Studio brief 3 -PLAY PLAY PLAY - first ideas

Our third brief consisted of is being given a word and producing three A3 illustrations that worked as a set one being solely type, one solely image and one image and type and showed three interpretations of the word. I got given the word play and started to experiment with it and it's different meanings. 

My first sketch was "playing hard to get" in ink. 

Playing hard to get, playing cards and a quick sketch of the word - in quink and nib. 

Ideas including playing the Christmas star in the nativity play, 

being a prankster playing tricks on people, playing your hand, playing hard to get (on a mobile through texting), playing your hand, playing dress up, being in a play. 

I chose to draw little aliens just because it was nice to use something different and I thought it could be amusing. 

I also felt it would be easier to put play your hand if there were aliens and their hands were different to human hands. This is one of the ideas I really liked because I thought it was really strange. 

I also drew a rainbow inked hand which I really liked but it didn't really go anywhere. I just think it was nice to draw a bigger version next to the small hands on the table. 

I also spent a lot of time drawing various dancing women with music playing as warm ups for me creatively as I find it helps me to draw better anatomical people when I warm up. Although these could have been used for development they weren't as I knew they were just drafts. 

The woman dancing led to some more interesting drawings of the woman and an alien, I was thinking "playing with your heart" when I was drawing these. They are really rough ideas but I felt that working outside a frame helped me for this as I think working inside frames had stifled me in my previous brief. I liked the idea of playing with the heart but it wasn't picked up in the crit. 

It took a really long time for me to want to start drafting type, I was really hesitant in this brief to use type. A lot of the first drawings (like above) were just playing with the idea of it. 

I homed in on the idea of computer games and that really blocky way that old computer games were. 

This helped me get started on some type roughs, I really liked play In the colourful blocks as they were really ambiguous blocks and allowed me to play with different shading. 

I then went to look at old video game type and copied that into my sketchbook. I liked the phrase "play again" as that's what a lot of the old games used to say to tempt you back in (rather than game over). 

I started to cut out the words and brought some starry wrapping paper and cut the phrase out of that. I started to feel that maybe I was getting too attached to this so I left it and went to experiment with other things. 

I played with the idea of something you could touch, wool and thread initially but then developed into brail (which is not photographed as it doesn't show up well on camera but is in sketchbook). The idea I started to get was drawing a musical sheet up and threading the lines into it and potentially the word play. 

I drew it out in pen but felt that it seemed to work better with the thread being there as well. I also picked out quotes from famous Shakespeare plays as another way to connect to the word play. 

After I had finished developing type I started to go back to image and type, I created a few little characters such as Colin above who were children playing. Colin is playing a triangle which I thought was sweet as it was something I did as a child. 

I also brought out the earlier idea of dressing up and applied it to animals as well. I used watercolours as I wanted it to have a nostalgic feeling and be softer. 

I tried to make it so they told their own little stories. I really enjoyed drawing the little characters.