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.

Colour experiments

Today we were looking at the Saturation, Tint and Tone of colours and how certain colours fit together better than others. I picked three colours I liked and then showed them in full saturation, tinted and toned.

Then I experimented with how they would look along side each other, and how the boldness of some can change the way others look. I reversed some experiments, so if one colour was the small box in the middle I would also see how it looks being the bigger colour too. This really changes the over all  look and feel of the two colours beside each other. 

Figure sequence

We were looking at drawing a short sequence of just 3 to 5 frames, with at least 2 different view points. After being told we were going to work into them at a later date exploring colour I kept this in mind when trying to decide what to do. 

I decided to do a short sequence of a boy going up to bed, with the idea of it all being very grey, but his dream would be in vivid colour.

Mapping

Today we had to 'map' our journey from the top of town in Montpellier, down to uni. First of all I just started with walking, deciding which way I wanted to go.
Then I decided to draw my way, looking at the buildings, focusing on what buildings stood out the most to me.

Whilst doing this I noticed a big difference in the doors and door frames I was seeing. At Montpellier they were all very intricately designed and elegant, but the further along my walk into town the doors became more basic and run down. So I decided I wanted to map my journey through the doors I saw.