Bordering Beautiful

So I've decided to use the man with the moon image I drew but I want it to fit into my plans for a heavy pattern border, but instead of on each side I'm going with a circle/ oval around the image to centre it. For the border I chose elements from the centre image and arranged them in parallel wavy lines. I think the wiggly shape and the bubbles coming off add to the overall 'whimsy' of the image. I used block sections of black because through my earlier experimentation it proved to make my images stand out more. This image is going to play with contrast a lot, but I don't want too steep a contrast when I'm playing with the light as colour part because i want the overall effect to be soft and whimsical.

I drew a little collection of plants because with the circular border on a square format the corners will be blank. Unless I have the border run off the edge, this will be decided when I put it together digitally. I drew just a quarter of the border so that I can repeat it to get a symmetrical border.

Subdued Whimsy

I made his head too big so I had to have this guy sat down to put the water around it. I don't think it needs the planet because it doesn't fit in with the concept and makes it more complicated to position.

For this second one at first it didn't have the black back ground but I was looking at work online, namely jon boom's and in some of his he uses a lot of lifework and then has large sections of black and I think the contrast brings out the line work more and improves it. I got more 'like' things on Instagram when I'd put the black in so I think it was successful.  

I like this one the best because I think it is centred nicely with the leaves. And I just watched the video to the song and it is all centred around a time lapse of the moon. So my image matches that video accidentally which is cool. Im going to add little glow insects on this image swell and that will dictate where the colour goes. And i will be using the new layer transformation thing i found which is brighten (i think) which just lightens up every colour I put it over so that will make the light as colour process quicker. 

Pen on Paper

This is my cake for clearest blue. I think the perspective needs more work though because this cake could not exist in any dimension. Probably should have used reference.

This is one for worry, I kind of liked the idea in thumbnail but I don't think it is as successful inked up.

This one worked well I think. This seems most likely to be the one I will make into a final for 'Worry'. I think the hand needs to look a bit more realistic proportionally. But I like the high texture but then quite sparsely textured face. Creates a nice contrast. For the final I think I will put heavier detail on the mattress and then more on the pillows to boost the contrast between face and fabric.

This was just an idea compositionally to do something that would utilise my texture and high detail work. I'm thinking using a tall rectangle in the centre to have an image in and then fill the sides with dense pattern.

Some ideas for what could go in the middle of the densely patterned section. I'm basing these on 'Dream 3' the only song without lyrics. The song seems to have a slight sad tone but also quite whimsical, fitting with the title. I've been looking at doing some whimsical scenes but with subdued emotions on any characters faces.  I most like the figure floating through sections of water and the man holding the moon lit up by insects. The water one seems to convey that sense of subdued whimsy and the lit up one utilises the colour as light play I did in my cop work. 

Thumbnails!

This is just some quick thumb nailing I've been doing. For the first song - Clearest blue, I've been either concentrating on the title or this one line where it says meet me more than half way. Which is where my first idea came from with having two slices of cake but one like way bigger than the other. I'm trying to think of some simple designs here because I think it'll make it more bold and eye catching. 

A goal I'm having with this brief is to get at least one of my sleeves picked for the event as last year I didn't get any. But the colour choices for the ones last year made them gaudy and not aesthetically pleasing so that's something I am going to watch this week. 

Etta James was a hard one to do because its such a well known song and I was struggling to boil it down to one image. I had some obvious ones like holding hands and Etta James' eyes but I didn't really like the concept of those ones. I also thought of a little maze with a heart at the centre, I think I need to thumbnail more for this one but if they're not any more successful then I will go for the maze one because a maze could be quite fun to draw out. 

For Worry I have been going with images that generally look like grief and loss. I like the close up of the guy with a hand on an empty pillow the best. It gets straight to the point without being too patronising with the image communication. 

For art school I had some general ones that are like aspects of art school fashion. Then the last one I took the line where it says "say what you want" and its just a little guys head with a speech bubble that says 'what you want'. I like that one the most because its simple and also kind of silly.

For John Lennon's imagine I have only one idea so far because, again, its a really well known song. Also its about an intangible concept and I find that harder to communicate. So far I just have a really nice sky and then at the bottom of the sleeve you can just see the tops of peoples heads as they walk by.

Secret 7

Brief: To interpret the given tracks in your own style on 7" by 7"

Product: 7" record sleeves

Tone of voice: Dependant on track

Audience: Music fans, gallery goers, Secret 7 followers

Context: To be sold at the secret 7 event

Mandatory requirements: To attempt to complete as many successful sleeves in 7 days, Blog about development, Evaluate successfulness of project

Deliverables: Multiple record sleeves

Dead line driven: Brief Numero Uno

My first brief to undertake is Secret 7. I will give myself one week to complete it. I started on saturday, so i'm already two days in. I am going to attempt to complete at least one cover for each song in this time. But even if I don't manage it I will see what my limit is. I want the covers to not look rushed, they have to be successful by my own standards so that this experiment gives me useful information about my practice.

The songs this year are as follows:

Deadline Driven

Deadline Driven

Brief: Take on different briefs (a mix of competition and self lead briefs) and set deadlines that are shorter than I would usually give myself.

Product: A collection of Briefs put into a book (if applicable) or into a small folio

Tone of Voice: Dependant upon each individual brief

Audience: Dependant upon brief

Context: Dependant on brief,
               Developmental brief to determine quickest time to successfully complete a project

Mandatory requirements: Minimum of 3 Briefs completed
                                        Blog to show development
                                        Evaluation of successfulness of brief

Deliverables: Book/Folio of projects under taken and times done in

The sacrifice of a lesser brief

I am deciding to drop this brief because I haven't started it yet and I feel that it is quite similar to my Illustration Friday brief. The illustration friday brief is all about responding to a word, and the editorial is similar in that it's responding to the story. But the story can be boiled down to a word and that makes most like the other brief. Although I am not completely abandoning my editorial, I am going to replace this brief with another one that I have made up. It will consist of a mix of competition and self lead briefs. I'm going to call it Deadline Driven and in it I will take on competitions or small briefs and then set myself a short deadline to either complete it or complete as much as I can. I'm doing this so that I can judge how long it takes me to do things and how realistic I need to be when I set myself deadlines in bigger projects.

Developing finalist images

I've not yet been told whether the book is in black and white or in colour at the moment so I'm not sure what I'm designing for which is making it quite hard. But I work in mainly line anyway so if there was to be colour I assume out would be a limited pallet. I had a meeting with Becky Freeman and showed her my sketches of concepts and with the ones she picked out I have made more finalised looking images to give a better sense of what the finished product will look like. Some of the concepts she couldn't pick between so I have developed a couple to still give her the choice.

IDEA

So I was watching this show where people were showing you around their amazing homes, and one of them was particularly odd. A man had built himself an island out of recycled bottles and rubbish he collected from land. He then inflated the bottles and straps the under his island to keep it afloat. He grows plants on the island and their roots help keep it all together. I really loved this idea and it brings up my two favourite things to draw; plant life and gross things (rubbish in this case). I've decided to base my story off of this. I think i'm going to make my audience 6-8 year olds because before when i was aiming for 9-12 I think i underestimated how intelligent the writing would have to be. I don't want to end up creating a story that is patronising for it's audience so I have lowered my audience age. The story will have morals of recycling and sharing.



So far all I've come up with is a small character will decided to make his own island and will go out asking people if he can have their rubbish and in exchange once he is set up he shall give them some of the plants he grows.
I think i'm going to include a 'bad guy' which will be a magpie because they are known for stealing shiny objects and that seems like the kind of trouble my little character will run into while building his island.

For the style I have decided to use this opportunity to do my colour and line work separately. I don't want to colour digitally because it never quite works out the way i want and I always think my work looks worse once coloured. So i'm going back to analogue, I'm thinking either using watercolour or brusho inks to create the colour. And then I will use a light box to do the outlines and the texture. I think if there is any digital changes I make it will just be to make some of the lines complimentary to the colour they are atop.

I was considering different names for my little character, I want it to be genderless so that it is relatable to any child. My main contenders for a name was Root, Soil or Sprig. But when I asked others for their opinion it was almost unanimously Sprig. I think it is a word that isn't used too often. And maybe then I can use an introductory page to say how it got it's name and what a sprig is. So that there are educational elements in the story.

This is one all coloured in. Im not sure about the body colour here though. I need to do a character sheet where I play with the colour and shapes till i've investigated it enough to know I have the best result.

Tropical

This week's word is Tropical. At first I got set on the idea of having a cactus as the main part of this image. My first two roughs were cactus inspired, the first one was just a cactus with sunglasses on in the centre of two long pots filled with tropical vines. The second idea was a two panel shot in the first one there is a close up of a cactus with sunglasses and a lay on, second panel zooms out to show the cactus stood in the middle of an empty desert with tumbleweeds flowing past.

I finally decided to just draw out a bunch of tropical plants because it is something I enjoy drawing and it always helps to improve at it. I've slightly changed my favourite big leaf design, now instead of drawing an outline around the different colour smudges within it, I just filled the area with dots and let them dictate where the colour ended. I used lots of line as texture, much of them are very similar but just slight changes in the flow and spacing makes it represent a different plant.

For my colours I went with a selection of greens and filled in the plants trying to space out the colours as best I could so that the oversell effect would look balanced. I added the warm red/orange because it needed something to make it 'pop'. The greens looked  nice but it made the whole image absorb as one flat thing, whereas with this bit of bright it causers the viewer to pick out certain parts. When I posted this on social media I was complimented on my colour scheme but unfortunately Facebook had deeply saturated my pallet when it compressed it causing it to look lurid. I've been trying to shrink down and compress my jpegs now before I upload them to Facebook so they are a true representation of the work I'm doing.

Moon

The week's word is moon. I decided to take this one very literally and just draw a nice moon scene. I used the clouds to create a frame around the image. and I added the logs at the bottom to connect the frame area. Looking back I think I should have erased the edges of the trees with the pastel palooza brush because thats what I normally use and I think it looks much nicer than the fade out. 

I titled this one like the last one but used three layers to the in the colours I used but still underplayed it with black so that it is easy to see. I chose the colours myself this time and I think it went quite well I tried to stick to quite similar ones because I wanted this image to have a calming finish. The two tone on the trees shows where the moonlight hits the tress, this is something I explored in cop, playing with light and colour. I definitely think it adds new depths to my work and makes the colour pallets less flat looking.

Soar

My ideas for soar was; a whale held up by balloons, a page of birds, a dog chasing a butterfly or a plastic bag on the wind. I chose the plastic bag because it almost mocks the graceful connotations of soar. I went really simple with the design and used two different line qualities to construct a difference between outline and texture. 

I decided to make the sky a rising/setting colour instead of a plain blue like i normally do. I used the smokey brush to blend the colours into one and another. I like the calming effect it has, it makes the whole scene calm and normal. And for city dwellers it is a pretty regular sight to see a shopping bag lazily gliding along the wind.

I made the shopping bag plain white to make the most contrast from the background. Since it is the most high contrast area I think this leads the line of sight straight to the subject. The bird and telegraph pole stay in browns so as not to distract from the main spectacle.

I remembered to do my complimentary colour signature. I also included the word title in these pieces which helps because I post them to my social media pages and this way it is all self explanatory. I doubled up layers of the title and coloured the front one black because the purple didn't stand out well enough. But i like the finished effect of the 3d writing, I think it adds another level of professionally to these pieces.

Unicorn

This weeks word was unicorn. I did a few thumb nails for this word and I decided to develop a couple of them this week. The first one I did relatively quickly as the idea was just based around a bad pun; prunicorn

When the lines scanned in some of them didn't quite get picked up and it left this worn looking texture down the thick outlines. In Photoshop I went through and using Kyles Pastel Palooza brushes I erased parts of the rest of the outline so that the whole thing looked worn. I think, now, that I should have also roughened up the colour because there is a weird contrast here between the rough outline and the block colour. I did crazy big eyes and tried to make it look quite cute, I was just attempting to pander to the audience of the illustration friday people in the hopes they would pick my image and post it on their Facebook page.

My second design was just a simple line drawing piece with no digital work done to it since I decided to submit the prunicorn piece. I decided to have a different take on a unicorn and instead showed it as an infection in a horse. The inspiration for the x-ray like view came form Michael DeForge, one of my all time favourite illustrators.

I went heavy on my use of black because I think the contrast between the pitch black and the lighter ares really showcases the deep texture work better. Also when I do big texture pieces it can take a while for a fresh viewer see what it is because theres so many areas of textures and only separated by fine lines. I think the block black makes the textures able to be appreciated individually and makes it clearer what the image is.

My last idea was something I only did a quick sketch of but it made me laugh. Its like an advert for the unicorn dating. This is his signature image where he looks as sexy as he possibly can.

The smoke was going to fade into the mane of the one above because then it looks all flowing and smooth. I was going to colour it in pale blue for the faces and deep burgundy and purple for the smoke/mane.

Wet

For this week I wanted to try playing with an image that didn't have any outline. But I wanted to keep my signature textures in the design. I created my design across two pieces of paper, on one I drew the outline of the image that I wanted which I was to scan in and use as a guide to colour around on another layer to make a completely block colour image. On a sheet of tracing paper I created all the textures I wanted, I still wanted to avoid using black though so I decided to colour in my texture lines in colours that contrasted the block colour they were on top of.

The problem with using tracing paper was that it kept moving while I was drawing over, so when it came to scanning it didn't quite match up in some areas. If i'm to use this technique again I should just use regular cartridge and a light box because it will be much sturdier and not move which will save me time when it comes to putting it together digitally.

I used a mix of coolers and my own picking to get my colour pallet. At first I liked it but looking back at it now I'm not quite as keen. The purple and yellow are significantly more saturated from the other colours and it makes the pairing awkward. But I do like how the texture lines look when they are coloured in contrasting colours. It makes them stand out much more, which I'm glad of because its the most time consuming part of my work.

I forgot to do my complimentary colour signature on this one, but there wasn't really an edge to put it on that was just one colour. Possibly I should have added the white border I did for some of my other pieces. 

I've now started following Illustration Friday on Facebook and realised they post their favourite picks throughout the week and then congratulate a winner which they liked the most. It is now my new goal to be one of their top picks.

Punch

For this week the word was 'Punch'. People seemed to be going with a lot of variations on word definition; punch as in to hit, punch as in the drink and Punch as in Punch and Judy. I chose to take the punching and drink versions and combine them. And so I drew a bowl of punch with little clenched fists floating in it.

Again I did a piece that was high in line as texture, I think I've come to accept that aspect as a heavy part of my practice. I think it is something that makes my work recognisable as mine. I wasn't really too happy with the shape of the bowl here though, it is wonky and not realistic in shape. I should have redone it but once I'd filled it in texture, it had taken so long it would be time inefficient to start again. I have to prioritise my work and I decided that this brief was mainly about keeping a constant flow of work happening, it doesn't need to really focus in on the final image. I think this project has been more useful for quick thumb-nailing and concept work. 

For the colours I used a lot of pink and purple because in my mind thats the colours of punch. Whenever it is displayed in popular cartoons in their inevitable 'prom' episode it is usually some hue of purple. I made the hands and spoon yellow/orange hues so that they contrasted highly from the punch. I gave contrasting colours to represent the parts under water, I tried just overlaying the punch colour at a lower opacity but it just created a dirty brownish purple colour and did not look aesthetically pleasing. Instead I chose a bright pink because it seems as though it could create that colour and also the contrast makes it clear that the hands are floating partly submerged. 

City

I've let my illustration friday blogging slip behind since cop, but now its over I plan to catch up and try to NEVER fall behind again.

The first word was city. At first I had the idea to draw a city growing out of some kind of animal's back but before I started I thought I'd have a look at the pieces that were already submitted. Most of them were cities growing out of animals backs. So I realised my idea wasn't quite as 'unique' as I thought it was. I still liked the ideas of having an animal or creature as the main part, but that was mainly because I like drawing organic things over man built things. I was thinking of different places I could sneak the city aspect into my design. So in the end I made it have city teeth and put big pipes on it's back pluming out smoke.

I used lots of little lines to texture the creature because I wanted it to look furry but without line i'm quite bad at suggesting texture with colour alone. So I went mad with line texture and covered the whole piece in it. I made the smoke plume in a circle around the creature so that it centred there creature as the main point of view. For colours I decided to use sweet shop bright colours, I think the image alone showed the idea of the city breaking down nature and I wanted the colours to contrast form that, the sweet colours seem more inviting. I've continued my colour complimentary signatures so that it is easy to see who the image is by. And hopefully this might lead people to my online promotional media.