New Direction

WORK is sending me into the void, if hell is personalised then mine will be retail for all eternity.
The awfulness of my job is another factor encouraging me to keep on illustrating every night so that I'll hopefully never have to work anywhere remotely similar eveR AGAIN.

I'm tired but happy with how my new ideas are coming, I've tried to let ideas & concepts dictate where I take the visuals, rather than becoming too caught up in visuals and using basic boring ideas. I'm exploring the essence of duality in five Shakespeare plays:

• Macbeth: Lady Macbeth's character change from supportive, normal wife, to murderous lunatic in like, two scenes.
• The Tempest: The difference between night and day in the character of Caliban, is he evil just because he was born out of an evil witch and ACTUAL SATAN? Cut him some slack, he already looks like a demon goat man. Does his inhumanity actually remove him from notions of good and bad, like an animal?
• Romeo & Juliet: The cultural perception of their relationship as beautiful and idyllic, and the contextual reality of their relationship as flawed, naïve and ultimately fatal.
• As You Like It: Freedom vs containment, is absolute freedom really what we want? Characters with absolute freedom always end up establishing some sort of institution or rule system to live by. Is the blank slate of complete boundless freedom just the same as being contained indefinitely?
• Hamlet: Hamlet's identity, he knows he must avenge his father, but instead of getting it done, he spends the whole play faffing about with the idea of it. Should murder be met with MORE murder? He as a character comes to a standstill between his two halves as he realises good and evil are mixed in every aspect of life. To be or not to be. That is the question.

I definitely feel much better about the project as a whole now that I have a solid foundation of ideas for heading forward.

Happy new year! (I intend to spend the 1st of January entirely asleep)

Secret7 moving forward - SELF INITIATED

After talking to everyone who was ready to do Secret7 (before it was cancelled and knackered my life), I've decided to start a self initiated project in which I intend to illustrate the covers to seven songs myself. I've already done so much development for this brief I don't see the point of wasting that work and the progress I've started to make.

I intend to complete these illustrations in a similar way to how Illustration Friday operates, taking a different song periodically and illustrate it without using text or any photography of the artist. So far in my development towards this I've enjoyed trying to illustrate songs as its not something I've ever done before.
My aims for this brief are to develop my independence with responding to a continuous running brief that it will be my own responsibility to keep up with. I also intend to improve my skills at idea generation, as trying to convey intangible concepts is something I'm really interested at developing in my own practice moving forward.

Secret 7 CANCELLED WHY

We found out recently that Secret7" won't be running this year.

This was a bit of a knock to my Responsive plans as I've been focusing on secret7 for a few weeks now. I think I'll have a go at the new Illustration12 idea briefed by college, but I'd like to be able to direct things towards a self initiated project, as I've enjoyed working on the preparation for Secret7 and want to keep this energy going forward.
I'll be aiming a project towards either music or film, as I've enjoyed translating music into still illustration as its a representative method I aren't familiar with so far in my practice.

IVE CHANGED MY MIND

I DONT WANT TO PRINT THESE
Today I decided that I need some new ideas if I want to make interesting and exciting work for the final prints. I think because this is the longest project we've done I feel drained of ideas, but I just aren't connected to the designs I've been making, focusing on the marionette figures and their character icons. I'm going to try to just take this brief back to my stronger initial ideas of comic book cover/movie poster styled drawings, because I want to use this to make stuff that I'm proud to show, rather than these bloody puppets (who I now hate, even though I made them, curse my past self)

I just don't feel there's any real depth to the compositions like I had in the first few pages of this brief. I'm going to try to recall that kind of work and redesign my prints between now and the New Year. I feel insane but also that this is the right thing to do, better to make a few good ideas great than churn out a thousand mediocre ones.

More Print Idea Development

I want to have a solid idea for each print by Tuesday so I can get some feedback before going on break for Christmas, mainly so I know what direction I should be heading in by then. I'm pretty confident with the marionette ideas, I just need some help in refining them and getting them good enough to actually be printed over Christmas.

Sound Task: Deconstruction: Picnic Studio Sting

Picnic Sting from PICNIC* on Vimeo.

After deciding to do three 10 second stings rather than one 30 second sting (because I'm still figuring out what my final prints will be and my stings should be organically related to them, and I don't think 30 seconds would be suitable for the direction my designs are going in) , I've started to have a look at shorter stings and adverts, as I'll have to compress my ideas into a smaller time frame.
The use of sound in this sting really makes the hand done illustrations pop and be memorable. I don't think I'll be using a soundtrack to my stings, as that sort of sound doesn't really fit with the motifs I'm illustrating in relation to Shakespeare plays. I'm going to use recorded effects and atmospheric sounds to establish a narrative in my stings, much like this sting from Picnic does. The sound is varied but constant, blended together smoothly, which makes for an engaging few seconds. I find it really interesting how such a short clip can have so much work put into it and be so rewarding for the few seconds it exists in.

Sound Task: Deconstruction - Adventure Time: Food Chain

When we were first shown examples of animated shorts/stings, I immediately thought of this short from Adventure Time (that I may have blogged about before).
Its dynamic animation and bouncy comedic soundtrack combine to make a funny and technically intriguing short. The song doesn't really work without the visuals, and the visuals are mostly nonsense without the song for context, and this co-dependence is the strength of the short as a whole. I want my sting to be completed by the inclusion of sound, rather than sound being an afterthought that doesn't make any difference to the animation as a whole.
While my stings will probably be a fair bit darker than soaring food chain musical numbers, the essence of the animation responding to the sound is vital to the success of a short sting, as it only has a few seconds to get its message across.

3005 - Finalised Design

3005 -  Childish Gambino






















I feel that this is probably my strongest design for the music based designs I've been exploring for this brief. My visual inspiration for this was the music video for the song, which focuses solely on the intricate spin of a ferris wheel. I wanted to get across the intricacy of the wheel without just drawing one, so I took a perspective of the viewer on the ride itself, up close with the different cables and bars. Because it is quite an involved design, I wanted to stay simple with the colours, so as not to overcomplicate the composition. I think the complicated intersecting rectangles and the simple flat colours work well to balance the composition as a whole.
The song itself is about uncertainty and loneliness, and I wanted to convey that with large areas of black negative space to communicate a character that is very much on their own, and I think the opposing intersecting lines that make up the wheel work well to parallel the uncertainty and apparent randomness that the speaker in the song is feeling.

Digital Exploration - Secret7"

 Me and Your Mama - Childish Gambino

Continuing with developing my work in more conceptual, idea driven ways, I have been exploring further with solely digital methods.
I've also been trying to convey elements of the music I'm illustrating in the image itself, so for this image I incorporated the four strings of a bass guitar in the blue streaks dominating the composition. The image of the moon in the top left corner aligns with the explosive first note of the song being struck on that string. My colour choices were mainly driven by the soul-inspired, lamenting nature of the song, reminding me of a deep blue night sky.



Telegraph Ave (Oakland) - Childish Gambino

I've never really utilised photography within my work, so this practice piece was a challenge I tried to set myself to (hopefully) develop some new skills. Working with levels, brightness, shadow and reflection on this image to create an outcome I was happy with was something quite different to what I'm used to. I feel like it appears too simplistic as a final image, so I plan to take the methods I've used here in more complex work in the future to create more successful work.