Even More Monsters...

Few more to add into the ever growing family!
Really want to see if I can push myself to create at least one of these guys per day.... Wish me luck :)

Posca Pens Practice

For my 21st birthday I recived lots of lovely new Posca pens! Decided today to have a little practice with them....

Really love being able to draw on glass! However I did find it difficult drawing upright and also found that when filling areas with colour the pens left stripy marks. This was of drawing would be most sucessful when doing line art or typography and not for filling areas with colour.

For the Music brief I had initially intended to do the entire thing using paint pens... This practice has made me realise that it would be incredibly difficult and the quality wouldn't be as good as it could be...

8x8

For the 8x8 brief I was assigned to a story called "Save You" by Cheryl Scott. The story is told from a girl worried about her grandmother who suffers from Alzheimers and has had to live in an elderly home because of it.
I came up with several ideas mostly based around loss of information and trapped/contained.

For my main illustration I decided to go down the loss of information route.

I am really happy with this result. The image is showing the gran as she was before and then the shredder reprisents how she is slowly losing who she is. I think it works well because we assosiate shredders with getting rid of personal information and this is what happens to a person's mind when they suffer from Alzheimers.

After speaking with fellow students, Gary and Jo, I became aware of some improvement that could be made. They weren't aware that the gran is surposed to be made from paper. They suggested I try having the gran as an image on a piece of paper being shredded.

This is what I came up with as an improved version of the first image. I'm not as happy with this one because the paper dosen't look right to me and also the character has had to be reduced in size drastically to fit in the paper. After seeing this version Jo suggested I try having the gran as a polaroid photograph instead of on paper. A polaroid photograph would reprisent a memory much better than a printed image. I intend to create a 3rd version of this image during this week. If I feel the first image is still stronger then that will be the one I submit as my final.

For the spot illustration I decided to go with the idea of being contained.

I assosiate grans with collecting buttons and other bits and bobs. My initial idea was to have a jam jar filled with lots of little interesting things and then to have some of the objects in grey scale to show somekind of loss.

This didn't feel obvious enough so I discussed my idea with Jo and she suggested using a jewellry box or a locket. I really liked the locket idea because it's a contained photo and it's also something I assosiate with memories.
This is what I have come up with so far and I'm really happy with it. I can't see anything that needs changing yet but shall seek feedback asap...

More monsters!

Have been trying out a new working method to give my monsters more personality. These monsters were designed around an object or word rather than just from my own head.
Here are a few examples of how they are looking so far...

...Spanner...

...Triangle...

... Hedgehog...

Deborah Allwright

Came across the work of Deborah Allwright here in a featured artist artical on AOI Portfolios.

http://http//www.aoiportfolios.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=775&Itemid=101

Instantly fell in love with her work. Really love the exciting compositions and the use of textures. Her work is a perfect mix of hand drawn and digital. She creates her images first and then puts them together digitally.
Her work has made me want to be more experimental with textures and has also made me realise that backgrounds are VERY important with children's book illustration. Her images show the worlds that these characters live in very well and would help a child to feel more involved in the story.

The above image is my favorite of all the work i've seen by this illustrator. The use of graph paper for the buildings and then again in the below image for the sky is genius!

More Monsters

Here are a few new monsters... Still think they need to have more individuality to them.

Monsters Improved

Have just been playing around with the monsters using part texture and part block colour. Have also decided to try them with different eyes... Here is how they will be looking in the final versions. Will add highlights to the monsters using a white paint pens once they are mounted on the glass.


The white areas will remain see-through on the glass... So anyone standing behind this monster will appear inside the mouth.

Music Brief: More inspiration

Another children's tv series I have been influenced by is "Chowder" created by C. H. Greenblatt. I really love the use of textured patterns in her work. The characters each have textures for their clothing that remain static as the characters move around.

My characters are also made up from painted textures to give them more depth. I really like the idea of just having cirtain parts textured. I will experiment with just having the monsters fur textured and their horns, eyes and claws as block colour.

Music Brief: Inspiration

I have really been inspired by Craig McCracken's work for the cartoon series "Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends". His characters are so different to look at and yet you can still tell they are all part of the same world.

http://cmcc.deviantart.com/gallery/

Here is a link to his online gallery on DeviantArt.com.

His work seems to be produced digitally, however the lines are done in a hand-drawn style. This really appeals to the way I have been working recently, combining digital with traditional styles.

Monsters! Music Brief

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v8qae11_-M

The piece of music I have chosen for this brief is Monster by The Automatic. For this breif we have to come up with something to cover a large area of glass with. It can be anything from a painting on the glass to things hanging near the glass.

My intention is to cover the glass in monsters of varying sizes and shapes. Some will be made from large stickers and others will be drawn straight onto the glass with paint pens. I want to have the sticker monsters with empty mouths so that people on the other side of the glass will appear as if they have been eaten. This will hopefully end up being interactive, fun and interesting to look at...

My main inspiration for this idea came from work by Jon Burgerman. He has worked on all kinds of large surfaces and also has a passion for creatures and monsters.

Here are a few examples of what I have been working on so far for this brief...

After a tutorial with Ian we decided that the individual monsters needed more character to them. I was advised to give them more of a purpose in life so they would be more interesting and relatable. I intend to look at other examples of character design to gain inspiration and then will hopefully end up with a selection of monsters, suitable for my final idea :)

Editorial Brief

For this breif we were asked to choose our own piece of text and then produce an editorial image to go with that text.
My chosen text was an artical about listening to your gut instinct rather than going with the logical or smart choice. My initial ideas were to have an image showing that feeling of butterflies in your tummy. However after a group crit I became more aware of the conflict going on between the logical way of thinking (the brain) and the gut feeling (the stomach).
It made scence to have somekind of conflict being illustrated between the two. My artical was from Cosmo magazine, so a fight scene might not apeal to a female audience.

In another group crit Jordan mentioned the idea of Yin and Yang. This is more suited to the conflict between good and evil or light and dark but I felt confident I could find a way to make it suited for my artical...

I experimented with different versions of the same idea...

This first version was keeping with the same style as the work I produced for the wellspring brief. I felt that it was too sketchy so started working with bolder lines in the next versions...

This version has the bolder lines which I think works much better and makes the image stand out more. I kept the image black and white to keep in with the Yin Yang idea. Then I thought about the idea of using other contrasting colours other than black and white...

This was my final image that I presented on the deadline day. After speaking with Ian he pointed out that in the Yin Yang symbol the dots are the contrasting colours to the shape they are in...

After the deadline I went back and reproduced the image with the changes that Ian pointed out. This is now my final image for the editorial brief.