U.G.L.Y You ain't got no alibi

We had a session on our visual journals and Eleanor asked us questions about what we are researching with it and what our focus was. At this point I don't really know so I need to do some more exploration drawing and thinking until I can answer the questions.

In this one I tried to make it look kind of aquatic with the plant life growing off him. I think I need to play with the posture more because it's new to have something with such an awkward shaped torso. But I guess it would make dynamic angles look more impressive because there's more body to distort. I think the blue and purple is too complimentary to the green, it's too calm a colour pallet for such a crazy face. So I think I'm going to try mixing some pink instead, it's more contrasting and it's a pallet I've been using in my personal work with my lizards.

I got the idea of a kind of documentary style introduction to my creature from Michael Deforge's comic where he shows his deer like creatures mating ritual.

I started a bit of a comic idea here. The mantis is in a clearing in the grass, he does this funky little dance and clasps his claws together. Then X-ray mode to see inside and he's making babies on his own, so he's technically cloning himself. Then he was going to spray the babies out machine gun style. But I wanted the cross section of the claw to be more realistic and to have figured out all the organs that are in there. I looked at some cell diagram to get an idea of how to do the insides of the claw:

So far I've got a layer of cells to reinforce the claw structure and the other thing is the egg sac although I don't really like how it looks right now. There needs to be more organs in it because I want to fill it completely with different parts to make an organised chaos kind of filling.

Now I've done some more drawing I have a slightly clearer idea of what I want to do although it's still pretty open to exploration.

Visual Journal research and proposal extension questions:

1. What do you already know?
2. What do you want to know more about?
3. What will you do to find out about it?
4. What themes are you interested in exploring?
5. What subjects are you interested in exploring?
6. What texts have you been exploring?

1. I know a small amount about mantis's mostly all from the youtube video; True facts about the Mantis. I know basic biology in skin and plant cells. I know I want to make a comic.

2. I want to know more about insects so that I can find all the weird one with peculiar abilities and then I can combine them into my own characters that I base on them. I want to know more about the organs that I could have inside.

3. I'm going to watch documentaries on weird insects and explore visually the x-ray images I could make with reference of anatomy diagrams.

4. The life cycle. Character.

5. Bug life. Biology. mating rituals. life spans. 

6. I haven't explored any yet. But I think I'll need to read up on insects and their anatomy.