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.