Evaluation

In The work I have produced I feel that this project has gone well. I have made work to a higher standard then I ever have before. I have also successfully collaborated with another illustrator. In the past when we were teamed up I hated it and wanted to never work someone else again. However from working with someone with a similar thought process to mine I found the experience enjoyable, though still in need of work. As Rowena and I do have such a similar thought process we were often late at the same time or had forgotten to do the same things, which meant that we often failed at the same aspects of our project rather than having someone else to pick up the slack. Though saying that when we would realise that we'd both forgotten we were very good at working together to fix the problem. I feel that my creative process has improved immensely from this project as the short time frames I had to work to allowed me to just focus on it and get it done. from this I think my work is a lot better. without a brief dragging on I still have the motivation for it, rather than having to try to be excited about something that has dragged on for months. I do feel however as I had so much other work to be doing that had more pressing deadlines I wold completely forget to do the work for this module. This meant that 90% or so of this module has been completed in two to three weeks. I feel that if it had been shorter and more pressing I could have just got it done rather than thinking about how I've got ages to complete it. This idea of a vast amount of time provides a comfort blanket of not having to work on yet, especially when you've got so much other work to be focusing on. I was also very ill and unable to do my work when I needed to most and while I definitely think that if I had done my work correctly and to the right scale it wouldn't have been as  devastating, I also think that I at least need more studio time to just be getting on with work. I find that if I spend the entire day in sessions and workshops I'm too tired to start getting on with my work at four and just want to go home. After saying a that though I really do feel that this project has been worth while and has improved my work to a degree that I am proud of these and feel that I now have some work I could put into a portfolio. As previous work has been more about the process rather than the end product I have been dramatically lacking in any work I would like to present to people.

I need to learn from this experience and focus more on my time management, I have known that it is my major issue for a long time but I will have to put more of a conscious effort into keeping track of everything I have to be doing and to make sure I've not unnecessarily given myself too much work in too short a time frame.

Project Report

Presentation Boards

Offlife

I was running out of live competitions to enter when I talked to Rowena and she told me about Offlife and at this i remembered a three panel sketch I did when I was thinking about doing the we transfer brief by myself. I used this as a stating point to make what I believe is my first comic and apparently they can take a long time to do as this took over twelve hours to do. However those last two hours were my own fault as I started the comic before properly looking at the submission details, so I'd drawn the final frame as a long one to show the depths. THis meant that i had to painstakingly move, resize, add some extras and change the background over and over again until it fit. Though after doing all this and getting heavily frustrated with it and myself, I really love the outcome and for now at least I'm proud. If I was going to change something I think I would spend longer on the background colour to make sure that flows correctly. I think I'd also look into some more creatures for the the wider one as I liked them better a bit more squished together. I'm not sure I regret working to the wrong format though as I like the long version better for the flow of imagery.

Hii 2

I  originally drew this as a possible comic about being sick but I'm not great at comics and it sort of fell apart but as I liked the drawing I thought I'd finish it off for  a Hii Illustration submission. This became one of my favourite illustrations (that I've done) as I feel that everything works. The drawing doesn't have any obvious mistakes, the colouring has both pale, weak colours for being ill while also being lovely and spring like, and it has the stronger pink and brown colouring to stand out. There's also a pattern on the duvet that I made digitally (a first). However as much as I love this illustration I was unable to actually submit it as the error from last time persisted and didn't go through this time.

Hiii Illustration

Hiii Illustration competition was just wanting any illustration made in this year, which I found harder to work to as there wasn't really anywhere to start from but after looking at Pinterest I saw some summer shorts (the ones in the drawing) and as I was still feverish at the time I was drawing this I had lifted my hand to my head which immediately made me think of this pose. The rest of it came from me thinking of my ginger friend in the summer as she tans/burns and freckles all at the same time. While I found the colouring of the girl really simple I had a lot of trouble with the rest as I knew I wanted it to be summery but didn't know how to put these pale summery colours together and I wasn't sure if I should do the baking tools as bright vibrant colours like they often are or to make them more subdued. In the end after using coolors a lot I managed to settle on varying blues for the baking stuff and the background. With a green and yellow for the clothes. After spending so much time colouring it I finally got to submitting it and found that Hiii is clearly in another language that's been translated as all of the instructions made no sense and I had guess at what goes where. After getting over that hurdle an error page kept coming up when I actually tried to submit but eventually it went through, much to my relief.

Useless pet

Like with the previous one (as I drew them at the same time) I treated it as word association and the thing I thought of as the most useless in the world (something not in my house but widely known) was a pet rock. This was relatively quick to do but when I had finished colouring I thought it still looked a little flat. So I got a photo I took of the mold growing in my old house (originally taken because I thought if I inverted it, it would make a star effect) and inverted it and applied it as texture. While I'm not overly proud of this drawing I am pleased with how the texture turned out and it has taught me that I should try using textures more often.

Useless

I treated this one more like an Illustration Friday, using word association to quickly come up with a concept (or in this case two). I did this based of what came to mind as the most useless object I would still have in my house and i came up with a bulb with the filament broken. which sounds really dull but I do always end up with broken bulbs that I'm not sure how to recycle and thought that maybe others would too. However when it came to the digital side (which went really well) I realised that just a bulb is a little dull so I added an expression to turn a regular bulb into character. When adding it to the template I found that I had a bunch of the paler colouring outside of the lines that I just hadn't been able to see on the white background. So I had to rather complicatedly erase all the edges as I couldn't tell in their unmerged appearance where had gone over and where hadn't.

Aviation

This is the first Threadless that I did and it was the longest to do as I put a lot more detail into this than I usually do. I don't have a lot of interest in aviation (which was the category I had to do) and I can't really do or enjoy technical drawings like you would do for a plane but flying pigs were mentioned in the suggestions and I really like them particularly since I heard John Steinbeck's motto Ad astra per alas porci (to the stars on the wings of a pig). Bu as it was in the suggestions and really overdone anyway I wanted to find a way of doing it with some originality. So I drew it as a wild boar piglet (one of the cutest things in the world) and the wings are based of a picture of a bee-eater. To create the pattern on the wing I looked at where the bee-eater has markings and then tried placing similar ones where they would work with the existing pig. To show the different markings on the pig I drew lots of little line details. From there I was able to do the surprisingly complicated colouring of all the markings. All of the colouring was quite difficult as I had to find the right colour to show the wild boar piglet, which if you look at the photo has around 60 different colours to create the over all effect. It was tricky to find that base colour as if you did it too dark it took all the cuteness away and too light just didn't make sense. After finding the correct colours for this (with much tinkering) I had to learn how to do it in a mock up for the submission requirements. It gave out a template and though it took me a while to figure out I think it looks really good on the t-shirt.

Pinterest

While I have been forgetting to save them to a board on Pinterest, I have been using it to work on nearly everything and have found it an invaluable tool. It allows you to quickly see beautiful visually rich imagery which can lead to all sorts of inspiration.

Window

Like with the first one I just typed window into Pinterest to see if it would give me any ideas. I found the window that the shape is based off and thought about how much I like to read at the window, so I increased the size of the ledge and drew a girl reading on it. I messed up the face a little in the drawing so I drew an alternative but I managed to fix the original in the digital section. I've really loved doing these as I've been able to be more creative and with only having a short amount of time I've been doing them while I'm still interested rather than some of the long briefs where I can get quite demotivated as it progresses.

Strong

This time the word strong made me think of how calcium makes your bones strong (I guess advertising really does get in your head). so I drew a skeleton drinking milk and while this was purely coincidence I really like the way the hole in the pelvis looks a bit like a heart. I then thought that a pale blue would go best and to keep it as simple as possible.

Path

This is the first of the Illustration Friday that I submitted and I really enjoyed making it. As it was just for Illustration Friday I was able to just do what I wanted without having to worry too much or over think it. With such a short turnover (a week) there isn't really time to spend too long questioning what I'm going to do and I just got on with it. As it's essentially word association I just typed into this weeks word into Pinterest and found some really good reference material straight away. I took the path layout and the forrest placement from one of these images and then did them in the colours I wanted. I also really liked the idea of having a character facing the path as if facing a choice.

Illustration friday

These are sketches I drew for Illustration friday (passion and jagged) unfortunately however I never finished these before the submission went past meaning they were useless to me but I'm not really that annoyed that I didn't keep track properly as I don't feel that any of these were really strong enough to make into illustrations.

Presentation boards

These are the final 4 boards, as you can see they look different to my previous post as Rowena made hers look much neater and more visually interesting. to ensure that our boards all matched I handed my finished boards to Rowena and she converted what I had done to the same style as hers. We were also very lucky with our boards as the D&AD deadline was extended by a day and we were able to spend a more appropriate amount of time making them then we had before.

Boards

For the boards that we had to do for hand in, we decided to do 2 boards each and I made us a set board for everything to be placed on so we'd have a sense of professionalism and consistency.

Final print

This is the final print and I'm really happy with it I think both of our inputs work really well though like with the last one i worry they are a bit too separate and would have liked to have made them more whole.

Final comic

This is the final animated comic which I think works really well and I'm glad we got it put all together as we started running out of time. I helped to spend it up a little bit by taking two of the cries from Rowena to colour. I think Rowena did a really good job of putting the comic together I helped where I could but Rowena is the comic genius and I'm glad I was able to work with her on this. I do however think that the characters and the background look a little too separate and if we'd had more time I would have liked to have tried to fix that a bit better.

Print characters

When it came to doing the characters for the print I found it a lot easier as I didn't have to worry about how they have to line up together and could just draw them. This meant that they ended up looking a lot better than the other characters but I think both the sets of characters suit their forms. We also worried a bit about where we could place them as the text is at the bottom of the print and we didn't want to place them too near that or move it. in the end we both went home and overnight we both had the same idea, to go back to the gadgets from the start and have them hover. I did however forget to place the lines around the eyes which was stupid but I think that just by having them have longer proportions and a smaller head made them look older.

Colour

I tried to keep the colouring of our characters with the scheme of a sort of 60's rich pastel. To do this I have two short cuts I use and showed to Rowena. The first is to use unison pastels as a starting colour they have a wonderful quality to them and tend to be quite desaturated so they all go together very well. Sometimes I'll just use the direct colour but often I find myself playing with the hue/saturation to get it to fit in perfectly. The other one is a site called Coolor which will present you with an infinite amount of different colour palettes and allows you to enter in and lock in a starting colour to see what other colours would fit with that one. I also tried to show us wearing brighter, happier colours as time progressed to match the lightening and increasing optimism of the backgrounds. I showed my hair colour as the same as I don't dye my hair and don't think I will in the future but I made sure to try and find a new colour for Rowena's each time.

Lines

These are the final characters, for consistency I drew out the body shape and then traced it for each character as a base to start with. While this did help with consistency it also meant that the pose is a bit too similar between each year (the outline of the chest is always on the right etc.) and the heads are all a little too big but those are things that I'm fine with as it took soloing to do all of these. To show ageing on both of us I started placing little lines under the eyes that with each year or two would get a little more distinct and in the last couple they had two lines. I also started to plump us up a little bit at around the 5th year. Individually I aged us a little differently based on our individual personalities. For me I should different hair styles and lengths of hair and how I would start wearing longer dresses etc. and a general neatening of my appearance. For Rowena she has different hair lengths while staying relatively short as she told me that she doesn't like it long, though I thought she may be more likely to want longer hair when she's older so past 25 the majority has slightly longer hair. For her outfits I tried to show her in outfits that I've mainly seen her in already (you don't change your style drastically), then I started showing her in more skirts and dresses. While I did this I tried to find styles that I thought she would move into, a bit more feminine but still baggy and comfortable etc. I tried to show her as a little uncomfortable in a skirt when you see it for the first time and she wears shorts underneath to further point this out (as well as being what she does now when she wears a skirt). The other thing I tried to include was to nearly always have something big on her wrist as she told me that she feels that she has large hands and likes to detract from that by wearing something large on her wrist. as the time progressed I started showing it as a clunky watch and then as a future device. In the last frame I drew use with some of the future biotech to tie in with the background a little better. It would have been good if I started integrating these earlier though and if i did this again I would.

Notes

These are just some notes to ensure that Rowena and I were progressing in the same way and knew how to proceed. We also decided here to cut the characters off at mid thigh more like how a photo would look if you met up in the same spot every year, except for the final print which will show all of us. So far at least Rowena and I make a very good team and think similarly so we're pretty much always on the same page.

Development

These two posts show the development of the characters I drew, I was able to do more of me as it is easier to see who i'll be in ten years than it is to see someone else's. For the animated comic that Rowena is putting together we decided we'd do the gif part as a drawing for each year. This means I have to create 10 versions of the both of us with a year's change in between. I decided to show the different years by a few different things, Which were mainly clothes , hair and the adding of some lines around the eyes. You can see next to some of them there is which year should go with which hair/outfit but only next to my ones. This is because I was able to look into my wardrobe and see what I'm wearing now and what I would wear in ten years but I don't know Rowena's wardrobe so I've just had to make up what I think she wears now and what she might wear in the future. -same as previous text as the images are for the same but are in landscape rather than portrait.

Development

These two posts show the development of the characters I drew, I was able to do more of me as it is easier to see who i'll be in ten years than it is to see someone else's. For the animated comic that Rowena is putting together we decided we'd do the gif part as a drawing for each year. This means I have to create 10 versions of the both of us with a year's change in between. I decided to show the different years by a few different things, Which were mainly clothes , hair and the adding of some lines around the eyes. You can see next to some of them there is which year should go with which hair/outfit but only next to my ones. This is because I was able to look into my wardrobe and see what I'm wearing now and what I would wear in ten years but I don't know Rowena's wardrobe so I've just had to make up what I think she wears now and what she might wear in the future.

Development

These are just of me and didn't end up being anything like how our work went forward but I think they show an important step of drawing characters to look older as most of my characters look between 7 and 25.

Notes

These are some notes I made of what to focus on and what to do before we met up again. It also has the  sort of tagline that Rowena said and I thought perfectly captures what we're doing with this brief "Bring back excitement for the future".

Development

These are some development on biotech gadgets and some notes on how to proceed.

Notes

These are some notes that I took after talking with rowena about how we want the project to go.  We also decided to meet up every Thursday to catch up on where we both are in our progress and to discuss how to progress. We decided that as my strengths are character and colour I'll do most of those and Rowena's strengths are background and gifs so she'd be in charge of those. We both have the task of keeping the other one in check so we don't let either of us slack off.

Sketches

Originally I was going to choose the we transfer brief for myself before Rowena and I chose to do it together, so these are the sketches I'd been working before. I started them at a time when I'd been looking at a lot of Tove Jansson's work and you can really tell (particularly with the eyes). None of these were really right for the brief as they were too idealised and trying too hard to show what I'd have personally.

The brief

These are the notes I took for what I should be thinking about for this brief.

Collaborative

Rowena and I have chosen to do the we transfer brief which is about who we'll be in ten years time. The main things we have to be thinking about are what the deliverables are: one print, one online piece and research presented in either four images or in a one minute video, that the concept is key, that we decide the target audience and why we decided on them and to celebrate the person we'll be in 10 years.

Finals

These are the finals as submitted, as you may have noticed and what I noticed as soon as I started working on the digital aspects, I had drawn them to the wrong ratio. They were no where near wide enough, but incredibly I was able to correct this by moving some of the lines around. I think that this actually made the drawings a lot better as while I was fixing the ratio I was also able to move some others to create a better effect. This is most obvious in the corridor illustration as I added a wall for her foot to rest against, a line to look more like a skirting board and was able to make the perspective a little better. This has made me a lot more aware of checking with the brief before just starting drawing. I think the colouring works well on these and I'm glad I was able to do the gradient on the first like I originally intended. Though while doing her dress I stopped thinking of it as a pinafore with a shirt underneath (white sleeves) and it became more like a 60's dress with a collar. I don't really mind this as while it would have worked well with the white sleeves it doesn't detract from the illustrations.

Final Drawings

These are the final drawings I did for Alice. I chose to do the giant Alice in the forrest reaching for the mushroom, for the front cover as I think it's more dynamic and as you can see around the drawing I have more ideas of how it should finally be presented, once coloured. I chose to draw it in dip pen as I feel that it often gives my work a more finished, smooth look. However with dip pen as soon as the line has been drawn theres not really anything you can do to fix it, the legs are a pro,e example of this as they get so incredibly thin a the end. I have just accepted this as the price of using dip pen and hopefully through further use I will be able to get better at avoiding such blatant mistakes. Though the small mistakes like the lines being too thick, or there being a line where there shouldn't be can be fixed in the photoshop stage. Over all I'm pretty happy with the interior page, its from a scene that always stuck with me (when Alice starts crying and the room fills with an ocean of tears). However the foot that's supposed to be pressed up against the wall/edge of the page (to make it more obvious that she's too big for the hallway) just doesn't look right. I should have thought about how hard I find feet to draw and taken (or found) a reference photo to make sure it looked right and I'll definitely be doing that next time I want to show a foot in more than just standing pose. I am really pleased with the hands though as I can find those tough as well.

Presentation Boards

These are the boards I made for a session, They mainly show the reference I was looking at both for existing illustrations of Alice and illustrations that I thought would be useful for creating the effect I want.

Sketches

These are my initial sketches for Alice in wonderland. They mainly explore character and composition. I knew that I wanted to make Alice look less twee as if you actually read the book you'll know that she isn't twee at all and is actually very sensible. Drawing from this I decided to dress her more like a 1940-1960's girl with a shirt and skirt which then changed into more of a pinafore dress. I also played with her hair as I thought that nearly everything about Alice has been overdone and while I couldn't outright change her hair colour, the hair band or the colour of her dress I could completely change the style of her hair. I settled on the short straight bob as it is so different from her usual long, often wavy hair. I then worked on some sketches of scenes from the book varying how I draw certain parts. I was trying to capture the magic, fantastic feeling of the book and will look further into creating that with colour.

Alice in wonderland brief

I chose to do the Alice in wonderland brief because it was the obvious choice for me, it is a brief that is within the field I am most interested in and would be good practice for me to have to work to a set format for the book.