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.

screen printing and lino stamps

This is one of the screen prints on brown paper, you can't really see the image on this colour paper so i think that the colour choice was wrong, all of the little details don't really show up. Needs work!

This is one of the better prints because of the colour, the red stands out well against the blue background. though this image bled a lot and i lost part of my image because the paper moved, technique needs improving. 

This is by far one of the best prints that i have done, the detail came out really well and the burst of colours just pops on the page, i like how the colour changes and is not the same throughout the print. 

Nice simple orange on white print, effective!

-Collaboration print - sorta lost my image in this tree print but is still interesting because of the chaos which is created on the page.  

-Collaboration print- I think this works well because the simple tree image really brings out the chaos of my robots, the image above covered too much of the page but this version is a lot better. 

lino print experimentation, here i have used my build a robot stamp to create this little scene, Jade also made some fox's which i used to interact with my characters, this however would be soo hard to repeat and it took soo long to actually build due to the separate pieces. 

One of my multi colour collaboration prints, it turned out great and the amazing blend of colours on both the rabbit and the robots really bring out the picture. one of my favourites 

The red print is a small adaptation of my build a robot design from a while ago, he works well now as a lino stamp and here i have combined him with the fat moustache robot to give a nice repeating pattern that was simple to do yet looks effective. 

This is my floating robot and he is one of my most effective lino stamps because he is so simple and has a lot of big bold areas which allow for good colour coverage. I thought that i would just recycle the tree stamp into this print to see what i could get. 

This is an awesome print, single images work well with my print because it breaks up the chaos in the image. The squid looks like it is attacking my robots. When i print on top of a busy image i think that because my image is also busy it ruins the picture. 

Just a green varient of my moustache robot, here i have been playing around with the angle in which they are presented.

print processes - pt 2

This is norm the robot, he was just an idea i had a while back and i thought that i would use him for print processes.

His slender body shape will be hard to cut ut with lino but could be good for screen printing?

After the build a robot idea went wrong i started drawing out some new simple designs for robots, i wanted ones which would interact with my other prints and i also wanted them to have a good block of colour so i would need to give them bold and simple features to achieve this. 

Here i am just experimenting with every day items which i could give robotic qualities to, i have used a kettle,  postbox and even a game boy. 

I have drawn norm the robot again using a different face variation and i have also drawn the moustache robot from the above drawings, the fat floating robot would e a good lino print because of it's simplicity. 

This was just some drawings from the build a robot idea, though if i were to bulk out the limbs  i could probably use this one as a print.
Norm the robot was one of my first initial ideas and he can be seen on the introduction page at the first part of this blog, the robot above is based on his design and was the design that i used for the build a robot idea. a smaller adaptation was used for lino print and was even a part of my a3 screen print, it was also this design which made it into the etching part of my work. The fat moustache robot ended up becoming a lino stamp and also played a part in the A3 screen print. 

These are all of the robots that i used for the A3 screen print, this is also the layout for the final design. on the top line, three of my original ideas have made it into the final design. The first and second robots in the top line are adaptations of my original robot plans and the 7th one along is norm the robot, who has been used in my work throughout this project. 

print processes, lino

 Print processes.

Book work 

Introduction page and initial ideas 

First planning page, the paper was a really bad quality and my pencil marks smudged and sorta ruined my ideas. This page was just an experiment to see how i could combine man made objects and nature. The bull with the pad lock in his nose was a favourite of mine because bulls that are used in arenas for bull fighting often have rings in their noses so it was fun to switch out the item in his nose for something else. I also have a grass hopper wearing kangaroo shoes. Kangaroo shoes were invented to allow humans to jump at incredible heights, they also allow the user to run extremely fast. Combining the kangaroo shoes with a insect that can already jump high just seemed pointless but funny. The robot in the top left hand corner is my favourite idea on this page, the robot is reaching for toilet roll as 'nature calls' and i just think that it gives him a real human quality. i want to do further research for robots and i want to make some prints of the robot. 

Here i am just experimenting with more nature and man made items. i had an idea for the rabbit, i wanted to do a little series of prints and have the rabbit interacting with different bits of technology in each frame. i made some mock up prints for this scene but i soon learned that my pattern would not repeat and the aim of this project was not to make scenes out of lino so i soon scraped the idea. 

I started working on the robot idea and thought it would be a cool idea if i could make the robot in sections and then i would be able to animate him in different positions. In this page i also started drawing trees with faces which i think will also turn into an actual stamp because he is a good solid shape and it would be easy to add accessories to him. The    problem that i think i will have with the robot will be the small body parts because they will be a pain to cut out, i will have to mount them to blocks for efficient printing. 

Here i have made the robot and tree stamps, now i am experimenting with a different way of printing, i did not have any ink at the time so i thought i would try to to colour in the stamps with a marker and then print them, this was the result. i got a good colour from the print but the image was very bitty and i did not get a solid block of colour which looks cool on the robot because it looks like rust though it doesn't work as well on the robot.  

Here i am just starting to experiment with robot ideas and designs, i know we are doing etching in the next task and i could do some of these guys in more detail there!

Here i have experimented with using water colour to do my prints, it didn't really work for my tree but again i think it worked well for the robot because it looks like decay and rust. the tree needs more work though i think.