For the laser cutting workshop we were asked to play around with font/ our typography working with a well known saying. To prep for this session I used floral imagery and abit of wild-life to influence my final piece for this brief.
Thursday, 11 May 2017
Brief 9: Book Illustrations, Animated GIF & Critical Report
For this assigned brief I chose to illustrate Angela Carter's 'Bloody Chamber' tale 'The Tiger's Bride' a tale about a young girl who is lost to a wealthy man known as the 'Beast' in a game of cards with her father. After spending time with the beast she eventually finds out his true form is that of a tiger and slowly learns to love him despite his form.
After reading the tale and beginning to do my research whilst experimenting with ideas and styles, I found a couple of artists that helped to influence the style of my work as well as giving me inspiration for a few of my ideas behind my work. For example, the digital artist Marcello Monreal uses portraits and combines them with floral imagery to create twisted contemporary art forms. From his work I found my inspirations of combining two of my separate images together overlapping to create a new feature to my piece (see third scene).
And although there was only one image that I could find to relate to this artist I loved the concept that Eduardo Recife uses in his work as he overlaps various textures together after manipulating them to create a new form, this technique I have used especially in my front cover. using my own textures to add more layers to my characters and surrounding objects within my image.
When reading through this tale I began to take notes of a few of (what i deemed to be) the most inspiring quotes that really bring the tale to life for me. Quotes such as in the beginning of the tale as the beast is gambling with the girl's father she says things like "My father lost me to The Beast at cards" and "his hands shake as he deals the Devil's picture book". In this the devil is personified as though he is present within this scene bringing a sinister aura to the start of the tale. This is something that I have used and developed within my work. Researching into how I could use the idea of the 'devil's picture books' to represent the beast as I wanted to keep his figure as mysterious as possible in this design. After some development, I came across the idea of playing off the two kings against each other, presenting the beast as a devilish form using the idea of his "mask with a man's face painted most beautifully on it." to present the looming presence of the personified devil. Creating the image of the one king hidden by a grinning mask while the other one is crying holding the cards as they burn. Deciding to create this into a gif I then had to go through the stages of making the burning cards flicker and make the tears fall down the king's cheek, also deciding then to include the quote within this image giving the gif more context.
Moving on to other important scenes within this interesting tale, I found it intriguing to focus on the part of the story where the Beast reveals himself to be a tiger, removing his robes and mask to run around the open fields. Wishing to keep the realistic tiger imagery I spent some time sketching out various images of tiger's to develop for that scene looking into main visual images from quotes in the tale such as, "The tiger will never lie down with the lamb...The lamb must learn to run with the tigers" referring to the girl's found courage in presenting herself naked to the beast. This visual image of her character change I attempted to capture in my next scene of the beast running and the girl undressing, gives the impression of her shedding her armor and exposing herself to him completely.
This image shows the transition of how the main character slowly lets down her barriers and gives herself to the beast in the final pages when she enters the room and "each stroke~ of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a'life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." This final quote of the tale, leaving the reader in wonder, is where I based my final scene. overlaying the beast and the girl as one as she is transitioned into a tiger at the end of the tale. Showing how she has shed her 'mortal boundaries' to become one with her lover. An image which I have captured in this scene.
In conclusion, although the style I have chosen to use is quite simplistic it worked with the technique that I was trying to capture as well as the fact that my pieces required a lot of line-work I found that keeping a white background kept the main attention within the characters in the images instead of having a coloured background that blended too much with the image. Meaning that anyone that would be looking at the images would lose sight of the main characters. As well as keeping it simple I was also pleased with the emotion that can be seen within the images when necessary, such as within both the third scene but mainly within the front cover, the misleading preconception that the beast comes across as a malicious dominant figure within the cover shows how as a reader we begin to see that the beast is not what his features make him seem.
For this assigned brief I chose to illustrate Angela Carter's 'Bloody Chamber' tale 'The Tiger's Bride' a tale about a young girl who is lost to a wealthy man known as the 'Beast' in a game of cards with her father. After spending time with the beast she eventually finds out his true form is that of a tiger and slowly learns to love him despite his form.
After reading the tale and beginning to do my research whilst experimenting with ideas and styles, I found a couple of artists that helped to influence the style of my work as well as giving me inspiration for a few of my ideas behind my work. For example, the digital artist Marcello Monreal uses portraits and combines them with floral imagery to create twisted contemporary art forms. From his work I found my inspirations of combining two of my separate images together overlapping to create a new feature to my piece (see third scene).
And although there was only one image that I could find to relate to this artist I loved the concept that Eduardo Recife uses in his work as he overlaps various textures together after manipulating them to create a new form, this technique I have used especially in my front cover. using my own textures to add more layers to my characters and surrounding objects within my image.
When reading through this tale I began to take notes of a few of (what i deemed to be) the most inspiring quotes that really bring the tale to life for me. Quotes such as in the beginning of the tale as the beast is gambling with the girl's father she says things like "My father lost me to The Beast at cards" and "his hands shake as he deals the Devil's picture book". In this the devil is personified as though he is present within this scene bringing a sinister aura to the start of the tale. This is something that I have used and developed within my work. Researching into how I could use the idea of the 'devil's picture books' to represent the beast as I wanted to keep his figure as mysterious as possible in this design. After some development, I came across the idea of playing off the two kings against each other, presenting the beast as a devilish form using the idea of his "mask with a man's face painted most beautifully on it." to present the looming presence of the personified devil. Creating the image of the one king hidden by a grinning mask while the other one is crying holding the cards as they burn. Deciding to create this into a gif I then had to go through the stages of making the burning cards flicker and make the tears fall down the king's cheek, also deciding then to include the quote within this image giving the gif more context.
Moving on to other important scenes within this interesting tale, I found it intriguing to focus on the part of the story where the Beast reveals himself to be a tiger, removing his robes and mask to run around the open fields. Wishing to keep the realistic tiger imagery I spent some time sketching out various images of tiger's to develop for that scene looking into main visual images from quotes in the tale such as, "The tiger will never lie down with the lamb...The lamb must learn to run with the tigers" referring to the girl's found courage in presenting herself naked to the beast. This visual image of her character change I attempted to capture in my next scene of the beast running and the girl undressing, gives the impression of her shedding her armor and exposing herself to him completely.
This image shows the transition of how the main character slowly lets down her barriers and gives herself to the beast in the final pages when she enters the room and "each stroke~ of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a'life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." This final quote of the tale, leaving the reader in wonder, is where I based my final scene. overlaying the beast and the girl as one as she is transitioned into a tiger at the end of the tale. Showing how she has shed her 'mortal boundaries' to become one with her lover. An image which I have captured in this scene.
Wednesday, 10 May 2017
Brief 8: Hand Lettering
In preparation for this session we were asked to walk around town and use the typography we saw around town to create our own alphabet, and take texture photographs that could once we did this we then (in session time) began to create our own textured typography.
In preparation for this session we were asked to walk around town and use the typography we saw around town to create our own alphabet, and take texture photographs that could once we did this we then (in session time) began to create our own textured typography.
(Scan of alphabet)
Screenshot progression of the session.
Brief 7: Digital Portraits
Brief 7: Digital Portraits
For this week's session we were asked to draw several portraits of people and bring in a few photos of people whether it be friends, family, or someone we know and create a digital painting of them using illustrator. For this I started off by manipulating this drawing from one of my scans, firstly changing the levels of the photograph in photoshop so that the image was only black and white as you can see below.
For this week's session we were asked to draw several portraits of people and bring in a few photos of people whether it be friends, family, or someone we know and create a digital painting of them using illustrator. For this I started off by manipulating this drawing from one of my scans, firstly changing the levels of the photograph in photoshop so that the image was only black and white as you can see below.
Once I had done this I then began to manipulate the line drawing itself in illustrator by changing the different colours creating a minimalistic effect to my work.
I then began to create a digital painting adding layers of colour to the original linework, experimenting with different tones which i found worked very well ontop of the linework as we can see in the screenshots of my process below.
Once i had finished this process I then added the finishing touches of a background to complete my final image.
Overall I was very happy with this outcome as I found it interesting experimenting with the graphics tablet and which shadings to use for separate parts of both the skin tones and the hair colour, I do think however that i could have blended the tones a lot more on the forehead of the portrait.
Looking into the next portrait I did this time using a photograph, here we can see the original photograph as well as the stages of making it a black and white template for my digital painting.
(original photograph)
As a contrast to my earlier digital painting using my line drawing I wanted to create a simplistic yet colourful effect on the skin tone, so I decided to use mild pink tones to recreate the face which considering the final background colour matching the previous portrait background. This worked well as the colours used in the face of this portrait compliment the background colour as we can see in my final image below.
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