Figure drawing

Narrative

I wanted to edit my sketches but keep them natural and rough, but adding in colour.

I wanted to use more than one colour to emphasise feelings, for example blue and red; i wanted to use this colours as they represent meaning, so blue for the negative, sad reason the people are doing these acts and red for the strong, positive happy reason these people are in these places. 

I decided to then overlap some of my drawings to convey the multiple reasons that these people are sitting in a cafe, buying flowers or in a book store. 

After playing around with different effects I think I've created the feelings I wanted to show within my narrative images.

This one of the people sat in a restaurant is my favourite image I created. The overlapping is clear and you can see the 3 multiple colours showing through each other. The blue layer almost creates an emotional shadow to the original layer, showing the same people doing the same thing but the blue creates a more sad and tense feel to the location. This is exactly what I wanted to show, people in everyday situations but for different reasons, good or bad.

I also really like these two, of the people on the bus and the girl in the book store. Again i used positive and negative colours to create a separate mood layer. 

With the girl in the book store layer, I added another drawing of her right beside her. I think this works well in really emphasising my idea of multiple reasons and ideas behind the peoples actions.

With these two images it worked better just having two colours of white and red. The Flowers were two busy in the last image that it made it almost too unrecognisable. 

Im still happy with how these turned out as my intentions are still showed, and the people sat at the table (above) I've only overlapped slightly.

Overall, I think these 5 images work really well together and portray the multiple meanings of the locations. Im really pleased i was able to keep the rawness of my original drawings as i think this created a real natural feel to the over all illustrations.

I also created one of these for the bus sketch, but i feel its too busy and doesn't portray the message i wanted. Theres too much going on and the colours and feelings are just lost within the patterns in the bus.

Narrative Illustration.

For this I had to bring together all the skills we have learnt over the months and turn it into my own narrative of my choice.
I wanted to use my new skills of:  Life drawing, colour and short narrative viewpoints (composition and viewpoints)

I chose to look into exploring locations and places with more meanings that people overlook/ don't see. I wanted to look at everyday places that have a different meaning or situation to every person.

For example; bus stops, cafes, book stores, parks, restaurants, hotels, park benches etc.

These places are some of the few public areas in which you always see people, but they can have any reason as to why they are there and i guess you just don't know what it is. It could be where people first meet, a break up in a relationship, or waiting to meet a parent they never knew.

Because of this I wanted to explore everyday places that I visit and look into the people that are there and try to convey the multiple reasons they are there and that everyone is leading a different life we know nothing about.

I started off by going on buses and looking at not only the bus, which hundreds of people go on every day, but the people that came on and off of it. Some on their own, some dressed up and some people preoccupied on their phone or with something else.

I then wanted to look at all the people waiting at the bus stops, going anywhere for any reason. I found it fascinating the crowds of people that come and go, the people that wait ages on their own and the expressions and manner of some people. You could see that some people were looking forward to where they were going and some people weren't interested and just wanted to leave.
I also looked at the smokers outside restaurants (above) and saw what looked like the first interaction between people whilst one asked the other for a lighter. Smoking outside public places is seen so much you over look it, but this interaction with these people could lead to anything, they could fall in love, become friends or just nothing at all. I think when you just slow down and look at it all theres a beauty in the innocence of the everyday act of smoking and the social connection you can create with other smokers.

After seeing my little sister spend hours of her days in book shops I went into one to observe the people in there. She interacts with anyone, about books she's read or wants to read and they just have this raw connection over a mutual interest. She said its something she loves doing as theres no strings attached, just conversations about interesting things with interesting people, and she uses it as an escape from her life of school and friends and day to day life.

I also sat in the cafe in this book store and noticed how peaceful people look just drinking coffee and reading along. Some people were in groups and some on their own and it just made me wonder why they were there, what were they escaping from, were they escaping or were they just looking to relax.

I wondered into the shopping mall and looked at all the people doing different things, people walking out of the cinema that could of been on a first date? could of been an anniversary or could just be good friends meeting for a laugh. Again there were people sitting around talking, interacting enjoying their day.

I also went and watched a flower stall in town, watching queues of people carefully pick and buy flowers. This was something that was quite interesting to watch, as you could sense that some people were giving flowers for a special reason, to a specific person maybe or even to someone they miss, as they would spend their time picking out the most beautiful flowers they could find. They could be going to a hospital bedside, or to a partner, you just didn't quite know the reason behind their gesture of giving flowers.

You could see that some people were enjoying this act, but others weren't bothered and you could tell in their expressions. Buying and giving flowers is such a general act of kindness to people, or even sometimes an apology, that it is something that is overlooked. But it was nice to see that maybe those flowers will be going to someone to make them smile, and brighten up their day.

I tried different ways of drawing these, one with my inks and brush pens and one with just quick sketched line work. I felt the inks and pens were too heavy for the subject i was drawing. I wanted to leave some thought and an unknown feel to my drawings and so by doing quick linework i felt it left enough detail to your own interpretation. 

By only drawing sketches I managed to create a natural look to their positions and draw them naturally within their surroundings rather than really forced and fake poses. I also really like the roughness of the lines and the imperfections to my drawings as i think it portrays the rawness and shows the movement and life in them. 

Facial Expressions.

Drawing faces is something Im normally not comfortable with, so having an exercise of drawing quick sketches of people pulling faces was really helpful for me. Not all of them are perfect but some are actually quite expressive and free flowing and show really well what i was trying to interpretate.

The girl sticking her tongue out on the left above is one of my favourites as i feel its not as cartoony and disproportioned as some of the others. By doing the sketches quickly, it enable me to draw freely without over thinking what i was seeing and almost trying to hard to create something picture perfect.

I also really like the man on the bottom left of this one too. I think i manage to portray all the creases and all the line work shows the organic pose well.

Overall I really enjoyed this task as I've learnt that by just drawing what you see quickly and freely, you can create more natural and expressive drawings of emotions rather than trying too hard. As when i try to hard to create the features I normally lose all natural feeling of movement within that persons face.

Dynamic poses

For the Dynamic Poses workshop i tried to use as much ink and pen as i could to emphasise the poses they modelled for me.

I tried to use tone, harsh lines and faint lines to emphasis the positions they were in and to create form and shadow. I wanted to use sharp fine liner line work on top of the ink to add sharpness to the poses.

I think i managed to create enough tone to show the shadows, one of my favourite sketches is the one on the bottom right as I feel that has got a real free flowing natural feel to it.

First Story

For this live brief we had to create a front cover design for a poem book for some students at a school. We were given specific sizes to work towards and a Title and Theme for every book. For this I was interested in one called 'My Voice is Shy Tiger' with the theme described as the students had imagined their voice as a creature who is eluding them, but who is eventually tracked down.

I wanted this to be a simple design, focusing on a main image so the overall look wasn't too busy.

So first of all i did some quick thumbnails of the initial ideas the came too mind. Some are not great at all but i went with the one i liked of a tiger roaring, i thought this was fitting as he's 'showing his voice'.

I then re-drew it properly adding the colour and detail I wanted. I also wanted to keep it hand drawn looking to give it a raw organic and natural feel to the design.

I then played around with layout, design and text around the image. I wanted the tiger to be the main feature so tried to add as little background noise as possible. Some of these work a lot better than others but i was keen on the design where the title word 'Voice' comes out of the tigers mouth as if he's saying it.

So I turned the tiger around so it looked like he was roaring the words. I wanted the text to be very simple and basic to create a contrasting effect against the pencil drawn image of the tiger. Im pleased with the overall outcome of this, but would of like to create more final designs rather than just one if i had the time before presenting my ideas.

Children

We were drawing ourselves as children, by remembering what we looked like and looking at photos. I wanted to also draw my sisters as they were a big part of my childhood. I found this useful for our upcoming childrens book project, as we learnt about the different shapes children have to adults and how the proportions are different.

I struggle with drawing people anyway, especially making them look natural and not just flat and rigid. Ive also not practised drawing faces a lot, so with the two images of my sister and me below i tried to focus on making the faces look as realistic as i could. 

Cardboard Masks

In this task, we created large wearable character masks out of cardboard. This was to create oversized creatures similar to the random creatures you can find within children stories. I started by making these simple step-by-step guides with the little pictures to demonstrate how to make my simple idea. I wanted to make a giant pumpkin head, for a surreal halloween theme.

We then went on to drawing each other whilst wearing them. I found this interesting as you saw each others characters in a more life like form from different angles and moving with the gestures of the people wearing them, bringing them to life as real monsters and creatures.