Studio brief 2 - DAY IN THE LIFE - first ideas

INITIAL IDEAS 

At the start of the brief we were all handed out different articles that we had to illustrate as if we were illustrating for a newspaper. We were given the dimensions (200x200, 290x105, 105x200) and told that we could use 3 colours including the background as one of the colours. My article was on self control and was about tests done to determine whether having self control as a child could impact your self control asan adult, the test involved marshmellows being placed infront of a child and that if they could wait 10 minutes before eating it they could have more. Some children ate the marshmallow before the 10 minutes were up and these children were shown to have less self control in later life than their fellow test subjects who waited the full 10 minutes.

With this in mind I set out to create a series of roughs before the end of the week and our crit sessions.

My first reaction was to draw young children, I tried to include perspective in my drafts this time as I had not really being able to do that in the previous brief. My first drawing was of a girl thinking about things and I tried to make it obvious it was self control but felt maybe it was abit too obvious. I practiced drawing children on chairs but again I felt it was too literal for the article. The idea behind the man looking at the girl in the jar was that the doctors watched these kids grow up and their decisions but I think the picture came off as something creepier and the emphasis strayed from self control. 

Even though it was a draft I tried to make myself aware of colours as I was going along, trying black and white as a first idea. 

The idea of food and self control were two ideas in my mind that connected strongly so I started to introduce them more into my ideas. 

I kept the idea of the children in mind as I introduced food into the scenes. On this one I had a table being in the front and the boy standing further back from it, I kept the marshmallow in there just so it fitted with the article. I also added a digital clock in the back but didn't colour in any numbers because I wasn't sure how long he should have left before he can eat it. 

The idea behind the cherry bake well cake was the they are trying to resist it but the reflection is seen in the cherry, I also put some other tempting things in the background for good measure. It was suggested to me that I also coloured them in so I had a better idea of what I was creating. So I coloured in the picture using ink and watercolour as I thought blue and red and white worked well altogether. With all the 200x200's roughs I found it easy to stick to the dimensions however I got really mixed up with the roughs for the other sizes which is why I had to change the ideas as some of them were the wrong size. 

I tried to keep the idea of children in there, I liked the idea of there being a market stall and the child going right for the wrong thing. I also got the idea of sticking children's heads on birds which I really like as an idea and wish I'd spent more time developing it as an idea. I coloured half of the market scene as I didn't want to ruin the whole thing if it didn't work in the colour palette I picked although I think the soft warm colours worked quite well. The market scene is done in watercolour because I felt it would suit it best, I couldn't decide on whether the children and sweets should have colour so I left it in fineliner so the details would be the most eye catching thing. These were both designed to the portraits dimensions without me realising that the landscape ones were actually much bigger which forced me to have a conversation with my crit group over whether they would work as landscapes or whether to flip them to portraits and lose some of the drawing. 

I started to think about things that adults try to resist and the idea of rejecting bread on a dinner table was in the article, because of this I decided to draw this idea out and ink it in red as red is a signifier for passion and temptation. Although I liked ink I realised that it would have to be in black ink if at all as the red made the baguettes look like fingers and that was not what my idea meant. 

I also drew out a bigger table with more temptations, I tried a different colour scheme opting for green and caramel although I don't think this worked as it made the things on the table seem healthy and if they were healthy they would probably not be temptations. I left half unprinted just so I knew what the original looked like. 

This was one of the portrait designs but drawn to the wrong dimensions (the landscape dimensions). The idea behind it was the girl at the top stayed away from the marshmallow and the woman at the bottom was the same girl but years later and showing how she stayed away from temptation, however I didn't think the idea was very clear which is why it didn't get developed any further than a rough sketch. 

The next idea I went for was almost linked with the idea of a time lapse, this one going with the idea of temptations we face growing up. This idea was of a young boy "Dave" outside a kebab shop. I made this one as a joke originally but found that it actually made some sense when I thought about. The character of Dave is resisting getting a kebab or burger from the shop and there are deterrents in his way but leaving the suggestion of whether or not he will get a burger. I knew I wanted red in this at some point so I made a few colour swatches and added them to the picture as well as making additional notes if I came back to it (such as the suggestion of adding flies and having dirt inside the kebab shop). 

Another idea was resisting the temptation of smoking as this too was mentioned in the article although it wasn't emphasised. I used the same character and placed negatives of smoking and positives of giving up on the page. I liked how graphical it could be and the potential to be a really nice clean piece of work. Again I struggled with the dimensions and this is drawn to landscape dimensions but obviously In a portrait format. I liked this piece but I struggled with how much negative space it should be left with and it what colours it could go into. 

I drew up only one in the correct landscape way and this is "john on a diet visits the strip club" and it sticks with the idea that time has elapsed and one of the children is facing self control even as an older adult. I drew women and men with cakes as part of their bodies and sexualised the bodies to try and emphasise temptation for the character. I knew I wanted darker colours and swatched black and crimsons into the picture. 

CRITS

The group crits were really helpful for me as I really didn't feel like I knew which ones I wanted to go with, only ones that I didn't want to pursue in the least. Most of the same things were said for all of them which was that the dimensions needed to be worked out before I could really make a decision, they picked out a few they liked but said that a lot of my drawings didn't fit as a collective 3 which is what the brief called for. This made me change some of them and convince them that the 3 I felt comfortable with could work well as a three set (marshmallow boy, kebab shop and strip club). The group agreed and suggested the character be carried through the three, although some one member of the group really liked the children and birds they felt it might not fit in with the article as well.