A Illustrator's Journey

Magazine Illustration  03/08/2018 'A magazine wants an illustration on one of the following: Lost   Disaster   Discovery   Guilty Secret They want an illustration based on still life.You have the freedom to select the items for the still life and are given creative free rein. The rest of the content, the method you use to produce it and the colours you use are all for you to decide.'    I chose the word Disaster to work with on this magazine Illustration. To start my create flow I did two moodboard, one was natural disasters and then I looked at magazine covers: Moodboard_01 Moodboard_02   Next I did a Spider Diagram to see what I could come up with around the word disaster: Spider Diagram    I came up with a lot of doom and gloom and because I haven't had a great week I thought I would play with the word cancelled. I did some quick Idea sketches: Ideas_01    I have bee...

Character Development 31/07/2018 ' Collect as many examples as possible of different characters - Newspapers and magazines are a particular good source. Catalogue these characters as types - babies, children, sportsmen, old woman - create your own category headings. Decide upon a character you would like to create. Begin to brainstorm around your character - perhaps there are characters from the media or your own life you would like to focus on.  Draw your character from the front, from the side and from the back. It may help to draw lines from the neck, shoulder, waist and knees as an aid scale and to ensure a sense of proportion. Draw your character over and over again. Get into role and adopt their mood , expression and personality. Try moving the facial features around to extremes and using a few lines and dots to represent the face. The try another, different, character. Make sure you come up with someone completely different, not just the same p...

Visual Distortion  23/07/2018 ' This exercise is designed to push you through a deliberate process of stylisation. Begin by drawing a cat or dog. Use reference from a source - life, photos or images from the internet. Draw the animal in a way that makes it 'real'.  Do a second drawing using no more than five lines. These lines can join up with each other and overlap or can be less connected; they can be straight or fluid.  Now make a collage from bits cut from a magazine and printouts. Let the texture of a tree be the fur for example. Have fun introducing surreal elements. Deliberately distort. How far can you bend reality? Produce a drawn version (not a tracing) of your collage. When drawing, edit and select from the collage being aware of the properties you want to create a strong character. Review the distorted version and decided how you can refine the image.  This can now be incorporated into a bigger image. Use your imagination an...