FMP: More scenes from Origin story

Here's another example of me taking my roughs into digital, I'm really not sure how I feel about these at all. They have the right colours and composition but they are just coming across very flat. 

This is meant to be a wide panel, just showing distance between the characters of the two scientists (J's parents) although I'm not sure this will be in the first comic I make, It will feature later in it so theres no harm in thinking about it now. Sometime's working this way helps me think, if im drawing something I can envision then it's much easier to draw than forcing something out. 

FMP: Sketches and taking them to digital

I started with one of the main sketches I had concerning one of the storylines. One of the main arches in the comic will be to do with people that were concieved using the powers of a specific crystal (used later by one of the witches to do battle in). Our main character, J a faerie type character, will be created by 2 scientists (another faerie and a vampire) that will be referred to later as her parents, who use the crystal to modify the way a plant grows to produce faeries (for good or bad reasons im not sure yet).

I fancied illustrating this scene to start off with because it seemed like a good place to start for now. I scanned it into photoshop and used my wacom to draw over the top. I used the oil brush setting on my brushes because it had a nice feel to it. I started off using random colours but after I got stuck I decided to consult the adobe colour wheel (another really useful thing I was shown by Amy a few weeks ago.. Ive been addicted ever since). It was really useful and gave me a solid colour palette to work with. After that I just had to decide which way round I preferred the colours, orange background and green outfit or vice versa. In the end I went with the green/teal background because having a green outfit felt very doctor-y and a few people commented it hit their eyes abit strong.

Once I'd sorted out the colours it became easier to make, I used a slightly darker yellow to hint at  some sort of creation within the flower.
I like the final outcome, but I'm just not sure whether it needs more texture? It feels very digital for me, and a little flat?? I'm writing this down so I can ask Teresa about it in my tutorial

FMP: Basic Storyboarding

Up until recently I was working towards a proposal for my FMP, a proposal for a graphic novel that could potentially published (so I was going to propose 5 landscapes, 5 characters and a concept) however after having a chat with Ben and Teresa,  I've 100% decided that I want to make an indie zine/comic instead.

It allows me to me more exploratory with my art style, I dont have to recreate a dc or marvel esque graphic novel. I could create something that is more visually interesting. It allows me to enter it into more competitions and stand a higher chance of winning, I've mentioned before about Thoughtbubble and The Observer but theres also other places that might be interested such as No Brow!

I have started to establish what I want it to be more clearly, This indie comic is going to be based on nightmares.
we will follow a main character (lets go with J for now) who falls asleep in our world and wakes up in a different realm as a different being. However she regards our world as being a 'good dream', for her the different realm is real. She is an orphaned fairy, rescued by a witch who happened across their village when picking new flowers for her protection spells. The threat in the realm is a mysterious collection of nightmarish monster, not defined in any way other than being sludge/smoke like black silhouettes who hunt the inhabitants of the realm. J's guardian Witch is the protector of the village and as a result she has to hide J  during numerous attacks as J is not in control of her faerie powers and will do more damage than good. We follow J going to school and struggling to fit in with the other village children (none of who are faeries), a surprise attack on the village leads J to rescue her peers, who after seeing what she really is her "true" form, oust her to their parents. The town hold a meeting to eject J, believing she is the cause for the nightmarish beings repeated attacks, the witch defends J but ultimately reasons with the village to allow to walk her to the forest the next morning. Before that can happen, the village is attacked, the nightmarish beings have massive numbers and the witch goes to help, advising J to hide. A mysterious shadow enters the house and J prepares to fight the monster, before realising/revealing it is no monster.. (but instead a traveller from another town seeking refuge)

At this point in the comic I would end on, the next chapter/comic released would start with the traveller, however it would be a different person from our world falling asleep on a train and 'waking' up in the different realm. He would again be a different being (maybe an elf or a warlock) and we would follow a small portion of his story before catching up to where we left off. Doing this allows me to create some consistancy, I'm planning on having a few characters have this happen to them, then the rest of the comics would be realising that they are all interlinked in a certain way.

Doing this allows me to explore different landscapes without having to take the characters all there, for example the travelling stranger might come from a swamp land so we can see that in flashbacks and I can explore it creatively without having to somehow find a way for the charcaters to reach that point!

The issuu presentation is just a rough mock of a storyboard and some initial composition ideas (as well as kind of how they might be presented on the page)

FMP: Covers

Being as the actual comic won't be finished for the deadline, It makes the most sense to mock up the outside and the inside rather than submitting a load of half finished illustrations (or illustrations that just haven't had the right amount of care put into them).

Here are the proposed front covers for the first 3 comics. Ideally I think i'd want there to be a small collection of them alltogether to create a long story, but to start with, i'll start with 3.
Alot of the story is to do with journeying into the forest, so I wanted to keep that in the covers. I originally wanted to do a variation of different places such as a big golden field with a purple sky and a skull island but both of those bits won't come til later so for the being it makes the most sense to focus on the forest.

The first cover I planned out ahead that I wanted it to go from black, to dark green and to a light green. I planned this first so I could mix my gouache to blend, leave to dry and then come back to it. I wanted something inviting and colourful. I have put a fire there because it is my intention to digitally put in the main character J.

For the second cover I wanted to show a sunrise, in contrast to the falling dark in the first image. At the moment I'm not sure whether I will be leaving the tree's white or not.
For the last one, It was originally an alternative to the second, but I liked it so much and it felt different so I have kept it. I was thinking about having nightmares at the bottom so it looks like the waterfall is spilling the words.

I haven't digitalised them yet so i think once theyve had their levels adjusted its going to become clearer what I should do next.

EXP: Nation Of Shopkeepers: Lost in translation

M O C K  U P S 

After I had researched and developed the mural's for N.O.S, I wanted to show the client how they might potentially look. As spoken about in my previous blog post, N.O.S has a lot of brick walls so my options were to embrace that or alternatively paint onto boards to hang. The pub had given me free reign over what I wanted to do, so I chose to display my potential pieces as being on the wall.

This was fairly simple to do, I went through the website GraphicBurger to find the mock ups that I was looking for (a plain brick wall) and it was relatively simple to go through photoshop and put them onto the wall (which is crazy considering last year it took me 2 hours to do practically the same thing for 503).

With the Pig illustration, I showed the colour version on two different wall types to show that it could be subtle (with the red brick) or dominant (with the white brick). I also displayed the Black and white version of the mural so that the client had some variation to choose from.
I chose to keep the skulls on the white brick just because they didn't stand out at all on the red brick, something which I included in my considerations part of the email to N.O.S.
With the Psychic and The Witch I did similar things and tried to show how they both could work for the client's space.


L O S T   I N  T R A N S L A T I O N 

I emailed the client the proposals and waited for a response. After 3 days (and the weekend) had finished, I thought I would email again. Again I was met with complete silence,  in the end I sent over 5 emails spaced out over 3 weeks. I tried to ring but every time was met with the manager not being able to make it to the phone. Finally a month later I went in, to talk to whoever I could about what possibly was going wrong. I was met with the discovery that they had chosen to go with a friend of the client's who had designed and done the work for free, they simply didn't want to pay the money for murals off 'art students'. 
This only really confirmed what John has been saying in PPP, you have to make sure everything is very official. Make sure that they have a purchase order, make sure there's some kind of kill fee in place. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been let down by this, after my success at the Lifting Tower Project, i thought that this would be relatively easy and perhaps the route to go down as regards to freelance work. If anything at least this has taught me a valuable lesson in making sure theres some kind of payment upfront and to never under sell myself to get a job. 
I spoke to other artists who also had the same kind of let down from this client, but really is the client to blame? If other artists undermine artists by selling their art for free, HOW can we all get paid for our work. Too many times people expect art for free and if someone out there is giving them their talent for free, it only undermines us all really. 
Another one bites the dust, but another lesson learned I guess! 

EXP: Nation Of Shopkeepers Design Development

S O C I A L  M E D I A   A N D  J O B   O F F E R S

I was on Facebook the other day when I saw an advertisement from Nation Of Shopkeepers for a new mural design as they are refurbishing their current pub. They already had a fair few comments on the page, so I was quick to email them knowing that they'd probably be overflowing with emails from artists as it's such a central location. They replied back to me fairly quickly explaining what they were after and suggested I pop in to talk

E S T A B L I S H I N G   A   B R I E F 

When I went down there it became pretty obvious that Nation Of Shopkeepers had never really hired artists before, I spoke to a manager and she was pretty shocked at the price I quoted (£80 per mural piece... I know I even underpriced myself I wanted the job so bad) and asked whether I'd consider doing it cheaper. I explained the kind of process that I was going to go through and what she would be getting with her money. Finally we settled and she seemed pretty OK with it. 

I kind of had to write the brief myself, so I set myself the deadline of 17 February to send over proposals that left me with a month to perfect anything they wanted changing and to source materials cheaper (so much cheaper if you have time to order it online rather than buy from a store). 
I researched the pub and asked about what kind of thing they had in mind. NOS were really open with this, they werent interested in a theme just vibrant work. There was some mention of carrying on the idea of a pig (as they had a neon pig currently) and how much she liked Day of the dead skulls. So before I started I tried to keep them in mind. 

C R E A T I N G  I D E A S 

As seen on my issuu above, I did a few sketches of each piece before taking them into photoshop. As I had a week from when i first spoke to NOS to when I set a deadline, It was a pretty quick turnaround. These weren't going to be the final finals, I wanted something that could be fairly easily changed if they wanted different colours and I didn't want to invest too much time in a concept incase they were not happy with where it was going. So i kept it brief but professional.    
I repurposed one of my previous illustrations of a witch because when I was showing the client my instagram, that was the thing she liked and stood out to her. It isn't one of my favourites but it made it fairly quick to replicate digitally. 

I submitted my proposals on time and was relatively pleased with all of them, I wasn't a fan of the psychic but as I said before, most of these were done to show what kind of thing I could do, hoping that I could build on them. 

FMP: More thoughts

As I mentioned earlier, I've been thinking about a comic for my FMP for a while now. Just because it makes sense for me, this whole year has been based around exploring colour palettes and character design and creating a narrative for my work and creating a comic would really sum that up for the whole year.
I've talked about it briefly on my PPP about my plans for the future, but I really would like to have a career in character design or/and editorial. Creating stories is something i've always done and if the FMP goes into the final end of year show which I'm hoping it will, then it will represent what I've learnt through this year on the course. I've really lacked confidence this year but talking to creatives like Krystena Baczynski and Mike Mignola has taught me that it's okay to keep to yourself as long as you keep creating work that you love and through that will make you want to share your work. In her talk, Krystena spoke about how she likes to make comics for herself and I feel similar. I really want to create something that I would want to read. When I spoke to Mike Mignola after his talk, he really encouraged getting into a routine with drawing, planning power hours to work through and planning breaks. Taking both of these creative's advice is going to be crucial to this project, as soon as PPP is out of the way I can start creating more and more work. Everything up until now has been research really and I need to get moving with a plotline (I started storyboarding after Patrick told me to hop too it last month, I just came to a standstill).

EXP: Buttercrumble finals

These are the final illustrations for the Buttercrumble brief, they took me 1.5 weeks to finish overall. I was pretty pleased with them, especially since I've got some new photoshop brushes this was the perfect time to test it out.

I used the same blue and red in each illustration just to tie them all together, I also used the same brushes to they all shared the same texture.
The only problem I had was with the 'communication' one, no matter how much I tried I just couldn't work a way to get the colour palette to work, so I kept the same brushes and chose a different selection of colours. I informed Kathryn of this, but she was more concerned with the actual illustration rather than the colours. I think it was the only thing that niggled at me really, I wish i'd spent more time trying to fit it in.
The drawing of the twins proved quite hard as I knew it would be, I spent far FAR too long trying to make it work and in the end had to step away and leave them til last. This worked out well for me because by the time I got to the end, I had an established brush and an established colour palette to work with!
My favourite one from this collection is definetly the spot illustration for the 'working with Independent Leeds' answer. (this is the small magazine open with small bits of leeds inside). I think it works the best out of all of them, perhaps because it's mostly a line drawing and the others have variant degrees of shading???

Moving forward from this project I think maybe line illustration for the quick editorial pieces is the way forward!