Still Hunting

A quick catch-up...


A while ago I prepared rough sketches for the purpose of showing what would happen in my book - a children's adaptation of Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark". Here are some:

A lot of my spreads looked a bit same-y, so I've experimented with angles and zooms - to make the pages more dynamic.

I'm now a the stage where I've begun mocking one or two of these up, to check my chosen colouring method works (bare in mind these are roughs):

The coloured areas are pastel scans, and the drawings are me making use of my new graphics tablet. Here's one of my characters:

I've created the top two in Photoshop, but I have experimented with drawing the figures in Illustrator... My only issue is that I can't seem to get Illustrator to recognise pen sensitivity (hence his flatness)... If anyone has any light to shed then please do!

Carrolling

A while ago I posted about how I'd be producing spreads for a children's book adaptation of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark", and that it wouldn't be long before posting some of my actual artwork for it.


Two months later...


It's been a bit stop-start this one - I think I've known how it's going to look since deciding on my story (not really advisable, but never mind), and as such have struggled to motivate myself to disappoint my imagination by actually putting it down on paper. I've finally relented, and produced these over the last few weeks/two months. I imagine this'll be something which occupies me over Christmas.

The imagery needed to be mysterious, but also fairly vibrant and quirky. Backgrounds will be in pastel, with the dreadful drawings seen here laid over the top drawn digitally.

These two show slightly better how a finished page would look - having two spreads out of thirteen dummied up is slightly behind schedule... But at least I know where it's roughly going.


I'll probably post more of this kind of thing when it actually looks good - anywhere from two months to two years then!

The invasion of the paper people

My flatmates think I've gone mad, and, with a title like that, you probably do too.

As an art and design student it's quite usual for rather uncommon things to become commonplace in my room.... In the past, the odd things hanging around my room have included empty bottles of wine, numerous copies of the Radio Times, and shelf brackets. Recently, the oddity has been chains of paper people.

We were asked to design an illustration for a piece of writing which can be found here. It's well worth a read - the writer is talking about something he calls "Politeness Enforcement Tactics", referencing the way people act towards each other in society. He mentions people placing bags on seats they aren't using, people speeding up to zebra crossings, and people cutting into queues - and then goes on to describe ways in which we can fight against this (the "tactics" I just mentioned).

The dominant story is one of a queue for a bus stop, and the way in which the people in the queue work together to exclude a queue-jumper. I won't explain it all (it's worth reading!), but my ideas were to show a unity between the queue members, and to show an exclusion of the jumper. Hence why I have paper people stuck on my mirror, perched on my windowsill, and sitting on my bookcase.

I guess in part my flatmates were right - using the actual paper people was mad, as it didn't quite work visually in my initial ideas here as I'd hoped it might. So, I literally went back to the drawing board, sketched out some linked people, and created a cityscape collage.

It's a little different to your usual editorial illustration, but I like the hands-on feel of the collage. It has a diagrammatic look to it, created by using grid paper, which links in to the clinical nature of the people-chain. Probably the greatest difficulty was in transferring the visual from paper onto screen, although it did give me chance to tweak a few things that weren't quite right.

I'm not going to lie, I hated this project. I struggled to get a grip with what the article needed in terms of an illustration - and this came out in my early sketches. However, I am pleased that I was able to work through it and produce a piece which is by no means fantastic, but just about fits the bill.

I'm keeping the paper people up in my room (in case you were wondering). It'd be wrong to throw them away after I went to all the trouble of naming them...

This is a post about an ex-girlfriend.

Well, actually, it isn't.

It's nice to have fans. Having fans was something I've never really considered would happen to me, but since starting this blog there's been a certain individual who compliments my work almost every time he sees me, often before a "hello". Great feedback to have, and I guess it makes me want to treat my work as something for others, rather than just myself.

Anyway, before this becomes some kind of acceptance speech I'll cut to the chase.

Above is a sketch I took at a recent acoustic evening, hosted in the SU. Do I sound odd if I say it's a moving experience to draw whilst listening to your subject play music? Probably, but it's true - must be a weird arty-brain thing. Anyway, if you haven't already guessed, the sketch is of the person I mentioned earlier, as he happened to be playing on the same night I decided to take my sketchbook.

I took the image, blew it up, and traced over with Promarkers, before adding detail with black fineliners.

It's a far from perfect image, I still struggle with people - but if it was 100% accurate then it may as well be a photograph. I enjoyed producing this - drawing was made easier by the fact that I appreciate Ellis' work the same as he appreciates mine (even if a great deal of his songs use "This is a song about an ex-girlfriend" by way of introduction).

Anyway, leaving behind the mutual appreciations and the imperfections, I'm pleased with the results here - a character appears on the page, and I may be finding an artistic niche in which to use Promarkers.