Beginning a story plan

So i've decided i should figure out a basic structure to the story and whats happening to make the poetry around. Because without a plan theres a high risk of me just getting side tracked in my poetry and not keeping the story moving at a regular pace.

I have some beginning points that i have planned out already

1. i will introduce the land, characters and the littering issue.

2. Sprig sees the bird balancing on the bottle. Has the idea

3. They gather bottles float them and try to get on. They struggle to stay on top and fall in the water

4. He ties a board to it and is rather pleased it balances but a soon as he moves from the centre it flips him into the water

5. a mouse it caught laughing at them and teaches them to treat it like a table so there must be a bottle on either side.

6. They get on the new improved platform and it works. they float out a bit. then the sprouts begin to complain, whats to eat? wheres the loo? how do we get back?

7. Soil pushes the platform back and they start thinking about food supply and how to drive it

once they get the design down that is when i will introduce the magpie that steals from them, which brings up the conflict in the story. They will eventually strike a deal with the bird and be happy.

Media Play

I drew out a scene using my characters and I was thinking of tracing it and painting so that i can use analogue media to colour my images and then just put them together digitally.

I had to trace over in pale blue so that i could see where to paint. I understand it would have been much easier process wise to just paint the colours first and then base the line drawing on the paint. But i don't think in shape and colour very well, i'm definitely a line based thinker. 

I quite like the final image but i think the time it took was not worth the final product.

Also after talking to Ben he felt that a much simpler colour scheme would be more beneficial. I think a limited colour could be nice because in want some of my pages to work as floating spot images that don't touch the edges and a limited colour scheme lends itself to that process much better than painting everything. Also i'm not a great painter and there's the issue of having consistent colour of the characters and i'm not sure i could repeatedly mix the same shade of a colour from scratch.

I am the walrus

Since the boxes format didn't quite look the way i wanted i decided to go wild and use a walrus as my box base.

This is my line drawing. I used reference for the walrus to get it to be an accurate depiction and be obvious what it is. I think the key part to the walrus is first of all the tusks but my favourite part was the ripples of flab where the flippers are stood up. It really frames the chest of the walrus and made it a perfect place to put my final line. 

I was worried that because the final line was bigger than the others that it would be mistaken for a title but i handed it out for people to read and they agreed that because of where it stood between the heights of the other two rows of poetry made it seem like it was to be read last and not first. Also the whole social reading rules in this country mean you start in the top left and go across and down. 

At first i made the box parts in really fleshy looking like it had been carved out but then i opted for the yellow as i wanted a bit more contrast within the image and the pink was making it a bit more distinctly gross and grim. 

I led the characters til last to colour and i struggled to find the right colour. Because i wanted to use the colour scheme i already had and not add to it. But the characters wen over both parts of the colour scheme. I ended up opting for a slightly orange yellow so it goes with the yellow. I erased like highlights into them though to separate the similar colours further.

This was my final image which i posted to my social media pages. But after i finished i worked on the bed one putting the texture in and i really liked how it changed the image so i tried it on this. And i think it really adds to it. Texture is something i think i want to play with more in this brief because in think it makes it seem more gritty and less bright and beautiful which fits better with the subjects i am tackling.

Blue improved

So it felt a bit awkward and long and since this poem was structured like my cop ones i wanted to do a similar style of presenting the poem, where there are boxes stacked up with characters inside and the poem is told through speech of the different characters.

At the length the last poem was at it would be a really crowded board of boxes to fit it all in. So it was time to slightly refine it into a doable amount

New and improved (slightly)
Blue

Feeling blue,
Are you?
Me too
But what to do?

If i grew
Would my view
Be anew?
Could i brew
A positive skew?

Theres a few
Damned with the hue
How on earth do
We get through?

Lean on who
Believes in you

There may not be an end in view
But just be strong, let you be you
Maybe blue but lighter hues
One day look back and say i grew

But just relax while we work through
I am the walrus coo coo cachoo

My original plan was these boxes and there would be characters in them. I will post a picture of the boxes one i did do but at the moment its at home. Either way i wasn't crazy pleased with the result and i felt like the boxes could be more related to the words than it was. 

my lovely list of rhymes

I found the first draft on my instagram!

The characters didn't feel relevant nor the format. Which is why i wanted to change it. Although it was quite popular on a lot of my social medias so i think this box as poetry thing is working pretty well for me.

Blue: The poem

Feeling blue?
Are you?
me too

But what to do?
If i grew
Would my view
Be anew?

If i flew
And did not stew
Could i brew
A positive skew?

There's a few
Cursed with the hue
Of that dreaded blue
How on earth do
We get through?

Strengthen the glue
Within your crew
Lean on who
Believes in you

There may not be an end in view
Just be strong, let you be you
Maybe blue, but lighter hues
One day look back and say i grew
But just relax while we work it through
I am the walrus coo coo cachoo

blue

So i already started to run out of steam with poems just about sleep. But i think it helped me to separate of aspects of depression. So i want the book to still be about depression but i don't have to worry about definitively defining what depression is and instead just work on small aspects of the over arching subject.

I was thinking the final book can just be called blue. Which made me want to make a poem about being blue. I wanted it to work a bit more like my poems from last years cop where i just took one word and everything rhymed with it and thats how i built up a poem.

EG

A media sensation,

A child throwing away education

In the hope of liberation,

Only to be met with damnation

As a concentration 

Of immigration and rising inflation

Causes agitation across a nation.

When you think a single donation,

Can create a foundation.

We make no personal relation

And call it thought mutation,

An abomination

When stakes rise to decapitation

But it's ok Dear, don't lose your head.

So i took the word BLUE

mainly because the wifi was broken and i couldn't use my trusty rhyming dictionary to find a good word with lots of rhymes. So i just wrote down every word i could possible think of that rhymed with blue. 

Bed

These were some quick thumbnails of what i was thinking of about putting with the 'Bed' poem. It is nice and short and i think it could work well framed within one image.

I most liked the image of the head filled with pillows. I wanted to use a circle format to make myself create a different looking image. 

I used a plate to make a circle base and i made these little branches come out and meet the circle because i liked the idea of this natural frame being made around the image. I made it thick with tiny dots because i liked how it acted as a solid but with the soft edge as nothing is actually attached to each other.

At first i was using a blue colour scheme because i felt it was appropriate to the subject of the poem. But then i was playing with the hue saturation key which i like using because it shows the the options that i didn't think of. 

This burgundy reddish tone is what i ended up picking out.

I kept the pillows blue though because it added a point of contrast.

I made the dots and the branches around the head white on black instead of the reverse because in feel like the dots look much more impressive in the inverse tones. 

I added a texture to the red which i don't normally do but it was so absent of the usual heavy texture i use that it looked wrong and blank. The texture darkened the colour as well which made it possible to make the text white. I think this worked as it matches the lines of the circular border. I moved the lines of poetry about as well because my original hand drawn ones weren't as centred as i would have liked. 

Some imagery

I just put a nice border around this one so that i could put it on my instagram and show my followers some work in progress sections of my working process.

This one was for the 'Lights are on but nobodies home' because it's all about the lights staying on representing not being able to sleep. I designed the character first and traced it so that i could have the four around one centre point. I fish i had done it more exact so that it fitted together more satisfyingly but it still works. The only issue being that its so awkwardly large that i can't scan it in. So this isn't a viable image for my poetry book.

Some Sleep poetry

Bed

There's a certain comfort when in bed
The world does not exist
No deadlines, fears or interactions
Bed presents no risk



Wake up

Maybe if i close my eyes
And concentrate real hard
I'll sink into the squish and soft
My calm; remain unmarred

But the sunlight is beckoning
Piercing through the sheets
Noise outside and drafts intrude
Don't they know I'm trying to sleep?

I should probably get up eventually
It can't be as bad as it seems
In a matter of hours ill be back in these sheets
In the safety of my dreams


The lights are on but no bodies in

The head hits the pillow
But the lights remain lit
This attempt at sleeping
Is blatant counterfeit

The minutes lap the hour
Birds greet the sun
The old day hasn't ended
Yet another has begun

Sleep, sweet unconsciousness
Has become a chore
Please turn off all the lights
Windows matching door

Some changes in plans

So i have changed my mind about trying to make the words part of the image. I don't think that that would be time well spent as I'm not a typographer and i know very little about the subject. I would rather work on the images themselves and the poetry separately so that i can demand the best from both.

I was also thinking about how its really depressing to write about depression. Which seems obvious now but it never occurred to me. I was thinking of just taking an aspect of depression like the sleep part. So that i have a more focused subject.