Project Report

This year I feel for the first time that the research and process I have undergone during studio practice has really formed the backbone of how I think as a visual communicator, and illustrator moving beyond University.
At the beginning of the year I depended very heavily on digital work, which itself was a departure for me in comparison to my early work from level 5. I was conscious that I did not want to lose the more analog elements of my work that I have always found engaging and the most fruitful in terms of idea generation. However, I was also conscious to not rely too heavily on that aspect either because it has been my downfall before, especially in level 4, wherein I would end up with lots of roughs and potential for finished work, but no actual complete work to be able to show.

This year has been defined by combining practices that I hadn't really considered before, such as collage, photography and typography into illustration that I have found to be some of the more successful work I have made on the course. I think that my time management can always be better, as the balance of the dissertation and context of practice this year did make it quite hard for me to keep up with the briefs I set myself for this module. Luckily, I was able to make up for this after context of practice finished, and I worked hard to create an extensive body of work that I feel best represents both who I am currently as a creative practitioner, and the improvements I desire to make once leaving university.

The briefs within this module have challenged my ways of thinking more than anything else, which I am pleased about because they came along quite organically. Issues such as race and sexism are always things I have wanted to respond in some way to before, but have never really found the appropriate medium or outlet. The creative freedoms of this module allowed me to finally start to explore these things, specifically in my TIMES UP brief and my Black Panther brief. Although I am not a woman and have never experienced sexual misconduct in the workplace, I found researching the topic and making work in response to it incredibly invigorating. That brief made me realise that just because a cause doesnt personally or directly relate to you, doesnt mean it isnt something you can actively campaign for and support through your work. This feels like a lesson that will be much more valuable moving forward, especially as we advance into the industry world and begin to take clients for different purposes and causes.

Conversely, the Black Panther brief gave me the opportunity to address some issues regarding race, something that has always affected me either directly or indirectly. It was a transformative process for me during this brief in particular as I started to feel proud of my work in a sense that was largely unfamiliar with me up to this point, and I feel my research and conceptualisation really helped build a foundation for this.


My longest running brief, the music based brief, was the one that has largely formed the backbone of my practice up to this point in a more practical, commercial and aesthetic sense. A couple of examples of exposure taught me that this work is marketable, something I was very worried about at the beginning of this year. Moving forward, I want to keep doing these designs as a way to excercise the creative muscle, and make sure that no momentum is lost in my practice when we leave university.
An element I always feel is weak in my own submission is my blog, and I could have utilised it more this year. I found myself working practically so much and trying to understand the development of my practice, my blog became for me a less honest place, as I felt somewhat self conscious of trying to analyse each and every decision I made. A lot of the time this process slows me down so I tried to streamline the way I think and work this year in order to hopefully strengthen my practice for the future.

Design Boards

HAIM finished poster

Times Up & Me Too - purpose & context

While researching the current spate of revelations in Hollywood, it's been good to see the amount of positivity arising around the situation, especially in movements like Me Too and Times Up. The main thing I find inspiring about these movements is that they are positively feminist, something that the internet in general largely misunderstands. A lot of people see feminism as something that threatens masculinity, and that feminists want to be, or see themselves as, superior to men. That isn't the point of feminism, the point of feminism is equality. Feminism says that no one of any gender/sex should be above anyone else for any reason, that everyone is equal. So whenever someone is surprised at a man for being a feminist, it's largely because they misunderstand the meaning of what feminism is.
In this same vein, the #MeToo and Times Up movement really speak a positive message to me because they are focused entirely on equality. It isn't as if you have to be a woman to be a member of either of these groups, or that women have an authority over the groups. The members are equally comprised of men and women without discrimination, unified in support of those sexually abused in the industry.

In relation to my practice, and more specifically, the zine I’ve been developing, it is refreshing to see movements like this. Because this issue isn't something that directly affects me (and sexual misconduct from a woman's perspective isn't something that I’ll never directly experience or fully understand, purely because Im not a woman), I was conscious that it might not be my place to make this work or say the things I want to say with it. But seeing these movements taking place has shown me that just because this isn't something that has happened to me, doesn't mean I can't talk about it and respond to it.

Working on this has been a really interesting learning process for me and has helped me to adapt my work to situations I wouldn’t usually approach within my practice.

Twin Shadow ft. Haim - Saturdays

• Recommended Listening: Twin Shadow ft. HAIM - Saturdays
  
  Combining hand drawn elements with digital block colour is my preferred way of working at the moment. I think the solid line contrasted with the colours works well to convey a simple and direct message in an illustration like this one.
  The romantic and retro aesthetic of the song communicates a sort of happy naivety, and I thought that approaching this from a perspective of youth was the best way to reflect these feelings visually.
  The idea of making a mixtape for someone is something I would consider a classic romantic gesture, as it's a simple thing but clearly shows that it's taken time and consideration, and I wanted to get that across here. I wanted the cassette to be the only heavily coloured object in the frame, to accentuate it's importance in the narrative of the illustration. The hands I left without colour because the main thing I want the viewer to focus on is the gesture itself of someone giving the tape to someone else, rather than who the people actually are.

Dream Wife - Fire

Recommended Listening: Dream Wife - Fire

For this cover, I tried to find a way of illustrating the band without explicitly illustrating the band, by spending ages making portraits of them or drawing them as full fledged characters or anything like that, as thats something I would probably have leant on in the past.
The band Dream Wife is comprised of three women, so I wanted that element to be present in the design. While listening to the song I thought of the three fates of Greek Mythology, because of the way the three women seem to share a single voice between them, in an almost eerie way. I thought the defining features of these mythological characters would be either their shared eyeball or their hands, that were used to draw out the thread of mortal lives and cut them with scissors to measure people’s lifespan.

Haim - surprise competition brief

Create a poster designed to be sold at HAIM’s gig - Red Rocks, Colorado - May 28th
Communicate the bands sound

Their image? - don't focus on portraits
Instrumental, focus the piece of music - percussion and instruments, not on lyrics - could become too specific and alienate a certain audience

Themes! Work! Change!

The itsnicethat brief has given me a solid kick towards visualising this zine in a specific context. I think it should be linked to feminism as that’s something I often find coming up in my research but never properly coming through in my work. The idea of equal representation for women, especially in music and films, has always been something I’ve found myself very aware of, mostly because I don’t understand how in a modern society the misrepresentation and sexism is still so prevalent.

This has all been at the forefront of my mind with the almost weekly revelations about sexual misconduct in Hollywood. While it isn’t something that directly affects me, that makes me want to make work in response to it even more. I think that if I only make work that relates to me or my life specifically, my practice will just stagnate, so I’m conscious that I want to branch out into different topics moving forward.

Response to ItsNiceThat brief - International Women's Day

Having worked on early roughs for my zine based around the roles of Laura Dern, I found it quite organic to adapt one of these ideas into a response for this brief. From the get go I was sure I wanted to use the image of Dr Ellie Sattler from Jurassic Park, as I’ve always seen that character as a great and under appreciated female icon in a largely male dominated franchise. She is never made into the damsel, she doesn’t have to depend on the men of the story to teach her anything or patronise her. But she’s often forgotten because she never runs around with bravado in front of the T Rex or has as many quotable lines as Jeff Goldblum’s character.

But since being young she’s always been my favourite character in Jurassic Park, I suppose because above all she’s equal to the men in the story, and there is no patronising story trope that shoves that fact down your throat, it is just an element of the story and it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that a woman can do a job as well as a man. For that reason, I wanted to illustrate her alongside my favourite quote of hers in the movie, when John Hammond stammers that it's too dangerous for a woman to go outside and fix something with all those angry dinos around.

ITSNICETHAT - itsbriefthat - International Womens Day

“Create an empowering symbol to celebrate International Women’s Day”.
This Thursday (8 March) marks International Women’s Day and in honour of the occasion our monthly brief is to create an empowering symbol which celebrates and unifies women from all over the world.

The symbol could be an illustration, digital design, collage or photograph, in fact disciplines of all kinds are welcome in this brief. The interpretation of what this symbol could be is also up to you. It could be a character, a photograph, or quite simply words.
There’s no winners when it comes to spreading a positive message, however we will highlight those who we think answered the brief in the most powerful way possible right here on the site, and on the It’s Nice That Instagram on Friday 9th March.

Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history that explores the developing intersection of African/African Diaspora culture with technology. It combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrism and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique the present-day dilemmas of black people and to interrogate and re-examine historical events.

Black Panther - links to music project

Recommended Listening: Run the Jewels - Legend Has It
                                         Kendrick Lamar - Pray for Me

One part of Black Panther that kicked off my interest was the collaborative soundtrack, orchestrated by Kendrick Lamar. An artist whose work I’ve been infatuated with since the age of about sixteen, I feel like it's fitting to now centre my work around themes he has raised in the world. A lot of his music has a strong lyrical foundation and discusses heavy themes while making it accessible for everyone to understand. At the same time, nothing is dumbed down or sugar coated, which is the element I love the most, because it's not afraid to tell the truth, at risk of pissing people off. I think that's important in the world today, as basically everything is usually heavily curated and packaged up all nice.

The soundtrack to Black Panther was overseen by Kendrick Lamar, but he doesn't appear on every song. The album is a large collaborative effort with over 20 other artists. Appreciating these lesser known musicians is the triumph of the album in my eyes, as most of them would never normally get the exposure of performing on an album this size for a film as big as Black Panther. I want to continue this theme with a visual interpretation, as I feel the whole point of the film is giving a voice to those who currently have none.

Black Panther - thoughts and responses

I’ve been looking forward to Marvel’s Black Panther for a few years now, but I didn’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I did. Race is never something I’ve properly talked about in my work before, while it's always been something I’ve been very aware of.

Being mixed race it's weird sometimes to think where you fit in, as I grew up with very few other black kids in my vicinity, I mainly spent time at gigs and parties where I would be the only one there. (Not a great many black teenagers are going to gigs for bands like The Cribs and Paramore). Not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, it's just something that you become very aware of. In music, books and film I’ve done a lot of research into black history and culture, especially in America.I feel like this last leg of the course should be an opportunity to really say something in response to these feelings and thoughts.

Watching Black Panther in the cinema was a unique experience for me, someone that is there for the midnight release of most of these nerd films, Star Wars etc. So seeing a whole new demographic being opened up to these films in the audience for Black Panther just felt like a really special experience. It's proof that these stories are able to access anyone from anywhere, in the same way that a bullied child finds solace in the heroics of Spider-Man, a young black child can now see himself in characters brought into the mainstream like Black Panther.

Paramore - Pool - digital collage

After the design I made before Christmas for the band Ider, i’ve been thinking more about using photography and digital collage in my work. Usually I would spend time drawing whatever visual element I needed for a composition like this, but in some cases, a photo is just more immediate and communicative, so it feels like a waste to not use them in certain opportunities. I do think that the photos I’ve used work quite well here, as I’m not really sure how hand drawn elements of these visuals would have worked.

Water is something I’ve always stayed away from illustrating, because looking at art that contains water sort of bends my mind and I can't visualise how it would work in the context of images I make. So using textures and images of water (and the lack of) was helpful in saying what I wanted to with this image.

The song uses the metaphor of  water and swimming pools to represent emotion and relationship. “Headfirst into shallow pools” suggests to me that the speaker is throwing themselves into a situation that could potentially be harmful, but is carelessly diving in headfirst anyway. I wanted to use the image of an empty swimming pool as it appears as sort of a liminal space, because normally (being full of water) you would float in it and be able to move in any direction. So stood at the bottom of one without water in it is a disconcerting experience, and hopefully that comes across in this design.
I enjoy working like this, it feels like I don't have to depend on certain ways of working to make things I’m happy with, and the message of the work is largely more important than the components that it's made up of.

X - MEN - ideas for prints/book?

Recommended Listening - Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

As COP has started to wrap up I’ve been trying to think again about making a book for part of extended practice, as it's something I don't feel like I’ve done as well as I could have so far in my practice. Linking to COP, my project focused on why people tell stories, and why similar characters and narratives reappear throughout history. I feel like there must be a subconscious link in the human mind that appears regardless of when or where we engage with a story. The same stories that appear in Star Wars can be identified in Flash Gordon, radio serials in the 1940s and books and stories way older than that, such as Lord of the Rings and even works of Shakespeare. Stories and characters are ways for us to see who we are and who we want to be, so it makes sense that so many people connect with the same characters and stories time and time again.

Characters that I have always found recurring in my life and work are the X-Men. I was never really sure why they seem to be so prevalent, I don’t much care for the films on the whole, I never really saw the cartoons when I was young. But I did read a lot of the comics when I was a teenager. The characters are stranger (and less marketable in general) than those present in the Avengers, who have become very much part of the public consciousness. But I realised recently that the point of the X-men is that they’re the underdogs.
They aren’t beloved in their own stories, they aren’t appreciated for their heroism, they are largely dismissed and hated for being freaks and monsters. I suppose the reason they have held a sway over my subconscious is because they were made to represent minorities in the world. They each deal with different facets of society, and how the public reacts to them. So I’ve always felt a connection to these characters because they were created to be reassurance to those who might be minorities or under-represented.

Mike Mignola - revisit & relevance

Mike Mignola is someone whose work has definitely had a massive impact on the way I think both aesthetically and conceptually since his talk in first year. I really like the way he uses the dark and negative space to tell as much story as what he draws. Shadow is something that I still don’t properly understand in my work, but it's something that I feel definitely gives a lot of atmosphere and character. I’ve started to utilise negative space a lot in my COP work right now but I thought I should talk about the work that's fuelling those decisions in regard to my studio practice.

The noir look of Mignola’s work is something that gels quite well with the aesthetic themes I’m looking at in developing this concertina book, so I’ve started to combine the two in early roughs. Still finding it quite hard to balance this with COP, not sure how much time to dedicate to each module, but I think it will be a lot easier to focus and think once I’ve finished the work I need to do for the dissertation and that module.

IDER - body love - digital illustration

The idea behind this cover was to communicate the duality of a relationship. One viewpoint is romantic and organic, represented by the photograph of the rose. And the other viewpoint is colder and pragmatic, represented by the harsh shapes making up the silhouette of the rose. Making the flower angular was a way for me to tell the story about this colder view of a relationship, while still keeping the obvious connotations of a rose present in the overall design. This cover was also featured on the band’s Instagram account, which was great because I was able to look at the work in context, and have the people who actually made the music see my interpretation. On the flip side of that, as soon as it was posted I immediately thought of ways I could have made the design clearer or more expressive. I might work further on this design before really thinking it's finished.

Tutorial & moving forward - get strange..

After my last tutorial I do feel a fair bit better about my practice as a whole, as I sort of felt the music project I have been doing so far is a bit sporadic, so it was good to hear that it is getting more of a direction recently. The Polygondwanaland idea can be a good way to move forward with this project, as zeroing in on a certain piece of music for an extended time might give this project more bulk and direction.

Discussing the strange nature of the album (how the songs aren't really distinct and the album works as more a single piece of music stretched out over an hour, telling a strange neon medieval story), an idea that sounds good was that of a concertina book. I wanted to make more books this year as I really enjoyed book binding last year and want to put it to use. Concertina books are a bastard, I remember from first year, but if they’re done right they can be really cool and effective. The main idea is to make a book that illustrates the album as a whole (when the book is fully folded out) and communicates something about each song on the inner pages. I’ve very roughly started to sketch out these ideas, but I’m also trying to balance COP and the dissertation right now, so I might revisit this when we have more time after christmas and the 601 deadline.

King Gizzard inspiration

Working on the King Gizzard design for the last brief has re-started my interest in the aesthetic present in weird 80s shows like Masters of the Universe. I love the neon nonsense presented in sprawling and majestic fantasy environments, the juxtaposition gives me a lot of ideas.

SOYOUNG Magazine - competition brief

Recommended Listening: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Wah Wah

Recently I’ve been trying to combine the digital skills I developed throughout last year and this summer with the more traditional hand drawn elements of how my work has been in the past. While I really enjoy working digitally, I’m conscious that I don’t want everything in my practice to be based on a screen, I still find doodling weird creatures and symbols a good way to get ideas out, and I don’t want to lose that in my work going forward.

With that in mind, I tried to combine the two forms of working in this entry for the soyoung magazine illustration competition. Instead of adapting a specific song as I usually would, I tried instead to get a feel for the band’s music as a whole, how it plays and what imagery it evokes. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard make me think of a sort of neon medieval future, similar to the sort of aesthetic seen in shows like He Man and Flash Gordon. I really love the over the top cartoonish nature of this aesthetic but combined with very spooky and atmospheric environments. The juxtaposition is what really sells this for me, so I wanted to capture both the zany and the spooky in this design.

POLYGONDWANALAND

The latest album by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has been released, and I’ve started to develop ideas for a separate project surrounding it.

The album only exists digitally, as the band have not put the music into a tangible form. So no records, cds or tapes or anything exist with this music on. Their site encourages fans to make their own versions of this record however they want, they even provide all the necessary files to do so. I love this guerilla marketing strategy, it gives the music this extra dimension of universality, and feels very much like it belongs to everyone and no one at the same time.

I want to try to make some cassette tapes to go alongside a series of illustrations for the songs. Although, the way the album is set out makes it more of one huge sprawling song across the time frame, rather than the songs being very distinct themselves. Not sure how exactly to approach that yet, as it's hard to pull certain things from each song, as sometimes it's hard to know exactly where they begin and end.

Wolf Alice - gifs & animations

• Recommended Listening: Wolf Alice - Don’t Delete the Kisses
  
  Continuing (a little) with animation, I tried to capture two disparate emotions in a similar method, if that makes sense.
  Instead of a huge animation, I tried a few looping gifs that are clear without being over the top. This one I feel is the less subtle of the two, but the song itself is a very overtly aggressive one (lyrics include: “Am I a bitch to not like you anymore? Punch me in my face I won’t even fight you no more”). While it was a change of pace, I definitely feel the second gif is more effective.
  
• This song is very lyric heavy and overtly romantic, in the classic more tragedy-centric sense. Because of this, as well as the lengthy title and swelling instrumentals that dominate the back end of the song, I felt a little overwhelmed when approaching it, as it feels like a very complete and full thing already.
  So I left it for a while and dawdled on other stuff.
  But then I basically thought, if you can't tell everything, then tell nothing. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense.
  I basically just wanted to give a small look into the narrative made by the song, by showing a simple image that anyone who’s ever written a nervous message to anyone else can understand. Literally as I type this the cursor stops and blinks along, as if the whole world is waiting to see what you’ll write next. I wanted to communicate this nervousness and trepidation in the simplest way possible.
  

The Big Moon - music designs

Recommended Listening: The Big Moon - Sucker

I want to double down this year on the musical side of my practice, because interpreting songs through illustration has been really beneficial for me not only as a visual communicator (la dee da) but also just in general. I find it a healthy way to get emotion out in a tangible way that I can look back and reflect on. I guess it's like a diary sort of, but for everyone to look at.
I’m still floating between literal and lateral thinking when approaching some of these songs. The idea for this one stemmed from the music video being set in the Old West, so I thought the visual of a Revolver barrel would link well to that, as well as the lyrics of the song basically saying the speaker is helpless to resist how they feel, at proverbial gunpoint from their own feelings. It's a simple and honest message so I thought black and white translated pretty well.

On the other hand, this song deals with the support friends have for each other, and how it's easy to feel alone sometimes. Visually I didn’t have much to go on so I simplified how I was thinking and just tried to tell the story through colour and composition. Although all the yellow shapes are clustered together and the composition suggests they are there to support the pink shape, I definitely wanted them to remain different colours, to communicate the fact that sometimes you just feel separate, even when there are lots of people there to help.

I’m really getting a lot out of working this way, I feel more aware of my decisions and like I’m understanding my own thought process more.

Baby Driver - animating alongside music

Following on from the brief (and very remedial) experience I’ve had up to this point with animation, I wanted to make an effort to make strides with it this year. Not sure how much it will play into my work as a whole, as I really don’t feel I’m good enough at it to warrant focusing entirely on it, as it might end up as a waste of time. Animating always feels a bit flat to me, like I’m working on part of a greater whole and for that reason, it never feels finished. I came a bit closer to feeling like I had finished animations with the shorts I made last year during 504 for Shakespeare. Those had sound effects and that made it easier and a lot more fun to animate around. SO I don’t really know why I never thought to make the connection before, but music was the obvious answer to the problem I’ve been having with this medium. (dahoy).

 Baby Driver is a film that I really connected to on an aesthetic level because it's meticulous, and I can tell at times during it's editing/production it will have been infuriating, and it's reassuring to see work in the world like that, because I often become stressed trying to visualise an idea. Basically every shot and movement in the film is synced to a soundtrack, but in a way that makes the sound almost a character in the film. Every gunshot, or car door slam, or camera angle change is linked to a beat or a sound in a song. So when animating this, I made sure I understood the music inside and out before starting, so a narrative could form in the spaces left in the song. The first idea that made me want to make this was the quick drum break that has exactly five beats, the same number of stars given to the film by Empire magazine. I basically just thought the idea of linking that audible number with a visual number was really cool, and wanted to translate the rest of the song into a visual story.

I’m really happy with how it's turned out, animating alongside music is annoying and hard and takes far too long and you need to know every change in the song as well as exactly what needs to go where in time for certain things to take place *BUT* apart from all that, it’s actually a lot of fun to do.

travelling man - British film & tv brief

I’m still trying to understand typography as a visual storyteller after doing a fair bit with it at the end of last year and throughout the summer. I just love the idea of a couple of stark hard hitting words that really clearly communicate something. I think it stems from a childhood love for film posters and album covers. But I still feel like it's very much something I’m getting to grips with, and I’m trying to test out how I respond to type before properly implementing it in my practice.

Having this print up in Travelling Man is great too, because I haven't really seen my work properly in context before. So having it hanging above a load of comic books is a miniature dream come true.

End of Module Evaluation

Project Report

Presentation Boards

Final outcomes - VALKYRIE

While I'm happy with the colour choices and composition used for the text page for Valkyrie, I think her character illustration is the weakest of the set. She was the last one to complete on my list and with simultaneous responsive and cop deadlines I let this fall by the wayside a bit and could have dedicated more time to making sure she was right before wrapping the project.
Valkyries are female warriors that appear on Viking battlefields to carry off dying soldiers to Valhalla, where they will feast and fight forever. I based her design here on my earlier Thor illustration, as most of the existing depictions of Valkyries have them very scantily clad, which I don't feel works anymore, especially in this project.
I feel that she could be more distinct from Thor than she is, and I could use different colours and shapes to achieve this, but time constraints meant I didn't have enough time as I would have liked to be able to mess around and make sure she was right. I'd also revise her general shape, as I don't think she communicates the character of warrior woman as clearly as the other female character, Hela, does.

Final Outcomes - HEIMDALL

I feel happy with this outcome as I tried to capture a specific characteristic in the design and I think I did quite well. Heimdall is the gatekeeper of Asgard, a stoic guardian of few words. To express this simplicity I stuck to variations on primary colours, and blocky reds and browns to convey an earthen, trustworthy figure. I think in the future I'd change the colours around to investigate more successful ways of expressing these ideas.

Final outcomes - HELA

While I'm happy overall with these two pages, I think the general design of Hela's character and the colour palette kind of makes these feel like they're from a different book.
Hela is basically the god of death and bad things in Norse myth, I wanted to get that across with an intimidating silhouette and colours that contrasted but weren't similar to any others in the book. Because of this though I'm not sure that it totally works with the others as a set. In the future I'd choose a different god to illustrate that would fit in with the other characters more cohesively.

Final outcomes - ODIN

With Odin, I tried to break out of the mold of the shape boundaries I set myself, as the King of Asgard should have his own thing, surely?
I wanted to convey his size and power in the same format as the other illustrations without changing the formatting, so I thought it appropriate that his character refuse to be constrained by the visual boundaries I established for him, and let his size dominate the frame.
I think this was successful as he feels to me like one of the more unique ideas I've had with these outcomes. I wanted him to appear complex to reflect his importance as king of the gods, without overcomplicating him. I definitely wanted him to be a striking and memorable presence among the book, and I think making him the biggest sod in it works well towards this goal.

Final Outcomes - LOKI

I had some difficulty with the design of Loki, because he doesn't fit into the stocky mold of a Viking god, being a slippery boy known for sneakiness and mischief. I wanted him to have a reserved look rather than the big blocky look of Thor and Odin, so I based his design on more snakelike imagery. I found that simplicity was the way forward too, as I was trying to recreate his horned helmet and elaborate shoulder pads, but when I tried to put too much detail into this aesthetic it just became lost and didn't look like anything. After a lot of faffing, I decided to reduce these elements to basic shapes to communicate the general aesthetic rather than trying to visually replicate Viking armour in circles and squares.
This process has been something I've been adapting to loads this year, focusing on ideas rather than fiddling with visuals to an extent that the image is diluted and the concept lost.

Final outcomes - THOR

I think this version of Thor is probably the most solid of my outcomes, I wanted him to evoke thoughts of 80s action heroes like He Man, Conan or any number of other barbarians. I based his asymmetrical look on a combination of these aesthetics and how he appears in the Marvel films. I feel like the way I think about character design has changed radically through these illustrations, as I found it a lot easier to understand proportion and the balance of colour in this digital medium rather than in my sketchbook.
I think this is the way I want to think about character moving forward, I find this way of working a lot better as I get bogged down and often annoyed with myself and my work when continually working in a sketchbook. I think my work can really suffer when I do this, as I get pissed off with my inability to realise something on paper and then leave the idea and end up settling for something weaker. To counter this I'm trying to be more confident in my idea generation and focusing on getting my ideas out in one medium or another.

Final outcomes - Title page

I've really enjoyed working with block shapes in my 80s investigation of Norse mythology. I bought a font called Thunderstorm (totally radical) to experiment with and it proved to be successful for the look I was going for.

 

I used common imagery and tropes from that period of popular design to try and create an immediacy in my own designs and root them firmly in that colour explosion of a decade.

I've never used this kind of shape exploration prominently in my work before, so I thought it'd be a good idea to do some research into the style of composition first. I came across this design from 1922 by Iakov Chernikov, who was a Russian architect and graphic designer. This constructivist design is something I never would have thought to look into for inspiration at the start of this year, but the way that shape and colour are so carefully considered leapt out to me as an interesting way to tackle my illustrations for this project.

Digital roughing

I've not been finding my sketchbook a successful place to develop ideas recently because it takes me a long time to figure out hand drawn sketches in a way that I'm happy with, and with the little amount of time we've had going up to all these deadlines, I chose to stick to digital roughs moving into finishing up my final outcomes.

I'm experimenting with different ways to get across the basic shapes and colours of each character, I don't think either of these are near a finished point because their proportions don't lend well to a head on top (which is kind of vital to character design).

However I'm getting a lot more comfortable with how the colours are turning out, I think contrast is the key to make these illustrations pop in a memorable way.