EXP: Self Evaluation summative statement

At the start of this module I was worried about not being able to find brief’s I liked or enough brief’s to do however once I started creating I realized more and more with each brief what area I wanted to move towards and the brief’s naturally become more adapted to what I needed my portfolio I looked like. At the end of this module, I feel proud of what I have achieved as an illustrator. I now have a project and a way of working that will progress after the university experience, as well as having the skills and know how to compete in more competitions and to a higher standard.

I progressed many of my skills throughout this module, my most important discovery was using gouache. I’d only previously used it for line drawing but using it to create solid images was a new approach for me that really works. I have also been trying to progress my digital work which I feel I have done to a good level but it is something I want to work on in the future. I have now started to research properly before projects and to mock them up at the end, which is something I haven’t ever done previously due to time constraints or not having the skill to do so. At the end of this module I can finally say that my organizational skills have really improved, there is still room for improvement but I am very rarely scrambling at the end of a deadline now.

I enjoyed using gouache the most in my projects because it gave me a good sense of colour palette, I enjoyed the storyboarding aspect of my Final Major Project. Storyboarding is not something I’ve done much of before but it has really helped me in how I see compositions and flow of a story. This year I enjoyed going to tutorials with tutors, I went with questions and really tried to learn as much as I could. In previous years Tutors have always been more of a check in than a place to ask questions but this year I found the range of tutors I could speak to really helpful and it has molded the way I have worked, from using layout paper to how I paint my pieces, their advice came in hand on a number of occasions this year and really pushed my practice forwards through hard patches of creative blocks.

My biggest problem this year was my confidence and having the confidence to stick with one way of working long enough to enjoy it, I have dabbled in many areas this year from animation, to projection to editorial and used a big range of methods to do it (ink, photoshop, water colour, pencil etc). I was feeling lost until a few weeks ago when Ben Cox encouraged me to find something I enjoyed doing and to keep at it until I produce something I’m happy with. Instilling that sense of determination in me was crucial to my final outcomes of Extended Practice, I think that’s the most important thing I will be taking away from this module.

Working in gouache is something that really works for me, both compositionally and colour wise, adding digital elements to my work will naturally progress as I have more practice with my Wacom at home. The next step for me is to continue working in this way and build up more pieces for my portfolio in this way so then I have something I can show to a client that is 100% the way I work, at the moment the only thing I was being commissioned for is my line work which isn’t very descriptive of me or the practice I want to achieve. I want to create more editorial pieces and continue my FMP into my future practice.

EXP: Project Report

EXP: Presentation Boards

EXP: SOI and rationale

EXP: Self Evaluation FULL

FMP: Mock Ups

 These are my proposed mockups for the book covers, I added in a red binder spot just because I'm unsure whether these would go around a hard book cover or not. If not I would simply remove the red binder and I probably would do this for conventions I am selling at (so the production is cheaper, I could charge less). I would pitch them at £7 for the time being, just because I would want them to be quality paper and in colour. Obviously if they were hardback I would charge more, maybe around £12-15 for them.

For the mock ups I kept the back cover text the same, but adjusted the tree colours and binder to match it's front cover. As seen in Nightmares 2, the tree's emulate the front cover colours and a pink colour picked from the rocks is used in the binder.

Seen again here on the third cover, I chose to make the tree's all orange to match the front cover and the binder to be the same as the front cover tree's. For the time being I think it's a good mock up, its showing the basic idea of what I'm going after. I think i might paint the tree's but it will most likely be after deadline and for the end of year show, but at least now I have a colour palette picked out and ready.

I'm really proud of these 3 front covers, it's probably some of my favourite work I've done all year and I really think that's down to the fact I've enjoyed making it and it's something that I've got to pick myself. This project is going to extend after uni and I would like to keep making comics and keep using gouache. When I spoke to Ben Cox back a few weeks ago, he told me that i needed to stick with something long enough to experiment with it and create a way of working with it, I think that gouache might be the way forward for me. It's a shame I didn't realise this earlier on in the year, but at least I have realised it. As much as I like digital art, I think I have a long way to come with being happy with what I make in photoshop, working analogue and taking it across is far more soothing and I am more comfortable with it.

EXP: Elina Pagett Work

Just a small blogpost to add to the end of the Elina Pagett project, She has just messaged me to let me know that these designs will be shown at London Fashion Week as she has various fashion shows she has entered into and been successful with. So far her work has been pictured on a few different bloggers ahead of her graduate show, even though my badges were a small contribution it's good to know that if she needs an illustrator in the future I'll be hopefully one of the first she goes too as well as the fact my work will be seen by a fair few people in the next few weeks!

EXP: Elina Pagett Badges made

Elina has just sent me these pictures of my illustrations turned into embroideries. I am so pleased with them, I think they've worked really well as embroideries!
This brief has shown me once again that I don't have to be involved with the making of the final product to have an impact (much like The Lifting Tower project) my input is reflected in the final pieces even though I didn't have to go through the process of making them. It is good knowing that my work translates well across into product because it's not really something I've delved into much over my years on this course, I've mostly stuck to editorial and character design rather than product, but this just shows me that I can work across areas should I want too.

EXP: Elina Pagett Line Drawings

I was really pleased with these illustrations and how they came out, as Elina had mentioned she preferred my line drawings I decided to do these illustrations digitally with my wacom.
After I did the research drawing them became much easier.
I drew a range of aprons so that Elina had the option of coloured ones, I kept the layers seperate so they could be recoloured if needs be. I also drew a variety because there were so many different types of aprons in the 70s (who knew).
Bra's I kept it limited to 3, I drew a model to start off with so I could understand where the straps would go. After a few attempts I decided to draw the red bra's without back straps because they over complicated the illustration. I decided to keep the model and submit her because she was so plain she could be embroidered.
For the underwear I decided to do a few that were unframed and then a few as if they were in heart patches. As Elina intended these embroideries to go on a jacket, I knew that mixing it up a little would work in her favour and match the work she wanted to make.
I left these all uncoloured as she has a range of materials, some designs would be unsuitable to stitch onto pvc or leather.  I added "bad girls do it best" to a picture of underwear because it matched the ethos of the time. The important part of this brief was matching the attitude of the era and also giving the client a variety to choose from.
As well as zippos she also wanted to show smoking, although I disagree personally with advertising smoking, I was being paid for these illustrations and also they fit into the work at the time. I found these the hardest to do because I couldn't get the right angle with the cigarette. I also had to photograph myself with the hand positions to get it right!
The zippos were far easier to do, I gave her a selection of 3 designs as well as the bare lines for her to embroider with.
I was most impressed with my glove drawing, I have gotten so much better at drawing hands that it only took me 3 attempts to get these right (wayhey!)

Overall Elina was really pleased with these and has promised to send me progress pictures once some have been made, as well as sending me a few badges after her submission.

EXP: Elina Pagett Research

I did some basic research for the illustrations, I wasn't exactly sure what a zippo looked like so I wanted to make sure I'd got the right dimensions etc before I started to illustrate.
Looking into ladies aprons from 1970's was a little harder, there were quite a few different styles so I might have to make sure I draw a variety for Elina and just let her decide which she likes best. I also sturggled with drawing the bra's, bras from the 1970s were really structured and I wanted to make sure that it really came across in my drawings.

EXP: Elina Pagett Brief

I was on Facebook when I spotted one of my friends advertising for an illustrator to help make her some embroidered pieces for her fashion show. Elina is a 3rd year fashion student at BCU and although I haven't collaborated with her before we've both mentioned how nice it might be to do so. So when I saw her advert I got in contact straight away. 

Although it's working with a friend I still wanted to establish a clear brief for it so that I didn't go in the wrong direction and so I could do the research accordingly. Elina spoke about her concept is late 1970's women and what kind of illustrations she was interested in, we went through my portfolio (whilst speaking on facebook) and she expressed how she would prefer my work to be the line drawing as it would go onto the embroidery machine the best. 

I also established a time frame, with friends there is always the potential for them to be unclear but luckily Elina was really good with communicating what she needed and by what time. 

She sent me over some of her research pages but I've still decided I'll do some of my own. 

EXP: YCN Final Thoughts

Just a small blog post to talk about my final thoughts about YCN brief. Although I liked the character design element to this brief, it was a very hard brief for me to do. It's taught me that I prefer briefs that are very particular, with an intended outcome and with strict guidelines as to what size images to submit. I think it would have been better to attempt the Penguin Brief this year (even though I was really not keen on the book choices) because Penguin have very regimented views on how to submit and they outline very clearly what they are after.
With the YCN brief it was very broad, but too broad. I spoke to tutors and they agreed that sometimes YCN has the tendency to be like that as it is more for those companies to get work for free rather than actually valuing a students artistic skills.
For me, what I'm taking from this brief is that if said guidelines dont exist, I need to set them for myself. So if there isn't a guideline to size, colour palette or intention, I need to adjust the brief to myself so that there is. I don't dislike the work I made for this project because I think it has moved me closer towards knowing exactly what I want to do illustration wise, but I don't like the outcomes from this project.
I do however really like using gouache, and I've only ever used it in a line drawing sense before I think that it's something I might keep using. I'd like to further my skills with it.

EXP: Matilda Mock Ups

I decided to mock my Matilda pieces up just as I did with the fantastic Mr Fox pieces, just so I could see how they looked in their intended places. For Matilda, I mocked it up onto a book and onto a poster format. It definitely works better as a book than a limited edition poster. I didn't send these along with my submission because they were only really interested in the actual illustrations as part of submission. 

EXP: Matilda finals

So after being down in the dumps about the failed result of The Witches illustration, I really tried to make a go of the matilda piece. After the unsuccessful attempts at a digital piece with Matilda, it was time to try and paint the image I could see in my head.

The gouache picee turned out okay, the tables were abit wonky and I forgot to paint in their legs (I was 1 day to deadline when I did this one) in such a rush but mostly it was okay. 

When I took it to photoshop I used the clone stamp tool to continue on Matilda and her classmates lower half which didn't take me too long. I then digitally inked some lines and facial expressions on. I'm not sure whether in the process I have somehow made Miss Trunchbull look like an angry spanish teacher instead of an ugly villainous teacher?? At this point though I was just trying to finish it to a reasonable standard and I thought it was okay. I had to clone stamp the original alphabet at the top to make room for the logo. We were given a range of logo templates to put onto our images, but this one seemed like the best placing. 

This is the final piece that I submitted to YCN alongside Fantastic Mr Fox. I didn't really have time to go back and fix the witches one back to a good standard. Out of them all I was probably the most pleased with Mr Fox, just because it was exactly what I wanted the image to look like, which is interesting being as it's the only one I didn't plan out composition wise. 

Feedback for this image was good, most of the tutors liked the focus on the Newt in the corner and the water affect that was used to show water in the jug. 

If I had more time I think maybe a more vivid colour palette with this one would have made it more appealing, I still stand by my decision to have Matilda in red and Miss Trunchbull in blue (just to show that they are opposing characters) although maybe it could have been bettered by some kind of pattern on the outfits. 

EXP: YCN What happened with The Witches

So I can now look back on this and say this was a disaster composition wise. I was so full of hope with my last post about creating a really good Grand High Witch piece but I think I overestimated the time it would take to fix this in photoshop.

I painted the initial piece in gouache and even as I was doing it, I was worried about the colours. The only bit I liked was the Grand High Witch, the dress was very her and I got exactly the side profile face that I was aiming for. Other than that though, it was a little bit of a train wreck, one that took me hours in photoshop to try and fix. After 3 hours of clone stamping and fixing, I gave up before I even started the inking. It was too busy of an illustration that it had lost it's effectiveness. If I was going to submit this piece (and at this point, I really don't think I will) I'd probably just cut the Grand High Witch out of this scene and photoshop her into another. I was too ambitious with the level of detail in this and forgot about the audience along the way. It's not people who are going to appreciate a lot of detail, it's kids who are more interested in the story but want something to represent the scene.

I'm really disappointed with this outcome, so I'm hoping that the Matilda Gouache I'm doing tomorrow is good enough to submit.

EXP: YCN, Witches Sketches

I've been sketching the idea of the grand high witch out, as I said in my last post, It makes the most sense for me to focus on her because then the piece can be my "one illustrated villain", although there's only a minimum of 2 Illustrations I would like to submit 3 at this point (depending on how happy I am with them).  I really loved the middle sketch on this one because I think it captures what I want her to show, glamourous but very clearly devious. 

I wanted to give her sharp angular features because this represents her vicious nature, I can't make her as scary as I might do because this brief is aimed towards 8-13 year olds. 

As I did with 11 second club, I drew her face a lot of times because I wanted to be able to replicate it easily if I decided to do more spot illustrations. 

After getting the general feel for how she'd look - cat eye make up, pointy nose, dark lipstick. I then progressed to thinking about composition, in the scene where the little boy discovers she is infact a witch, she is holding a meeting with all of the witches in England. I liked the idea of illustrating this because I can show variety in the witches but also similarities (such as square feet and wig wearing!) 

EXP: YCN - The Witches Research

I am also very tempted to illustrate a scene from the Witches for YCN. I've done some research into what already exists regarding the witches, just because I'm not really sure what colour palette direction to go in (and thats one of the main things I wanted to focus on for this).
Now I know that gouache is the way I'm going to make these I really need to nail down the colours first.

When I think of the Grand High Witch, I think regal colours red and purple. She is elegant but also very scary! As I'm aiming my illustrations at children, I don't want them to look anything like the movie version because that was straight up messed up and gave me nightmares as a kid. 

I liked the scene in the hall the best with all of the witches cheering her on so that's probably going to be the scene I choose. With this brief it asked for One Fantastical Creature, One child hero and one villain, so that means that this illustration could equate to being the fantastical creature (witch) or the one villain (grand high witch). As I already have Fantastic Mr Fox, I'm not sure whether he counts as the fantastical creature (probably) so that free's up the Grand High Witch to be the villain and Matilda to be the child hero. 

Im going to start with some sketches so I can really nail what I want her to look like, grand but scary!

EXP: Fantastic Mr Fox gets finished and mocked up

 Here is my final resolution of Fantastic Mr Fox, I really liked the final outcome for this, although I might have liked it a little more if the crane mouth was drawn slightly better. I ran out of time with this really but considering I made this in a week and a half I think it turned out alright. It's my first time using gouache to create solid shapes, normally I only use it in my line drawings so It's nice to see that it can turn out okay.

With the Roald Dahl package they also asked to put the logo on, I used the long logo because it matched the colours of the boot and other random ground objects perfectly.

I created a mock up of what it could potentially look as a postcard, as the brief was very broad it didn't exactly say what the illustrations were being used for. You could submit any size images so with that I took the liberty of mocking up both a book cover and a postcard image. 

EXP: Fantastic Mr Fox, decisions decisions

So I had a really clear idea of what I wanted for Fantastic Mr Fox, with the deadline getting too close for comfort,  I did a naughty on this one and didn't draft it out in the slightest before I did it. I started with digital, but the colours were not the right kind of vivid, I struggled to get the right texture involved and although it did help me composition wise to think about fox placements, it really wasnt working for me. I think it's one of those projects where if I'd started this and given myself 2 months to work on it, maybe I could have pushed through the awkward digital phase. However after spending 3 hours stuck to my laptop, I decided to join my friends in the studio by doing some painting. I used gouache and some somerset paper I had left over and was actually really pleased with what I was making. This is the scan in, Im too afraid to paint or pencil the facial features in for fear of wrecking them so there is going to be a little bit of digital editing but hopefully just enough to keep it looking hand made. 

EXP: Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr Fox

After being stuck on Matilda a while I thought I would just swap to Fantastic Mr Fox, I read this as a child as well but also really love the Wes Anderson adaption. I did some quick research for this one, just to see what covers are out there and if there's any colour schemes I could use.

Obviously red/orange is going to be in the colours I use because of the foxes coats, I did also like the contrasting blue that was used by Wes Anderson for the film poster. So I've jotted those down.
Also the scene where the farmers start digging out the foxes is the most poignant in my mind so I think that I will probably illustrate that one.

 I looked into other Fantastic Mr Fox illustrations and most of them are done in quite a traditional style, mostly painting if I'm honest.
I haven't thought too much about painting but I did buy some gouache the other week so It might be a consideration? I still want to persevere with the digital for now to see if I can get any closer to what I've got in my mind. If not I may have to start thinking of a different way to tackle this brief.

EXP: Matilda, Digital gone wrong

I've been stuck on the Matilda illustrations for a while now, it's taken me a week and these are still really horrendous. I keep trying out new compositions but I dislike every one.
I mentioned this to one of my tutors and they advised that I move onto a different book and come back to this later, or I abandon this brief completely in favour of another.

Half of the reason I chose to do this brief is because I felt like I havent had that many competition brief's so far, most of them have been commissioned or self lead ones and I would like to add more competition briefs in. Part of the reason I struggle so much is because I don't have the self confidence to enter into a competition and sooner or later that needs to change!

EXP: Matilda Sketches

I've started to sketch out some basic character concepts for Matilda, mainly focusing on matilda herself with a possible Mrs Wormwood as well. Once I was happy with these I started thinking about composition and what scene I wanted to do.

My immediate thought was to choose the scene from Matilda where she topples a jug onto Miss Trunchbull with her mind. Just because I feel like the obvious option every one will pick is the scene with Amanda Thripp in (where she is thrown) so I thought I might be able to do something slightly different with this one. The only problem I'm having is how to do it, I'm not sure whether to do it by hand or to take into photoshop and try my brushes out on it. 

EXP: YCN- Matilda Research

Before I got started on making any designs, I wanted to see what already existed out there for Roald Dahl's Matilda. It's a famous book, movie and film now, so I wanted to look at it's other representations.  

Miss Trunchbull is represented the same in both film and book, very masculine with a small topnot bun. If I do decide to illustrate her, I most likely won't stray from that. 

In comparison, Matilda looks different film to book, in the book she is described as having wild brown hair, whereas in the film it is very neat and ordinary. She is also described in the book as being taller whereas in the film she is average looking. 

Researching into character descriptions will give me a better sense of what to illustrate when it comes to Matilda. It's one of my favourite books so that's why I've decided to start with it. Other possible ones at this point that I might illustrate are Fantastic Mr Fox, The Witches and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 

EXP: YCN - picking a brief

In my statement of intent at the beginning of the year, I'd listed YCN down as one of the brief's I wanted to do. This is because I preferred their brief's over D&AD, I'm far more interested at this point in delving into something character design/ publishing based rather than packaging (and D&AD had alot of that going on this year).
In my SOI I originally stated I wanted to do the Royal Opera House AND Roald Dahl, however with 6 weeks to the deadline date and a little research into what both they both want, I'm dropping ROH in favour of Roald Dahl. This is down to the fact I've got a few other brief's going at the same time and I don't want to burn out or make weaker work.

Roald Dahl brief is a really broad one actually, maybe a little too broad even? For me, this brief is going to be about focusing some more on my character design and thinking about composition. I want to illustrate at least 2 scenes for this project, 3 would be the optimum but it depends on where I see my illustrations being placed and which stories I choose (for example there could be more than one character in the Matilda one?? So would it count as at least three iconic characters?? probably.. like I said.. this brief is very broad).

EXP: Oh Deer Greetings Card Competition

Ohh Deer are holding their annual greetings card competition, after my earlier success with valentines day cards I thought I would take a crack at this brief too. I only noticed the competition 2 days before closing date, so I didn't have too much time to perfect.

I started by looking at previous winners, there were a really varied mix. Some were done in ink, others collage and some were even done in paint (wow). There wasn't really anything that linked any of them. After scrolling through the current entries, I drafting out some ideas. Ohh Deer said that they were looking for Valentines Day cards or Mothers Day cards ideally but all cards in general would be accepted. They accepted square, landscape and portait sized cards.
I thought about doing some 'Im sorry for your loss' cards just because I've only ever seen awful ones in the shops. However, It was harder than first expected so I abandoned that idea pretty quickly.

I drafted out some idea's but if I'm honest, none really felt like they were communicating anything meaningful. Having downloaded some new photoshop brushes a few weeks earlier, I decided instead to just create the pieces in photoshop. It gave me the chance to warm up my skills on a brief without being too worried about the outcome. 

After playing around on photoshop for a while, I started to think about creating a 'you can do this' kind of card. I chose the format of a square out of the card option sizes just because I like square cards and I like the format. It also makes it easy to share to social media (especially instagram) because it fits in with the grid look very easily.  I had a lot of fun with this one, I kept the colour palette muted blues for the back ground to give off a sense of loneliness, but by introducing bright colours in the sky, it really popped and gave an atmosphere to the card.

With the second card, I opted to make another Valentines Day card. I did consider re-purposing my "love hearts" card from the earlier brief but thought that maybe that was a little bit lazy? Also I'm really having fun with these new brushes (kyles) on photoshop so I thought I would just make another fresh one. The 'Bee Mine' pun is over used and theres always some cheesy bee's on the valentines day selection so I thought that by adding it to the chest of an androgynous character might give a slightly different vibe to the phrase. The bee took forever to draw, I must have googled bee's and bees from above a tonne of times to create something that remotely resembled a bee (I didn't want it cartoony, I wanted it more lifelike).  

This brief was a quick turn around for me, I have had a lot of briefs that were a month long and to pick this one up last minute felt nice. I like working under pressure, perhaps more than I do with a long brief where there's ages of time to mull around in ideas. Having a quick brief like this forces me to make snap decisions, pick a colour palette quickly and try and really nail those compositions down within the first couple of hours. 

 After I entered the competition, I made a mock up of both of the cards on a peg line (because that's what I do with all of my cards) and waited anxiously to see if I had been picked! Unfortunately this time I wasn't been picked, I went to look at the competition winners and the obvious theme they'd gone with was minimalist illustration rather than full card pictures. This is okay though because I'm slowly becoming happier with my work and there is always next year and adding these to my portfolio can't hurt. 

This brief was mostly a practice for me, practice to work with new brushes and really define my colour palette useage. Compared to previous cards I've made (even just last years Valentines Day cards) I can really see a difference in my considerations of colour and composition.