illustration-and-animation

[illustration-and-animation]

CONCERTINA PROJECT

Since my final weeks of trimester one will all be focused on one project, I have decided to have this post cover all the final weeks as one big post.

For this project we are focusing on print making and mark making. I enjoy mark making, I think it’s relaxing. Here are some pages of mark making I did

My favourite was the fork as the fence, it looks so withered and somewhat creepy? I want to include it in my final piece

I’m not confident with print making at all. It makes a mess and it stresses me out however I’m excited to do some mark making. My idea right now is for the print making to be used for the sky and dark silhouettes.

Here are my initial ideas. I have no idea where or how the concept of war appeared in these ideas. I think it all links back to the fence and how worn down it looked and that made me think of war. As a child I was obsessed with learning about the world wars but I have never done art work on it.

In my sketchbook I talk about this idea in greater detail, I wanted it to be more positive than negative. With the idea that even after the beautiful scenery we see in the first panel is destroyed it will inevitably grow back and be restored to its former beauty. The idea that life persists despite everything that comes it’s way is a message I really like. In terms of the people, I wanted to represent this by the first panel having just two people and the last having a whole family

[illustration-and-animation]

WEEK SEVEN

This week I was very excited as finally we get to work with colour. I’d say the day in the studio was my favourite of the entire trimester so far. I’m in love with colour, just getting to use all my paints and learn more about colour was very exciting for me

We did multiple exercises in class relating to colour such as creating a colour wheel and colour palettes. Here’s a few examples of what we did

I felt confident (for once) in these tasks and more importantly it was fun.

[illustration-and-animation]

WEEK SIX

To begin the week I will do some research on my chosen weather phenomenon. I decided to do research and my project on volcanos. I had a pretty good case study idea for it with that being Pompeii.

Pompeii was a city in Italy that was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 79 AD. The volcano mount Vesuvius erupted and coated the entire city in 13-20ft of ash. This is the perfect place to start my research, so I looked into some documentaries. However the best thing I found was an animation that documented the day and how the eruption would have looked.

However my main idea is for the volcanic eruption to be something mundane. I want to draw people with metal umbrellas, staring at their phones walking through a volcanic eruption and ash falling with fire. Then showing workers shovelling away the ash like it’s a normal day.

I got this idea from one thumbnail in particular

The umbrella with the red tones made the connection for me. Red like the lava of a volcano and the umbrella protecting from ash.

So I did some experimentation, drew out my panels and created my final piece

I’m really proud of it, this has been the most enjoyable week so far for me. I really enjoyed the process and being able to think about my work instead of having to capture people walking by and having no time to make it look decent.

I enjoy having time to actually focus on what I’m drawing. I liked being able to just stay in the studio and focus away from the noise and stress that comes from working outside. Alongside that the idea for this week was also just really fun, turning Cambridge into a volcanic wasteland was an interesting concept for me to work with. I also finally got to incorporate ate my imagination into my work, even if it was only a little

Overall, it was a good week

[illustration-and-animation]

WEEK 5

This week we created thumbnails of the nearby river. I decided to use coloured pencils and fine liners to do my work. My main difficulty was spending too much time on my drawings to begin with. This slowed me down a lot. I began to speed up later though. Unfortunately the rain got really heavy so I decided to head back to campus and I came back later in the week here’s an example of a few pages of thumbnails I did;

I decided on pencils to begin with as I found them to a lot of fun with the museum work. I found black and white tone extremely difficult and the coloured pencils helped me to understand and enjoy tone. However I found they kept getting me too focused and I couldn’t draw the thumbnails loosely. So when I went back to the river I switched to just simple line drawing which helped me to complete my thumbnails a lot faster, I used a simple highlighter to add some colour so I wouldn’t get too bored though.

I didn’t mind drawing at the river as much as the other on-scene drawing sessions. It was a lot quieter albeit a lot rainier and colder. I’m not good at working fast, so I wouldn’t say it was my favourite week. I liked drawing nature, but I didn’t like that i had to be fast and loose. But I didn’t hate it.

[illustration-and-animation]

WEEK FOUR

In the fourth week we worked with complementary colours. We could only use two colours per piece. I chose blue and orange.

We started of the day with a lecture about using the colours to create tone. The hardest part of this exercise was trying to ignore the colour of objects and solely focus on the tone. So for the initial exercises we used white objects or objects with a limited colour palette. I drew a shoe and a pair of glasses. It was when I was doing these exercises that i knew I’d really enjoy this week.

I’m very proud of the shoe. I think it was easier as it was pure white. The glasses were rose tinted so I only used red on the gradient which is a sign of me focusing only on the colour and not on the tone.

After these exercises we focused on drawing artefacts in an anthropology museum. The artefacts were quite varied in shape and colour so it was an interesting concept.

As said in previous weeks, I love colour and struggle with black and white so I felt this was my time to shine.

These are the 5 artefacts I drew at the museum

I think my major problem was my stamina. I can see the quality of the drawings going down. Whether it’s because I spent too much time on the first I don’t know. I’m not good at managing my time. It would help to set timers for drawings so I don’t keep going past my limit and leave enough time to work on every drawing equally.

[illustration-and-animation]

WEEK THREE

In the third week, we studied tone. Depending on what medium I was using, I enjoyed this week. I loved using the inks as I don’t paint do often. I really didn’t like using the charcoal and rubbing it away with charcoal. The collage I wasn’t fond of either as it is evident from my previous attempts to create the sky line using paper last week, I’m not precise with paper. I started with three exercises which used each of these mediums which i will put below

I enjoyed doing these little exercises. Although I didn’t enjoy the medium I think that the charcoal portrayed tone the best. I feel like with the ink someone would not know what I drew unless they saw the subject from a photo. I tried to plan out what I was going to do using thumbnails before I created the actual piece which was really helpful, especially for the college as I could pre plan what paper to use where.

Working on tone in my free time I found it extremely hard. Maybe I just don’t have a good eye for it but I had many failed pages that were just a mess of charcoal and ink. I found myself getting really frustrated. I didn’t enjoy it. I think I’m a little addicted to colour and black and white is really hard for me.

As you can see, it wasn’t very successful despite my multiple failed attempts and practice. This was especially frustrating because I felt so confident doing the class exercises

[illustration-and-animation]

WEEK TWO

In the second week we worked on perspective. I knew this would be difficult for me as I have focused on drawing humans and getting the anatomy of people right that I really neglected perspective. I had to focus a little on perspective last week when I did the people with scenes but it wasn’t my main focus. So we went out to the market place to draw. I stuck to pencils this week as I wanted to make sure things looked correct.

Unlike people, I had more time to truly focus. Despite this, I like my drawings from last week significantly more than the ones from this week. I believe it’s because I haven’t drawn much perspective and it’s hard to wrap my head around the principles of perspective. I feel I’ve looked into all areas of art rather thoroughly apart from perspective. I struggled greatly without guidance.

To give you and example I was trying to draw a building. I was looking up at the building. The top drawing is my first attempt

It is clear I didn’t do two things:

1. Use my pencil to see how the lines slope

2. Consider my eye level

The top image would suggest my eye level was the roof of the building which would mean I’d have to be floating in the air. I didn’t even notice anything was wrong until a teacher pointed it out. Then when I redrew it I realised what had gone wrong and that my eyes were tricking me.

Class time aside, I think I’d need to work on perspective a lot more. Here are a few examples of what I did throughout the day and week

(The final images I am not proud of)

[illustration-and-animation]

WEEK ONE

In the first week we focused on drawing people in motion. I have never done this before and it posed a huge challenge for me. I struggled to keep up with the people moving, as soon as I started drawing them they had already walked away. You will see in my sketchbook pages that people will be half done. Sometimes I got frustrated and scratched them out but I’ve tried to avoid this.

I’ve tried multiple different mediums for this, starting with pencils and then markers, charcoal, brush pens and fine liners. I decided on fine liners and they didn’t give me the option to rub things out if I messed up. It made me feel a lot looser with my drawings as I knew I couldn’t go back and fix them. I knew if I used pencils I would try make them perfect and just keep erasing as it was option open to me.

I think I really need to work on my speed and looking at the subject rather than my sketchbook. It’s a hard habit to break as I draw from my imagination so often.

Drawing people in scenes was really hard as well since the scale of the people were hard to keep consistent with the scale of the world around them. Depending on where the person is walking I could accidentally draw them looking they are as tall as a building. But I enjoyed drawing the scenes and people a lot more than just people

Below are some examples of the work I did;