Mini workshops - The Museum of Spectres and Spooks

Here is my finished ghost poster design, pretty happy with it overall and I feel good about my first proper hand rendered type of this module. I have taken inspiration from Aaron Blecha and came up with a style that works for me, one that I am confident in using. If I was to be really picky I would move the word 'THE' up a little to the right to centre it but I don't think it hinders the composition at all.

If you look through my sketch folder you can see that I made a spider diagram depicting where I wanted to go with this workshop, this one is the one that I am most excited about and because of such I had quite a lot of ideas.

One of the first things I wanted to do was create a flyer for the museum. The image above shows the development from ink to digital colouring, I wasn't a big fan of the image in the middle so I played around with just having a glowing face in the middle of the flyer. That idea was a lot better but I still felt like it could evolve some more, it could be better.

Above is my revisited and enhanced flyer, it looks much better now after I decided that the whole canvas would act as my slimy ghost. I threw my design onto some tee shirt templates also, the blue was just to experiment but the green one is pretty cool. I liked using a few black lines to add in details, the artwork and style has evolved since the first poster design and I like where it's going.

The tickets above were the first thing I made after the poster, the little green ghost in the bottom right hand side of the poster was my favorite so I wanted to incorporate him as part of the ticket. I think i prefer the bottom version as it seems to glow more and the square texture in the background makes it look more plush and ready for print. I designed it so that the purple line would be perforated so that the owner can keep the ghost as a memento, I also left out some of the details because I wanted to include a flyer with every ticket. This was a smart move as I didn't want to have too much type on my image and now it balances out nicely. Obviously for an adult ticket i'd just switch out the part that says 'CHILD' and i'd also just bump the price up.

I have also made a welcome sign to direct the people who come to the museum. This one has a mixture of full line work and pure colour inking, thought I would combine two of my styles and blend them into one, I think it works well.

After playing around with my design I actually decided that the black background is better and it makes everything a lot easier to understand. I'd like a green text though maybe to match the green glow around the hand.

I think I have narrowed it down to two designs. I think I like the one on the left more, simple and too the point. The other one has a more ghostly look but it seems a little harsh on the eyes. Might just want to brighten up the green text a hint more to get that glowing ooze effect,

Right I have revisited this ten thousand times and now I feel like it should be either of the above two. Just not sure about keeping the hand green as I worked hard to get a nice skin colour on the original image. I shall try the image with just the text being green and then i'd like to move on.

This is it, I think this is what I wanted from the beginning but I took the long way around to get here. Nice and simple, green text, enhanced the colour with a neon green layer mask and now I am happy with it. Time to move on and extend this workshop even further.

Mini workshops - The Museum of Spectres and Spooks - figuring things out

When this workshop started we were given a specific Pinterest board to look at, we then had to choose three images from said board that would help to inspire our image. The three images that I chose will be in another post.

Above is a collection of images that I looked at to get inspired for this workshop although I was already excited because this one really appealed to my interests as an illustrator. I am a huge fan of monsters, aliens and all things gruesome and because of such I wanted to get stuck into this workshop before we had even been fully briefed!

As per usual I looked into cartoon ghosts, some of which were from some of my favorite childhood cartoons such as Scooby Doo and Spongebob Squarepants. I've always been a big fan of cartoon monsters as they never really seem to scare me and their exaggerated features just make for great characters. Things that are green and glow in the dark also just appealed to me both when I was a child and now, I do enjoy a good glow in the dark sticker.

Moving on I had a look at Aaron Blecha who is an absolute boss!
I found him whilst I was on my Internship at Hallmark and he is just amazing, he has worked with clients such as Disney and Cartoon Network, he has also illustrated kids books and even has his own brand of Cola!

As far as aspects go this is exactly where i'd like to be as an illustrator. His work is vast and stretches all across the board, reaching out to a younger audience whilst still being able to please the masses and gain all types of commissions. His character design is fantastic and everything has this toxic look to it which is pretty awesome. This was sort of what I was hinting on in the above paragraph, grungy and gooey aspects just appeal to the male audience, in a stereotypical way of course. Boys like monsters and farting, it's simple maths!

Stationary workshop - figuring things out

In response to some of my earlier thumbnails I started to research Marvel's Silver Surfer to get some inspiration. I love how animated this guy gets and I feel that he shows great control over his body even though he is in a completely weightless environment. One of my original ideas was to parody this great hero by illustrating a Pritt stick surfing around on the Surfer's board, leaving a gooey trail behind to illustrate how far he had come. Whilst looking at the Surfer I was also interested in the cosmic trails that are left behind by his board and I think this helped to animate the character. These are all things that I should consider when making my character.

After playing around with the surf board idea for a while I figured that although it would be cool to parody one of my favorite Marvel characters it would make more sense to come up with something a little more original. Above is my first mock up of my Pritt stick character, I like how he turned out and the glue has been emulated fairly well but after having a few words with Tristan I noticed a few points of improvement that could take action. Tristan mentioned that my characters expression might not fit the piece and the characters shape is a bit rigid. These comments were fair and I was happy to take them on board since this character was still at the early stages of development.

In the article that we were given it talks about the original Pritt mascot and how he appears to have a bit of a hard life and I think that is maybe what I was going for with my characters expression above, I wanted him to look fed up and annoyed about his gluey trail he had left.

For me as an illustrator i'd think that my style of work would be targeted towards a younger audience and even though my original sketch is cartoony he might be a little bit grungy for kids, I should consider this during the next stage of development for this character.

 After revisiting my character and expanding on what I had already learned I came up with a slightly cute and more relatable character (see sketch folder for plan sketches). This one has better form and shape to him. The image above contains characters from the Worms game franchise and I feel like their thumb like shapes helped to inspire my character in a few ways. I started off struggling with animating a solid cylindrical object and I didn't want to give it arms or legs because it would become less apparent that it was a glue stick. I eventually chose to throw reality out of the window and started playing around with some crazy poses for my glue stick character, I didn't want it's simple shape to limit me.

I also wanted to limit myself by not giving my character a mouth, that way i'd have to convey emotions with body shape and eyes alone. Above are a bunch of different brand mascots which i'd looked at to see how other artists have dealt with giving life to random objects. The little pizza is a good example as it uses minimal features to bring it to life, the peas in a pod are also a great. Either way I think I have captured my characters emotions well using the minimal elements I gave myself.

 Above are some development shots of my final image, you can see there is quite a change in between original pencils and digital inking. The original drawing shows satellites and astronauts getting caught up in the glue trail, this changed to rockets in the second image and I had gotten rid of them completely by the third image, This was because I felt that the busy glue trail already added a dynamic element to my image and it did not need much else.  During the third image the glue layer was hidden so I could focus on the character and the earth.

I also added a small moon to show that he is on his return trip back to earth and to really exaggerate his journey he has taken the long route back.

Here is the final image, I made the swirling pattern using ink, I then scanned it in and added a linear light gradient layer mask (what a mouthful!).

I was tempted to add some stars into the mix but I feel that they would take something away from the gooey trail floating free in space. The texture was definitely needed on the earth as it gave it a much needed lift, it was way to flat on its own. I wanted to experiment with glue textures but after completing it I can see that it isn't really needed. This is probably one of my strongest images from this module and it demonstrates a good understanding of character design and composition. The trail was a little bit hard to understand at first but maybe that was because I was looking at it for too long, I thought about moving part of the trail behind the earth but decided against it.

I went for the full size image that would feature the editorial text on the opposite page, I think that was a good choice as it gives my character a lot of room to breathe. Also the large scale image gives a sense of depth and scale to my characters mission.

My mini statement of intent writes about focusing on the character creation and generation of ideas. This workshop helped me aim towards those goals, after writing my statement I decided that I would like to showcase some of my characters at the end of the module via cartoon title cards, This character will hopefully become one of them.

Mini workshops - Grasshoppers - figuring it out

These are some of the photos I took from the start of this workshop. I was originally going to illustrate cockroaches but something drew me into doing grasshoppers instead. First we had to draw our chosen insect 10 times realistically from reference, I struggled with that but I got through it.
We then had to characterize our insect with 10 more sketches, that was a bit more my thing.

I got stuck with this workshop for a while, I just could not get the characters to look the way I wanted them to. Once again cartoons and films saved the day and gave me the inspiration that I needed.

The first character that came into my mind when I started this brief was the grasshopper from James And The Giant Peach, I always loved that character and they way they animated his mouth was pure genius. Whilst drawing my grasshopper characters I thought about the many different segments that made up the body and face and how I would deal with them, this character study from the film helped me understand just that.

Whilst working things out (see sketch folder) I
started drawing the grasshoppers with square heads, automatically I thought of Invader Zim and started looking at the characters from the show. With these two studies in mind I was ready to start building up my image.

This was my first mock image for the workshop, I was at a point of frustration and I couldn't get a composition down so I drew this up. I actually like the character and the text isn't bad but I feel like it could be more than this, stronger. Also I wouldn't say that a single character is enough considering a cloud of grasshoppers is a massive swarm.

Here are some progress shots of my newer image, thumbnails for this can be seen in my sketch folder. This one is a lot stronger and I feel like the composition just works a lot better, I feel like I have explored this character a lot and pushed it to it's very limits and I am really happy with it. These guys look like they could work as a cartoon, maybe I could adapt the design to look like a title card.

The image on the left was my first finished version but I soon decided that the gradient in the background was too distracting, the orange clouds were originally chosen to stand out in contrast against the green characters but I also changed that. The image on the Right is my final version, I might play with text colour but apart from that I am content in saying that this workshop is complete.

The characters have been explored a fair amount already in the build up to this but to really polish this one off it would be nice to mock up a title card as if this were a cartoon!

Mini workshops - Synchronized swimming - figuring things out

To start of this workshop I looked at some general illustrations and photos of people swimming, some of the images I found were beautiful and they also came in a variety of different styles, some realistic and others quite cartoony. I chose synchronized swimming over swimming in the wild just because I feel like this route would allow me to focus more on the character instead of the location. A lot of the illustrations I found resembled patterns which was pretty cool but I was also interested in how the bodies became almost tangled up to make these crazy shapes. After watching a few videos on YouTube I can see that this sport is not as easy as it looks and can be incredibly stressful at times.

Some of my earlier thumbnails featured tentacles wrapping up and getting tangled in the water which I think helped to simulate how hard these moves are to choreograph and execute. Using something like an octopus's limbs to simulate each dancer would be a cool idea, a group of separate beings coming together and working as if they shared one brain.
This is getting pretty deep...

  Whilst exploring some different ideas I searched up on some images that had an obvious split between surface and sea bed as I feel like that is the simplest way to emulate the two planes. One image even features an octopus so it seems like fate has decided this one for me.

I'd also looked at playing around with perception, some of the images above feature monsters heads being mistaken for islands which is a pretty cool concept. The sea in most of the images dominate the picture to emphasize how large and vast it is. For my image though I feel like what lies beneath is less important than what is on top. I want to have an octopus like creature crammed into the bottom of my image underwater, he will be working hard and wriggling away, his tentacles will mimic the legs of synchronized swimmers and he will be getting top marks for his efforts.

Above is a piece that I made over the summer titled 'Under Da Sea'
It was part of my work for the little book of texts and was also my first attempt at drawing something under water. In this case I used a lot of blue gradients and messed around with transparencies to emulate plant life at the waterbed. There are a couple of bubbles scattered around to add movement to some of the elements. When I go to colour the workshop piece I should consider the methods I used to create this image.

I have an angular style which is directly inspired from older cartoons from my childhood, because of such I was struggling to make a tentacle look like a woman's leg. I looked into some of my favorite cartoons for inspiration and soon figured it out. I always loved the running gag in many cartoons that featured a woman's leg stepping out of a car, it would then pan up and the leg would not belong to a woman. The Spongebob image above always makes me laugh, he goes to rob a bank and to do so he uses a pair of tights as a robbers mask, as he goes to tighten the headdress it snaps into the shape of a woman's leg, absolutely priceless. The character on the far bottom right has a really angular set on boots on which is what I would want to go for, I might even add stockings to make it totally clear that the tentacles are mimicking women's legs.

This is the finished image, original drawings can be seen in sketchbook folder. I am really happy with how the legs turned out and they have plenty of room to breath i think. I used a similar gradient idea for the octopus as I had done on the previous piece 'Under Da Sea' and it works well to show that it is underwater. I think the clock needs to be centered a little bit more to the left and i could maybe play around with taking the elements away and just leave the legs kicking out of the water. Happy with the lack of line work also, the way I have drawn the hands remind me of the art style from Samurai Jack. The black and white signs are also a homage to Cartoon Network, home to many of my influences.

Book cover workshop - Figuring my character out and final plans.

This was the first initial run for my book cover design, I kept a similar text from the original digital images I made but chose to include just the head of O'l Stormalong. This was a happy accident, I was mapping out where elements would lay on the page and drew his head large just to see how it would sit, I ended up liking it and digitally inked it up straight away. The chains simulate those of the anchor that Stormalong swam to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve whilst having to fight a giant octopus. I wanted the chains to be subtle so I multiplied them and dimmed the colours, I also wanted Stormalong to be entangled within the chains so some elements of his face are multiplied to gain this effect.

After messing around with thumbnails for a while I thought it best to keep the tentacles minimal, here they are in blue, not yet the final colour scheme but the composition of the tentacles looks pretty good. I could make the tentacles weave in and out of the chains to make them more involved in the piece, that way they don't look like they have just been slapped on.

Above are some of my favorite illustrations from Andrew Kolb and Drake Broadahl. their images can get pretty busy but they maintain order with some lush colour palettes and subtle textures. The elements in their illustration are simple yet effective and that is what I want to go for with this book cover design. It would be nice to add some subtle textures to the tentacles or maybe the Stormalong character, maybe some flecks on his beard.

Here is my final image - well so far anyway.
Ive added anchors onto the spine and a matching title, I have proofed the colours and upon doing so the greens become slightly less vibrant and it also immerses the elements nicely within the piece. I threw the crop marks on there so I could see where to fold it when I print it out. Now I want to print it and get it on the book to see how it looks in a 3D context, There is a version included in my sketchbook folder which has a texture along the top but after consideration I took it out because it didn't work with the piece. I still have a week left so I might play around with adding textures and things but i'm feeling pretty happy with this one at the moment. It's nice to see how this character has evolved since the start of the project, he looks a lot more stylized now and i'm pretty happy about that. At first I was a little concerned with the green tentacles but I remembered that I am not using a realistic colour palate which totally justifies them being green in this case and they also stand out really nicely against my red character which is what I was aiming for.

Book cover workshop - figuring things out

I'd previously done some research on my story and the links that it had with the program 'The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.
I guess on the way I became a little attached to the secondary character Captain K'nuckles, I adored his design and I feel like he has influenced my characters for this workshop. I loved how this program illustrated the nose, large bulbous shapes have never looked better!
Above I have included some of my character designs for Stormalong and the arrows depict the evolution of him, the length of the nose and the way the characters eyes sit have definitely been influenced by watching this program.

Also I like how beards are animated in this program, the middle image shows some rough sea dogs and their beards have sentient qualities, one's is even holding a sword!

The two digital images of captain Stormalong (enclosed in sketchbook folder) were greatly inspired by Logan Faerber and he is one of my new favorites
This guy has found the perfect balance between digital and traditional, the textures and lines are hand rendered and then the colouring is done digitally. The image on the far bottom right was one of his narratives and it helped give me an idea for the Stormalong comic (top right/middle)

I am happy with the two digital outcomes that I made but I'd like to tone it down a bit for the book cover. During some of my early thumb nails I drew out some simpler ideas and I think that is the way I should go.

A found object - thought process and character development

Before I started colouring my final image I wanted to get an idea of how I would colour it. Lately I have been working with a limited colour palette. I have also limited the amount of shading that goes into my imagery because in the past I have added too much to my line work which took some of the quality away from the final image.
Over the summer I made a few pieces that were really restricted in terms of colour, below are a few of them.

That seemed to work pretty well and it was also good to limit myself. Going back to top image of inspiration pictures I seemed to look at a lot of adventure time pieces, I like how each element just has 1 or 2 colours, that could be something to look into.

Click to enlarge 

Above is the final line work for this workshop, not sure if cutting off the umbrella at the bottom is going to be a problem, I feel like because other elements are also out of shot it will be okay but i'll have to see. Whilst thinking about stage two of this module I knew my focus would be on character design and the application of such. After bouncing ideas around with piers I decided that it would be great to make some cartoon title cards that would feature some of the characters I have made throughout this module. This image in particular kind of looks like a title card already and the 'POOF' text along with the faces on the inanimate objects remind me of the title cards from 'The Fairly Odd Parents', examples below.

Taking some of these images into consideration along with my original research I started to colour my image.

The image on the left is the original image with the line work unchanged, I was fairly happy with it but I was still unsure of the brolly in the bottom left hand corner. I felt like because the story originated from a umbrella handle it should play a larger role in the image or at least not be cut off. So on the right is my finished version, I shrunk the umbrella down so it would fit in the image fully without having to be cropped out and I much prefer it like this.

Despite that there are over 10 different colours in this image I still feel like it is minimal and the shading is only used on certain elements which was the desired effect that I was going for. The image is incredibly busy but the vibrant colours do a good job at keeping everything separated. I like that this does look like a title card and I'd like to explore that concept if I have the time, maybe single out the wizard character and sit a title along/ or in his beard.

Looking at The Fairly Odd Parents images which featire the objects with faces you can see that one has green eyes and the other pink, they relate to the characters Cozmo and Wanda who act as the main character's god parents. These characters can change at will and the only way the viewer knows that it is in fact them is by the green and pink eyes that distinguish the two. I wanted to do something similar with my characters as I took the Grey and Blue swatch and applied it to the objects. Over all I am pretty happy with the result but in the future I should be careful of making my image too busy, I should also consider layout more before finalization.

A found object - narrowing it down - MINI workshop series

 For this mini workshop we had to find an object from a museum and find out about it's origins, delve into it's many mysteries and explain why we chose it. Eventually we will be illustrating aspects from this objects story so it had better be interesting. I saw a load a things in the museum that I liked such as Tiki masks, pickled jellyfish, traditional Katana;s and much more. Eventually I narrowed it down to two objects, above on the right is my first choice.

This is a ceremonial dagger from Ladakh, Kashmir, India, it's actual name is a 'Phurba'and it was supposedly used for rituals and things, COOL RIGHT?!
Anyhow these daggers vary in seize and design but there are some comon features that always make an appearance such as a three headed deity or a decorated skull, in this case it looks like both designs are present. The blade was meant to personify a powerful deity who would bind itself to great evil and destroy it. In addition to such the blade could also be used to influence the weather and was used widely during sandstorms

A lot of that information came with the blade in the showroom but I also found a website which talks about different types of Phurba and their origins. Here it is! CLICK ME

Above are a few examples of other Phurba's.
Some designs are really intricate.

My second choice is absolutely fantastic, I literally had no words for this item, I had to read the description to gain any ground.

A Japanese water spirit? Fantastic.

I love also that this was given as a gift to someone I mean i'm all up for joke presents but this is just amazing. It's also incredibly bizarre because of it's placement, It's not like it is on the end of a sword hilt, this would go in your hand regularly whenever it is raining and that makes it even weirder.

After doing some research I managed to find a newspaper article on this exact piece and I can confirm that it is indeed a water spirit named a Kappa. The Kappa is a spirit that had the body of a turtle or frog and a head of an ape, it also came with a turtle like beak for added shock factor. The beast had a Beatles style hair cut and a massive bald patch on the crown of it's head which was supposedly full of liquid that granted strength.

This thing was bloody terrifying but I learnt that if you are to stand a chance against this beast you must first bow as low as possible, the beast will be obliged to do the same thus tipping the liquid out of his crown which will weaken him.

Nice little fact that I read from the article which can be found here... CLICK ME

Year three - mini workshops - Editorial illustration

Awesome illustrator Kelsey Heinrichs produces these epic images for various magazines such as Kerrang, Wired and The Wall Street Journal and many others.  These magazines aren't that high end but they don't come cheap either, from what I can see, most of these magazines are printed on thin paper. Kelsey makes these wonderful coloured images and the application of such is very well suited for these platforms.

There isn't a lot of texture to her work if any at all, Most of her elements seem to have 2-3 colour values and her complex images have 4-6 which isn't a lot, it's simple and effective. Looking through some of Kelsey's images I was able to find some of them in context from the magazines, Wired magazines paper looks quite thin and cheap and has a light bitty texture which actually picks up on some of Kelsey's images which works pretty well.

It should also be noted that Wired magazine has a digital version for tablets and kindles which obviously won't feature the thin paper texture, Kelsey's work is coloured digitally also so being able to see the work on a digital platform delivers her work effectively

Kelsey often leaves a lot of space for colour and allows that to do the talking and it is on these larger parts of the print that the texture of the paper can come through.

Ricardo Martinez is an abolsoute boss at cross hatching!
Fan boy moment aside, his work is incredible and visually stunning, he has been in the illustration game for a long time and has landed various jobs within the editorial world. Ricardo has worked for companies such as Dr Pepper and 7UP but his main art style as shown above is black and white ink work. These images pop perfectly on newspaper print purely because of their natural tonal value and the existing grey pages. The natural texture created by the hatching is easy to process and easy to read which is probably why he has landed so many jobs in this field.

Ricardo and his friend Nacho (yes that's actually his name) created the comic 'Goomer' and it has been a very successful and is still in print now i believe. Having a quite look through those comic images i can take similarities from Kelsey's work as far as colour went, everything had nice bold colours and was shaded simply, it picks up on the paper and reads well.


Seems like the cheaper the paper the simple the colours must be? Crosshatching is a smart way of adding shadows and tonal value without having to use too much colour if any at all. It's also a popular technique to use in newspaper cartoons. A lot of big illustrators use this style including Philip Harris and Chris Riddell.

The museum of spectres and spooks - Making my final design

This poster took me a little while to throw together but I am happy with the overall outcome. 

From top to bottom you can see the basic path that my imagery took and how I built it up over time. This piece is heavily reliant on digital rendering, the original line work was only used as a guide and was not incorporated into the final image. Throughout the process I was thinking about transparency and how each characters value would affect the end product. Just above you can see two finished images, I am not yet sure which one to go with, the one on the left has a creepy feel to it where as the one on the right feels more Halloween influenced. Either way I am happy with the composition and ready to move on. Because each character is fairly polished off I feel like they could easily be applied as singular elements to other objects such as tickets, badges and even tee shirts. 

We got given a Pinterest board to look through and we were to select three that we liked the most, we then had to apply the influence to our artwork whilst still keeping it our own work. The first image above is of 'the Creature From The Black Lagoon' and I liked it because of it's angular style and awesome vintage horror font. The colour schemes are quite simple and some of the corners look like there are shaded with a spray paint like texture which is also a similar texture i use to shade my images.  The main influence here is the way the text is placed at an angle and it works well, because of such I have angled some of my text in a similar way. 

The second image was again chosen because of it's vintage look and awesome fonts. My main text was designed to look like some kind of ectoplasmic goo and is similar to the blood text above. I also incorporated some bats into my imagery because they matched the 'spooky' theme but by coincidence they take inspiration from this poster. 

 Finally I chose this poster because of its simple angular character designs, elements such as my skulls, bats and mini ghosts were created with this simple design in mind. Because they are simple they stand out and act as strong communication elements for my image, it is also these elements that allow themselves to get reused on other supporting objects such as badges and tickets. 

When I have chosen which final image I want to use I will upload it but for the moment I'll need to move on and focus on another brief.

More to come soon!