A matter of opinion

In this brief we given the option to choose one of fourteen quotes and illustrate it. I chose "A drawing is simply a line going for a walk". I knew straight away that I wanted to take it quite literally and draw a child going for a walk. I wanted to draw the child as a continuous line to really emphasise the fact that it's a line going for a walk. I thought that the child should remain very two dimensional so I knew it was necessary to get the face right, especially as a side on faces are a weakness of mine.I feel that I got better at drawing the face for these and that they worked much better to exagerate the noses. I also did an early colour test with a copic and  decided that I didn't want to use them at all for this brief. One of the ideas I liked was to draw the character with an explorers hat to show how for a child a walk can be an adventure. I also drew some roughs of places he could be.

After settling on the boy I did some colour tests, none of which went incredibly well due to my lack of skill and experience. I tried to do some coloured pencil ones to really play up the childish aspects but it just ended up looking terrible. I need to further practice with these mediums to mainly get rid of the marks left behind and neatening up. In these colour tests you can see how I wanted for him to leave his line behind him to show that he's all one line. It gave me the idea to do a children's book with his entire journey mapped out.

I also did these two with the idea of really emphasising that he is a line. I also thought that I could simplify all three and slowly draw out the boy with each illustration. However I decided after this that I would keep the line separate from the character as to not confuse the three illustrations as one.  

I then did some experiments to show the line differently. The first one below is a mock up of how I would do it with thread and pins and the rest are a red dotted lines, the idea for them are both based on ways of showing travel on a map. Its from this that I moved more onto the island and completely separating my illustrations. Keeping them separate was the main trouble I had with this brief as I wanted to show his progression in his journey.I really love the island design I think that its simplicity is what works best and on the island the house is my favourite, I think it's design is lovely because of oddness of it and how much potential it could have for a story. In the end I decided to do three separate squares with the three aspects of  the island on them and after talking to Matt I decided to try to use photoshop to colour them.

I did some Photoshop tests and really liked the paper texture overlaying it,, it stopped it being too flat but in order to keep the paper I couldn't adjust the levels and that made the lines too pale. I know there is a way to add the texture afterwards but I don't know how and this proves to me that I should continue to practice with Photoshop.

These below were my final pieces. One of the aspects that worked well in this is the shading it makes the whole drawing look a lot better than without. However I need to learn how to use Photoshop better, perhaps how to get the right brushes and play around with it. As I said these were my final pieces until in a moment of exhaustion I forgot to move the first two images from my user work folder and lost them. I had to redo them and because of that they ended up a little different.