The Response I got...

Was one of the nicest feelings ever.

when i showed my Final Project Work to some children. its like All the Stick ive been getting, all the rejections, all the failures that I thought i got this year were completely STOMPED ON.






They loved it, interacted with it and were inspired from it, and the best thing about it is that it was aimed at them! I guess i was trying so hard to connect with myself at there age i can understand why adults wouldnt get it.


What really got me is the fact that i felt like i told a story, that people could understand, especially the people who it was aimed at. A well done mural! created by a lil artist ! its his BIG imagination.

I gotta make sure i keep this mentality for my year out!

I know im terrible, i said id keep updating this thing!

Believe it or not ive been really productive over the Weeks i havent put anything up here. Ive had work in an art show :D Had my Drawn together Event, and Got into a university......

Ill start by SHOWIN the Results from the Drawn together tour that actually went BRILLIANT!
Its interestinfg how some of the pictures i created were really fun to draw, were as others, would be quite annouying because maybe i wasnt looking as much as i was drawing. Its funny how my life drawning roots have a big effect on the way that i create theses images. and when i stray away from that concerntrations, things get a little more expression. when that happens the drawings could go either way.

Most of the tour was done on south bank. it was a killer location! as in on the 4 ddays that we did touring, the most successfull days were when we were there.



IT was her birthday! she liked it alot actually :) and she knows about arty things so it was nice to know that she was happy with portrait.

This was ALOT of FUN! Guys were easy cause you dont have to worry bout making them pretty haha.

The Australian Graphic designer!

MANGA-KAN! this dude was from singapore! what was cool about this dude was the way that he ended up looking like a living manka character....

NEW PROJECT!

I really want to carry on this blog. ive noticed i take LOADSA pictures! so why not just do what needs to be done!

I got a New Self Created project!! Were basically trying to raise enough money! Fundraising. Wilderness Foundation are getting me and a friend to raise £150 EACH to get use to go on this leadership trip to scotland on June 10th.

I wanted to have some type of art show that exposed the talents of me and my friends and anyone else who wanted to get invloved in the show, but then again... that wouldnt be fair on all the other artists who would get invloved... there not exactly going on the leadership trip aswell.

So i came up with a way of rasing money and doing something creative and productive :) Speed Portraits! I first thought that id try and get 150 Drawings done in 1 Day! the size of A5 picture. that seemed so HARD since during foundation we did a 100 drawing project and that was looong!



So weve been going out on the street on a tour and Making People Pay for Portraits, i always try todo the style in the mood of the people i draw. So far weve made £40 !!!!! GOIGN GREAT! were having the final Event day were we invite people to come to our event on the 28th of june... ill keep you posted untill then.

The final piece

Proud of it yes...

Finished it, No...

Theres always going to be room for improvement, but the Key here really is the the message, and i hope through this blog, and the final outcome there will be a strong one.

EVALUATION

My project has always been based scale. The idea came from the fact that a my accomplished work is always limited to sketchbooks, which in turn has limited the effectiveness of my illustrations. I had the idea of creating something larger scale to force me out of my old habits.

My research was triggered by a popular underground illustration event named “Secret Wars” I visited. It tested the illustrators understanding of size, use of lines, improvisation skills and expressing their creativity within a time limit. The images created really influenced me to work with “scale”.

Around this time I had been invited to Essex University in Colchester for a viewing of a Chinese fine artist named Xin Sun where, he used the space provided for him to create something more interesting than his sheet drawings and actually said something through its scale. I wanted to create something using this method of communication.

At this stage the concept of a child’s imagination became something I wanted to explore. It seemed limitless as children show pure notion of their creativity. I wanted to illustrate this point. Trips to the Museum of Childhood where among the list of things I did to get some insight on what I was actually looking into. From the visit I found the concept of “reminiscing”. I started looking at my own old toys that made me think about working with my own childhood imaginations.

Originally I kept two books, one big one small for comparison and ideas. I started with small sketchbook to record ideas and create observational drawings. However, this book was 70 percent random and 30 percent relevant. This reminded me that I had a strong understanding of method, but lacked understanding of theme/concept, and how to tell a story.

Through the process of my project it’s became apparent that I wished to transcend certain ideas from 2D to 3D all to aid the strong idea of play that children have with toys.

So I the idea of comparison books changed to working from work sheets by using things that I had made and developing them that way.

The feedback conversations I had with people about their childhood were really helpful as they gave me confidence throughout the project helped me to delve into the subject better. Working with worksheets was a lot more effective than sketchbooks because of the visual communication aspect.

My time management was fairly flexible, right from the research. I would give myself targets for the week, rather than days to leave room for changes.

CONCLUSION

I have learn that I have time management problems that needs to be dealt with, many problems arose when trying to build the final project due to not giving myself enough time to build everything. If given more time I would have finished mini tasks that would have made the outcome of my project stronger.

I felt that my work has become a lot more skilfull as I am now more interested in the “experience” of doing things, rather than just drawing in the style of someone, or taking things from the internet which is what I previously did. This surprisingly helped me create stronger ideas with substance.

Legoman Saga!

I actually started Getting lego men again since i couldnt find any in my house surprisingly. Im still in practice of making stories just liek i did when i was younger. Theres this notion that people cant do the same activities they did when they were a child which really gets me down. the thing that made your childhood so creative was that you were active in expressing your creativity. This story was the Aspect that helped me with planning my image composition.






YAY lego powerrangers win!

Back to the three

Back to Marc Brown, Andrew Jones and Tite Kubo.

whats quite nice about the things that i looked at was the fact that alot of these artists drawings were done on a larger scale than what I expected. because we see there stuff in books and magazines as reprinted 2d work, we immediantly marvel at how they can produce such complex or well done piece of work on that scale. When infact alot of these work is Drawn on twice if not 3 times the size of what its printed as. That interests me because the rescaling of a picture can actually change the meaning off it, so you should as an illustrator bare this in mind. Try to create an image that can be as effective small aswell as big, so that it is not limited to a particular way of viewing.

ALSO Reading Rocket's interview with Marc Brown

heres a nice little video that interests me... probably because there was a transition with the character moving from books to TV/animation. it would be nice to see Zeek do the same thing one day :)

Desicion making

finally decision making with the piece. i get the feeling that this would be very suited in the Room of a child around 7-12 years old, which is pretty much what im aiming for. the colours help that alot.

~However I feel that for it to be more of an effective mural it needs maybe a better contrast. I think thats down the the lines used... or maybe the fact that its not finished...? but still, i had an idea of where the illustration was going.


The left side of the illustration is working quite well, interms Line work, however the Right side has a strong use of colour, but not together! we need more of a balance.


That word balance has been floating around the latter half of my project for a while now. I wanted to put more of a composition balance in the line work and with the colour. Should i think about using Gradients? blured or smudged colours or try and be more specific to bold and solid colours. from what ive done so far shows alot of indecision, as the Lego robot has adopted on method while the otherside has adopted somethign different. in a way the right side has a Commitment to the reseach and development that i have been doing on the work sheets, but the colours are somethign i feel i shoudl think about more, try and get some omre mockups done. but so far i think its worthy of getting the point across.

Anime Expo! ONE REASON!

Anime Expo. i went there for one reason and one reason only.....






Zeek Had ALOT OF FUN!!!!!

something about dressing up as samurais and powerrangers and BATMAN! that just brings out the inner child.... its great that i get to Experiance my project aswell as illustrate it. it has made me totally approach my project in a different type of creative way...

Never too l8 for some research.

Not really research... just a colection of images ive been looking at on my way to shorditch that actually helped me think bout composition...










Some work better than others but it would be really good to see how mine would stand out of the crowd. interestingly enough they all work together sort of like a collage of things that compliment eachother, rather than indevisual pieces.

Original idea

The colouring for the actual mural has been turning out completewly different to how planned it. i experimented with asetate planning to use it for the actually mural but because i didnt get an over head projector things had to change.


anyway! all day! since we got the wall up ive actually been Painting :D what made me paint was the whole action of practically doing something BIG rather than drawing which seemed almost harder to do big.

I ended up spending all of my money this week on paint and prima. all for a good cause. looked good on thoses walls. Only thing that was actually a shame was that the first layer of prima had a really nice aray of textures.

Spent the last of my cash on :( PAINT!!!!! WHY!!!!!!!

Straight after the PRima

At this point i was worring that i had too much Gray and maybe it would need some tones. i only had the projector for another couple of hours so the stress was to put the lines on first even tho i wanted to go colour.

NOOOOOOO!THE PROECTOR MOVED! and i spent AGES trying to PUT IT BACK! but eventually noticed it was hopeless!and i had already started drawing on it when it changed. so the idea was to get the lines done aswell as i could.... thats where the problem of putting colour on first had its problems.


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It got to the point because of this i had to make the decision of how i wanted to fill in colour. From Advice given by An FDA student in illustration it seemed thati should try to be consistant with the actual style and use bold Strong flat colours rather than Shifting tones. this made sence because of the idea of keepign the childrens theme.


At this point i felt like i was in a secret wars event, being one of the artists invloved.

Secret wars

Finally a Relief

Ive got good news and bad news. the good news is after all that bloody planning ive finally got a wall up! The problem i had was the fact that i was doing a two man job with one person... they were big blocks that i had to put up all by myself. Time management was a big issue as well and since didnt realise all the things that i would need earlier, the last two days felt like they were completely wasted. but thankfully enough i have friends in foundation who actually do different Pathways.

Stephen Tyrell! My Technician! luckily enough in the time that i felt was wasted I made a little machete of how the wall would look. So when it came to me and steven making the wall, This HELPED ME LOADS!!!!! I had all the piece together but i needed to bolt them on, and spent the whole morning figuring out how to do it! not to mention the compasition planning. But since we had the Projector! things felt like they were alot better, we could place to wood in places and nail them securly in with nails[i was so worried about the weight but it was perfect]


And dont get me started on prima!!!! Sheesh if steven didnt let me know earilyer that i had to buy primer before i did any painting on the wall we would be in sokme seriouse trouble.



Found a place better than B&Q called Brewers! in queens way! was actually quite cheap. and from slapping on the white primer undelay, i realised that i could get interesting textures... of course i needed it to dry, but that ment that there would be no more.

behold the RELIEF!!

Good old steven if i didnt find him then i would have probably had to completely rethink everythign i was going to do. Next time when it comes to big constructions liek this, i think aswell as draw a plan of how it will look, i would also need to creat a HOW TO MAKE guide. because not knowing how to drill certain things into other would have been really difficult. Ive now got two solidm studeio days to finish it and ive only got the projector ofor one of those days.....

Zeek wants to get involved, since hes the narrator


The projected image was then Shown on the Primed blocks. i wanted to try and keep the interesting textures i created when priming to give it a really nice *built* look. we will see if i have planned enough.