Phils scene of the crime

This is a picture from the college toilets, i used bleach to make this burning effect, i found it quite humorous to see a toilet on fire, to make the really white parts i literally flooded that section with bleach.

Flames in the corridor, looks really effective here, maybe i could experiment with layering up the flame effects in photoshop. i think i would like to go with the arson attack idea for my final idea though i am not yet sure.

Just a random collage of a murder scene at the sinks in the 4.1 studio, i just used a pro marker to colour over the photo, the blood is really blatant and cartoon like but i think that i like it like this because despite it's cartoon appearance it still suggests gore and violence. 

This is a picture of the gallery in the art college, i really liked the open space and the white walls were almost asking to be ruined. the structure of this building sugests that it is strong and able to take a beating, thought destroying the piller could make the entire thing crumble. 

Drawing perspective image of a hall way, coloured with fineliner and water. 

This is a photoshop trace that i have done of the gallery, i have made it slightly cartoon like and i can now colour it. i earlier said that i liked the cartoon blood i had drawn for one of my images, i wanna keep up with this theme and use really bold and bright colours to illustrate this piece.

Here is my cartoonized image of the gallery, i have added my pigeons from the last project to make it look abandoned and they also fit in with the colour scheme. i have made the scene in a different location, i did this just to show that the inner structure of a building can be re-used into different scenes and landscapes. 

I experimented with odd angles and interesting objects for my crime scene, the phone hanging off of the  console could suggest that someone was trying to call for help but something got them.

Another photoshop trace - i didn't get around to finishing this one but i would have liked to colour it using the same technique as i used for the gallery, i would of also added some really obvious blood by the phone to suggest someone was clawing away at the phone before someone killed them.

Whilst i was doing all of this tracing i had the idea of using phil's room as a template for my crime scene, the desk and chair were good elements for the pieces structure and it would also be humorous to illustrate a crime scene that takes place in my lecturers office.

 I traced some of the key elements and then switched out his chair and macbook for a typewriter and an old victorian age chair, the many stages that this image went through are all in my physical folder. i coloured the image using pro markers, i then photocopied the image and coloured over it with charcoal  and then repeated the process. finally i tea stained some paper and used it as my background for the final image, i burnt the edges of my work to make it look authentic. The piece is mounted on a burnt bit of paper which is ironic because the image is showing an arson attack.

The image turned out really well and i am proud of what i have achieved, if i were to do this project again i would work more on the artist reference to extend my pool of ideas and i would focus a lot on how space is used to appropriately compliment the piece. I am happy with the way that this turned out and i really like the techniques that i had learned when creating this image.   

Stage 2 Visual communication

This is the article that i have chosen for my stage 2 Of the visual communication project. I used the archives in the city library to access some older crimes in hope that i would find a case that would be fun to illustrate. After routing around for about half an hour i came across this bad boy From the Western Morning News (1970). A couple a thieves broke into Co-op and made off with over 1000 eggs which i thought was brilliant. 

I had ideas for this project straight away and was eager to start drawing out some plans for the project. 

Here i started to generate ideas For my robbing characters, the article did not actually tell me how many   robbers there are so at the moment i am not sure how many i am to do.

Refining ideas slightly, I had the idea of basing my characters on the robbers from home alone, one obviously being tall and the other being really short. 2-3 bandits is a good number for this project because with the end result only being A5 i won't want the image to be crowded by a load of characters. The long nosed character in this image is looking to be a keeper at the moment, he is tall and has bird like characteristics which links in to his egg stealing.

         This is one of my ideas for the short robber, his little face and hat reminded me of Steve Bell's work that he does on David Cameron so i thought i would research him. I picked up a couple of tips for facial features when researching this artist.

This is one of the images that i got from Steve Bells website. For a while now David Cameron has been portrayed by Bell as a condom which i think is hilarious. It is the features which make it apparent that it is Cameron and i really like the way his eyes seem to pop out of his face, i will definitely take some influence from this artist when drawing the faces of my characters.

My quick sketch of the 'wet bandits' from Home Alone

An artists representation of the 'wet bandits' ~
The short one is pudgy and is lacking hair where as the tall one is skinny and has a nice head of hair. It seems that the taller one is the more desirable character but the catch is that he is incredibly stupid. the short guy is the brains. I think the structure behind these bandits work and i can see it being used in a lot of cartoons today, one will always be short and will therefore be annoyed about being short thus leading to him always being angry. The other will always be tall and incredibly stupid, this one will always find a way to annoy the smaller partner in crime.

 I started doing location research for my image, the scene of the crime is not actually that far away from where i live which i thought would make it nice and easy for me to take loads of pictures. Turns out that i forgot about how old the article was and realized that the store is no longer there. As an alternative i went to another Co-op branch and started taking pictures. The above picture shows the side if the store which features two massive windows with food printed on them as well as a cash machine in the wall. I thought it might be funny if the store was advertising eggs on the side of the building and some robber just came along and fell in love with the abundance of eggs and just needed to steal them.

This is the very back of the store, i managed to catch the fire escape door so it was open thus allowing me to see inside. This could be good to use as a location because this is potentially where the robbers would have gone to get the eggs and they would have hauled them through a small space like this.

 Just drawing out the scene, i replaced the fire exit sign for an 'EGGS' sign to lure the robbers in. Bit of an awkward angle to work with and adding characters into the mix might make the final result too busy.

Here i have just illustrated the robber walking past the store and seeing the massive display for eggs, it is almost like he has walked past a large page 3 print from the Sun.
Like this idea, not sure yet though.





This is my first character sheet, i took the idea of the tall and stupid robber and started to refine how he should look. I decided to give him a hook like nose which resembles a birds beak which also happens to be a coincidence because he is stealing eggs. He will always look tired and a hunch back will make him look disfigured which is the opposite of how the tall robber from Home Alone is portrayed. I noticed that this character also looks like the birdman from the TV program 'Hey Arnold'.








This is the Birdman from 'Hey Arnold'                                                      

Using some of the sketches from my early plans and the influence picture i drew from Steve Bell i managed to pull together my second character design, this one is incredibly short and also has a very large nose, though his nose doesn't look that big because of his fat face. The other robber was too stupid to wear a mask so he used his hat as his mask which still kinda works for him though his nose is way to big so they had to cut a hole in his mask. This guy has the right idea, he wears a mask and a hat for full identity protection. The striped shirt that i have given this robber would suggest experience or maybe he is on the run and it just looking to increase his bounty?




Here i have made a colour pallete for the robbers, i have explored different skin colours, hat colours and even shirt colours, using this i can decide which will be the best combination to use. Next i will need to pair them up and start building my image, though i am yet to decide on a appropriate location.








Here is have started to make the egg piles for my image, i did this by drawing out a small sample pile and then photoshopping them into a pile. works well .





Just some random egg splat's that i want to have on the walls behind the characters, i could also have a couple on the floor to show that the piles are that big they are beginning to topple over.





This is an image which i used in my guess who task for Ben, it is some of Chris Riddell's aliens and i love them, i noticed that they are placed in a traditional police line up which i think would be a good idea to use on my robbers. i could have them holding up the little number cards and have their haul of eggs in the background. Riddell has influenced a lot of my pieces from various modules and i keep referring back to him because i love his technique and realistic colour palette.





This is my first mock up of the two characters together, i have added the same style lineup from Riddell's picture and even used the blue patterns in the background. I also added a mock up pile of eggs which i think turned out well. There are quite a few problems with this image, there needs to be more eggs in my opinion as i really need to stress how many they stole, the blue is very sky like and although it brings the elements away from the page it just doesn't look right. Maybe i could try this colouring technique but with another colour?

Now i have added more eggs, the orientation is slightly off but now i like the image a lot more just because the eggs fill up my canvas and gives the viewer something to look at. i made this massive pile by layering up the same pile, reversing and re-sizing the image until i got this. Though now i am not too keen on the idea of them being in the police station with their number cards.

These two versions now feature a wall which i think really helped to bring the characters away from the page.
I was talking to Mel and we read through the article and we noticed that it said that they presumably used a vehicle to get away with the eggs, Mel then said, wouldn't it be funny if this wall was outside the store and they had got caught before making off with the eggs, or for some reason they had forgotten the car.
I thought this was a really good idea and started looking for wall textures.

At this point i thought it would be good if a could create a third character and have his head popping out of the eggs just for the added touch of humor.

This is the head that i created, he is based on some of my original sketches and is an adaptation of the tall robber, further up in the blog there is a diagram which shows his development into this character. I have used Bell's imagery as influence when sculpting the facial features of this character.

This is the wall i eventually ended up using, i sampled it from 'Game design blog ' the texture was re- posted on someones game design blog because i couldn't find the original. This wall is perfect and it really makes my character stick out, i added a really rough floor, it is rough because most of it will be covered with eggs in the next couple of steps, the pictures i took of walls outside of co-op weren't that messy and this one just works perfectly. Since this character was originally designed to be holding a number card i thought i would edit it to now read 'Egg Count' so it is his little check list for the crime ahead.

Now i am starting to build my image, i have made use of my egg splats and placed them on the wall, this combined with my main character holding eggs in his hand could insinuate that they are also there to vandalize the scene after stealing from it.

Now i have coloured all of the eggs using an image of real eggs for my colour palette, i used three different shades to add depth to my image and also because not every egg is the same colour. Here i have also added the other two characters and positioned them appropriately. Next i need to add shadows, a dark backdrop and a spot light to show that they have been caught.

I had to mess around for ever to make this work, i took a load of tutorials online to figure out how to make an effective glowing light, this is the result. I believe the dark area layer was set to 'darker colour' and the light layer was set to 'linear light' which gave me this effect. I also used a curves FX on the wall to illuminate it accurately with the light being shone on it. just need to add shadows to the guys now.  

Shadows have now been added, though i need to go back and change the main characters shadow as it looks like he is wearing a dress.







This is the finished piece...
i am quite happy with how this turned out, my photoshop skills have come a long way since the first unit, i also believe that my characters accurately convey that they are robbers. When the eggs were white i had worried about them looking like rocks but now they have been coloured and the egg splats have been added i now have no need to worry.
Throughout this project i have used Chris Riddell as my main reference, but looking back on my characters, i can now see that their expressions reflect more of Steve bells work, especially the condom Cameron cartoons. 
if i were to do this piece again i would like to draw my own wall to see how that would have worked with my characters, though the wall being the only non- cartoon element worked quite well in this piece and made everything stand out. I could take some wall pictures and use them for my backgrounds next time so then i can say i have literally created everything in the piece. There was a pretty nice wall across the road from co-op but i found it in the really late stages of this project and didn't have time to revisit the piece with a new background because all of the effects were keyed in to this wall.

This was the wall that i found a couple of days ago, could have worked well, but i have saved it in my textures folder should i ever want to experiment with my final piece.  

Bens task - artist research and sketches

Ben's 3rd task from the guess who workshop left us picking a piece of paper out at random from my hat, each bit of paper had 3 words, 1 noun and 2 adjectives. we then had to create a character using those three words, the characters would eventually be used for a giant and weird game of guess who so we had to make sure that we conveyed the words properly through our images.
My three words were melancholy, alien, warrior and i am very happy with my choice. This part of my blog will contain scans from my sketch book, it will show my path of thought and how i came around to making some of my characters. The page above just shows my first initial thoughts when i got my words, it is sort of a mind map but with images, i tried to illustrate aliens and warriors on different pages so that i could define the key elements of each word. For warriors i focused more on what weapons they would be using because i will be using an alien body shape so warrior characters didn't seem to matter too much. For aliens i just drew up some ideas of what the word means to me, some are floating, some have big heads
and some have robotic features.

Here is one of the first pages of my sketch book, i shows some simple ideas for the concept of a melancholy alien warrior. The one on the left hand side is a weak, amphibian like alien with only one eye, the way i made him hold his weapon at a lowered angle makes him look unprepared for battle. Making his eye red was a bad choice in my opinion because it makes him look angry, the harsh angle of his eye lid is also makes him look mean and or annoyed. If it were to neaten the curve in his eye more it would look more sad. The image on the right shows a stout, muscular, heavily Armored alien. Whilst drawing both of these images i was messing around with the eyes and was seeing if i could convey the mood without the use of any other facial features. The helmet on this one makes it impossible to see most of his facial features, again i have made his eyes slightly at the wrong angle so he looks more annoyed than anything, i also drew him with his hands in his pockets which would have worked well if his eyes were angled correctly but in this case it just looks like he isn't bothered. I did some research and i found out the importance of facial features and how the eyes can actually make up most of the expression. Manny the mammoth from Ice Age for example has his face completely covered by hair and his trunk yet he is still able to show anger, sadness, excitement and many other emotions. For my final image, should i chose to focus on eyes to convey sadness i will have to work on drawing them correctly and take influence from characters such as Manny. 

       Angry manny

Ready for adventure Manny 

This was just another idea that i had, i made him small and weak, his simple face actually conveys the sadness quite well, though i think the angle of his lip could have been lower, he looks a little more irritated then anything. I think the use of greens in my past images definitely helped to convey that my characters were aliens. I want to experiment with different colour's now just because not all aliens are these classic green colour's.

E.T the extraterrestrial  

Zoidberg the Decapodian 

Crypto the Furon 

For my character research i though i would check out some of the more famous aliens and take them apart to find out what it is that makes them recognisable as an alien. E.T is a character from the Spielberg's  E.T. the extraterrestrial. He is small in size and brown in color, he has an extended neck and only has 4 fingers on each hand. His finger glows which seems to allow him to use telekinetic powers to move objects his wrinkled face has an amazing texture and i would like to try and use wrinkles on some of my aliens. Wrinkles exaggerate emotions and could therefore help to make my aliens look sad.

 Zoidberg has features of a squid on his face but he also has claws like a crab. he is able to use his claws to cut open flesh and or sever limbs, he is supposed to be a doctor but usually causes his patients more pain than relief. 

Years ago i played a game on the play station called "Destroy All Humans" i got to play as an alien called Crypto and he is this little grey martian with a large cranium, he also has the ability to move objects with his mind like E.T. Crypto has the classic alien look, small, grey in colour and incredibly smart, Zoidberg on the other hand is silly, unprofessional and clumsy, whilst E.T. appears to be weak, fragile yet very intelligent. Each one of these aliens have their own personality and back story, maybe giving my character these features will help me convey his message.

This is another extract from my book and it just shows some ideas of alien influence. The page on the left shows my interpretation of Crypto and E.T. the colour on the pages was my own fault, the other aliens were coloured  with pro markers and it bled through the pages so i tried to touch it up with photo shop, it was worse. The page on the right shows my interpretation of Paul the alien who for me highlights what a classic alien looks like. Paul is skinny, grey and very smart!
one of my images was also inspired by the Pale man from Pans Labyrinth. the pale man has eyes on his hands and i thought it would be fun to see what i could do with this. the image below shows a pregnant alien who has a facial expression on his belly.    

This is the Pale Man! 

Chris Riddell is one of my favourite illustrators and i thought i would let his work inspire me to create some aliens in his style. I found out that Riddell had released two books, both of which contained a load of images of aliens which he had drawn. I'm currently waiting for the first book to arrive so i thought i would upload some pictures of his other projects. The image above is one of riddles aliens, i love how feeble and creepy they look. 

Riddell uses a lot of neat ink lines and then colours using some amazing vibrant colours. his accurate line work mixed with the insane colouring leaves him a cartoon image that has realistic qualities.  

This isn't necessarily a alien but it is a character from his book series The Edge Chronicles and i thought it appropriate to add in. The pages below will reflect my interpretation of his style and i will begin to home in on a final idea for my alien.   

Just an ideas page for some aliens, the one in the top right hand corner on the left page is a copy from Chris Riddell's Alienography book.  Three of the characters on the right hand page were eventually used for some of my outcomes.

Here are some more of my character ideas, They are coloured using Pro Markers and my line work was done using a fine liner. The added weapons and Armour tick off the warrior description. The odd body shapes and colours definitely cover the alien qualities and the facial expressions definitely make them look sad. The one on the left is weak because of his small limbs, his gear is too big for him and his sword is broken, and if that isn't reason enough to be sad, he is also pink. The one on the right is overweight, ugly and lacks protection which are all good reasons for him to be sad.
For my final image i would like to do one like this on A4, i will then scale him down to A6 so i can keep all of the detail.

I managed to get hold of Chris Riddell's Alienography book and it was literally jam packed with alien ideas. his use of colour is incredible and i can see how much effort he has put into these images. 

Each of his aliens are incredibly detailed and they all seem to reference real life animals.  

I know that Riddell uses a dip pen and ink to colour his work and he generates some pretty awesome textures and i would like to try and mimic this style. Colouring inks and dip pens are quite expensive so i setled for a fine liner to lay down my outlines. I have recently discovered using pro markers to colour my work, they dry with an amazing matt finish and they also layer up well. For my visual mapping module i tried my hand at colouring my images using photoshop, i would now like to take my skills further and try to colour some of my aliens this way. Photoshop allows me to neatly colour images efficiently and professionally, i can also generate the highlights and shadow quite easily using this program. I have noticed that Riddle never really uses white, he adds subtle colours from the pictures palette to make the white pop off of the page.  

This is my final design for the words; melancholy, alien warrior. i am yet to add a background and some of the shading needs to be improved but this is the colour and structure that i will be using. Throughout this project i have researched what are the main features which can be used to describe and alien, and i have come to the conclusion that there are many features which are used to define an alien. The colour green, amphibian like appendages and monocular vision are some of the features that i have used to get the description right. I have drawn this alien out using a fineliner and then coloured him with pro markers, i then touched im up in photoshop and blended the colours, I love the matt finish which is created when i color this way.   

This is just a grey variant of my final alien design, i have changed the design of the eye in this one and i have also gave him a different armour colour. The grey skin tone was inspired by the alien Paul! which is noted further up in the blog, in this picture i have also made his pupil a lot bigger making him look even more upset. 

Here i was just experimenting with the words alien and warrior, he was a bit rushed and i messed up his eye, though the concept behind him works well and it was quite easy to convey the words that describe him. 

By far my neatest image yet, this was just experimenting with the word 'alien'. i think the line work from this character best mimics that of Riddell's aliens, i think when i finish my final image i will add some more detail using this image as a guide. the colour palette used for this alien works well and i am really happy with the way that it turned out.
This alien is supposed to be a worm like creature, he was originally supposed to be an aquatic alien so that is why his lower belly sorta looks like gills and his moustache also looks like seaweed. 

This is one of my early ideas, the warrior description was met by using armour and a sword, the way that his face melts combined with the way i have angled his eyes helped me accomplish the sad emotion and the green skin would makes it alien like, though giving him horns made him look more like a monster and could therefore confuse the viewer of it's description.

Here i have been Experimenting with black and white images, i used a fine liner to create these Riddle inspired aliens, this one is based on a bull frog, i like the loose lines that i can create with a fine liner, my line work has definitely gotten better since the first project.

This is Marvin the alien worm,  he was actually one of my first ideas that i had when i first got this project. i have just revisited this image because it was a good practise to draw as many aliens as i could to generate a good body of ideas for this module. I love the wispy lines that i can generate with a fine liner and the textures that i can create are endless. In this image i have used thin lines to accentuate his wrinkled face, it works well and looks like a cross between E.T and Medusa, E.T was also mentioned further up in my blog and was used for eye reference.





This is Skottie Young. My friend introduced me to him a while ago and i think his work is pretty impressive. He uses brush pens to create these awesome little doodles, i love the looseness of the lines and the thick block colour. I found out that he  also illustrates for Marvel comics which i thought was pretty cool, he creates his professional images using a graphics tablet.




I love the thick lines created with the ink as it really brings out the detail in the face and hair.

How Skottie would communicate a warrior.

This is one of the prints for the Marvelous land of Oz, i like the way that he colours his images. thick black lines are used for stress marks on the clothes and are also used for accents on the limbs.

Here is an image of the different stages my alien went through, the middle one even features a helmet which matches his armour. For my final piece i thought that i would add a background as well as a platform for him to stand on, i tried to create the platform using the same technique as the alien so they would match.

This is another image from Skottie Young, i used this moon as a reference when drawing the planet for my final piece.

I chose to come back to my final alien piece after i had finished my stage 2. My article for stage two was about robbers stealing 1200 eggs on Ham drive green, which i thought was an accidental reference to green eggs and ham by Dr Seuss. Books from Dr Seuss are normally coloured in a really simple way and it turns out that the front cover for green eggs and ham featured a green background. Getting back to the point, i thought i would try to colour my alien's background like this and this is how it turned out!

There are a load of different versions of this book but the one that i know always had a green background. 

This is my final piece for Bens guess who task. Chris Riddell influenced my line work and colouring technique, i really like how this turned out. If i were to do this project again i would like to try my hand at using a dip pen and colouring inks to get a  more natural feel. If i were to do this again using digital media i would probably trace the image in photoshop so that my lines were nice and consistent, some of my lines here are a little grainy because i just worked straight on top of my origional pen drawing.