again because i spent so long planning and making the boxes. So i started just drawing out some ghosts, trying to figure out ways to  distinguish the adults from children.

In this one i was just drawing for fun under the theme of day of the dead. I really like the skeleton laid down. The angle is a really awkward one to draw from but its interesting aesthetically.

IDEA. What if i did the comic from the dead persons point of view? 

I was thinking of phrasing it in rhyme, Dr Seuss style.

I drew the yellow marigolds because they are an important element of day of the dead. They symbolise the short duration of life. They are really hard though because they are practically a ball of petals. Think i may have a look at some other options to get this right, live trace perhaps? or just having a photo on a low opacity layer on photoshop so i can have it as reference directly on my drawing.

Here is another candy skull i did. I really like the head curving round into the jaw, this was a total accident but it looked good so i kept it. I tried my hand at a limited colour palette again. I picked out 5 colours all from the left hand side of the gradient on Photoshop. But it turned out easier than i first considered because i liked it with just the red and amber colour on, they feel like quite earthy organic colours and contrast from the usual sugary bright colours on candy skulls.

I did the writing myself because i liked the hand drawn nature of the piece and I thought a proper font would look out of place where as handwriting would compliment the style. I had to put the boxes around my writing though because i couldn't get it to go in a straight line. Even though i wanted a hand drawn/written effect, it still has to meet a certain level of neat and accurate to be considered good.

I really struggled with the angle for this part. I couldn't find reference anywhere, so i had to improvise using shapes to estimate the angles and positions of the limbs.

Here i was trying to create line that screamed ghost. So that even if i only drew the outline of him, the audience would know.

I got some references for the hand, and i struggled a lot on this one. I usually draw hands with four fingers because i find it easier to put into positions and make expressive. But i just couldn't get it to look right with four so i had to go anatomically correct.

For the next panel i imagined that it would be the ghost flying over some woods. I drew lots of lines in different tones of purple to try and get a weird would texture going.

But once the foliage was added it just didn't look quite right to me.

so I decided to focus on the ghost, figuring if i got what i wanted him to look like the rest would fall into place.

But it was not my day for drawing ghosts. None of them seemed to fit with the style i'd been working on while using the cintiqs.

So i decided to avoid including the ghost, since it was narrated by him should he be included? or should it also be from his point of view visually?

To hint at the ghost passing without actually drawing it i chose to have a big gust of wind. and with the background black the wind can be drawn in white line, which i think is very befitting of wind.

I began drawing the yellow marigold, i put a photo reference on a lower opacity layer and began to draw on top.

This panel took longer than most of the other ones, there was just so many small objects. I think my main issue with this panel though was working with the colour, because theres so much stuff in one area and my colour scheme only allows two colours. So i had to find gradients that contrasted enough to stand out from each other without being uncomplimentary.

There was a lot of overlapping colours in this one so it got quite awkward to work with. In retrospect if i had planned out every aspect o fit i could have drawn it in the most efficient order, instead i was left trying to add grass around and in between the bodies.