DEVELOPMENT
After the crit I decided to go with the groups decision and use the three as a set, drawing them up again but this time making sure that the character looked recognisable in all 3 drawings. I also double checked that all the measurements were right this time and that all of them were drawn in their correct frames. I left some of the details out of them like the kebab shop and what the dancefloor of the strip club would look like simply because I wanted to experiment with the Wacom tablet and draw those in digitally (which I did manage to do successfully I think). I scanned them into photoshop and worked with them from there.
The kebab shop came from me looking at my local takeaways in Hyde park and using that as primary research, as there were piles of sick and lots of rubbish outside most of them. I felt that the people were in better perspective this time as I'd been practicing drawing anatomy and I think this contributed to my style.
For the strip club, I didn't visit any strip clubs but I did look at some in a few in various grand theft auto games and listened to music that was playing in there. I also listened to lots of jazz music when drawing which I feel helped me get into the vibe. I kept the character the same but aged him, and also made him look like he's trying to resist. I really wanted my pieces to leave the viewer wondering whether he did do the things he was resisting from doing or whether he had self control.
I tried to show this in the first of the series where he is only a boy, I wanted the viewer to not be sure if he took the marshmallow (as obviously the article would go on to say those who ate the marshmallow went on to not have better self control and that would explain it all).
FINALS
I chose to go with digital because it was something that I had previously struggled and felt that I needed to work on, I used a Wacom tablet for this and it was my first time using one of those too. I felt quite proud at my finals because they achieve what I wanted which was a clean crisp finish without any pencil marks or colour inconsistency. I kept in the perspectives as they were one of the things In the crit that people felt worked best with the work and added something extra. I also changed the character in the third landscape illustration to look the same as the two others so all three became a set and showed a young boy growing up and going through different levels of temptations.
The first level of temptation is the one the article talks about, I decided to keep in the digitial clock as I felt it worked better than the suggested normal clock on the wall. I think it shows the urgency of the 10 minutes and that the character is already struggling. I used a more detailed brush for the kid as I wanted the focus on him, which is why I took all the hardness off the brush when i drew the marshmallows and the packet. The illustration uses less red than the other two because I wanted it to read that the temptations are more innocent when you're a child.
The second level of temptation and the second in the series is the same character when he's in his teenage/ early twenty years. I tried to recreate a scene from outside a kebab shop as I have seen during my time at uni. I'm fairly pleased with this illustration but I feel like I could have worked better on the perspective of it and that it might be better if I had done that. Out of the 3 this one had the most detail when it got scanned in which is why it is not as tonal as the other two.
The third level of temptation and the third in the series is the strip club scene. I was most experimental with the landscape one than the rest as it was bigger and had more space to fill so I could experiment with more brushes (which I did for the carpet). The reason most of this is red is for two reasons, the first being I wanted to show the red as a signifier for temptation and that the older you are the darker the temptations but the second reason is because when I was trying to fill the carpet in I accidentally coloured the whole thing in dark red which is what I thought was a disaster at the time I realised it worked so much better in that colour. So I changed my original plans and changed the colours around from what I wanted so that now black was the wallpaper and white was the highlighter and I used different shades of red for the different areas. I also drew in the stairs to make it have a better perspective and I used different levels of outlining to try and show how close or far away the dancers were (which is why those right at the back are in red).
Overall I was pleased with the outcomes, I feel like they work well as a set, they are clean and they give off a tone of voice which is what I wanted from the set. I think that there are weaknesses such as the perspectives (especially on the tiling on the kebab shop) let it down, as well as the straightness of the lines (even though I did want that drawn feeling and didn't want it to be too neat It could be straighter). I think that it is quite over complicated as a set of illustrations and that maybe something simpler could have been done that would have worked better. Although I had lots of ideas for this brief I think I struggled to create ones that I really rooted for, most of the decisions were made by my crit group as I struggled to pick one out of my ideas that I felt worked the strongest, there were certainly weaker ones which I could pick out but can't help wondering if some of the more simpler ones would have worked better alongside the article.
The feedback I received from the group was mostly helpful but a lot of it was negative as I hadn't managed to finish the third illustration on time which left me with lots of the comments saying that.
The most helpful I pulled from this were
"Images are quite dark, maybe stead of outlining them in black could have outlined them in dark red and used a lighter red for the block colour"
"More white highlights"
"The sense of atmosphere comes brought really well, evokes emotion"
"The same idea could be communicated with simpler compositions"
These are helpful as they either told me what I could do better next time, what i could do to improve the current work or let me know that I had achieved what I was aiming for.
Most of the comments were positive but one was particularly offensive and I felt that it was missing the point by calling me internally misoginistic and sexist. I don't think it was helpful and everyone I spoke to about it afterwards said that they felt the use of sexuality in the strip club was justified and suitable to the theme.
No comments:
Post a Comment