Experiment

The Dreaded Week Off

| Rolo

Surprisingly, this week has went a lot better than I thought it would. At the start of the week I felt slightly lost and had no idea how to bring some life to Skaadi, she looked good but was missing heart and fire, her eyes looked soulless and plain. However, after a lot of experimentation and watching a plethora YouTube tutorials on Photoshop processes I have finally created Skaadi as I saw her in my head, sure there are still a few small kinks and details to sort out, but overall, I am much happier with how she looks now.

I primarily focused on fully developing the Skaadi dynamic pose as this is the one that I plan to use when I create my final comic book panel which will depict Skaadi defending her forest home. Throughout this project I had the idea of showing Skaadi inside the beautiful forest in which she resides for my final outcome, however, over the past week or two I came to the conclusion that this would be too bright and happy and it wouldn’t show the depth and darkness within the story that I wrote, it also wouldn’t portray my protagonist as the complex and conflicted character that she is. 

  • Initial Forest Photoshop Sketch
  • Old Skaadi in the Forest

I spoke to one of my tutors last week and she pointed out that Skaadi was currently looking quite normal, when she isn’t, she has a much darker demon side and there is endless conflict within her world which just wasn’t showing in the illustrations I had done so far. To tackle this problem, I have decided to depict Skaadi standing in the blasted heath that I describe in the story, protecting the forest she calls home. I hope that choosing this landscape will reveal a glimpse of how dark and distressing her life can be. I’m not certain that this change of setting will be enough though, Skaadi herself will still look the same, just in a different place, I think I need to show her demon face somewhere on my final hand ins. Physically showing her other side in all of its maniacal glory would most likely solve this issue.  I guess I could show the expressions I drew of her (including her demon face) on one of my development boards. Speaking of which I’m not too sure how I am going to tackle the development boards as such because I have primarily been focusing on what the final standalone illustration will look like, I need to improve my ability to spread my focus and attention across all aspects of the project.

Dvorsky, J. (2019). The Blasted Heath | The Pnakotic Atlas. [online] The Pnakotic Atlas. Available at: https://pnakoticatlas.com/places/97/the-blasted-heath [Accessed 17 Oct. 2019].

But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name.

H.P. Lovecraft- The Colour Out of Space

I feel as if my time management and focus has been a bit off this project, I want to blame it on the fact that I haven’t done a course for a long time, however I don’t feel like this is good enough an excuse. Other than a few notes, both mental and paper, I didn’t really set myself an official timetable for this project which is starting to bite me in the behind a bit now; when I do future projects, I should try to write up a timetable, even if it is a loose one of how and when I am going to tackle each aspect of the project. I think this would be greatly beneficial to me as it would help me to organise my time better and would make me feel less scatter-brained.

Week One, The Return

| Rolo

I have recently finished my first week back at university after taking a year out in London and as I mentioned in my last post, I have been given 8 weeks to fully realise the project that was set to me during the summer. I am so relieved that we have been given this much time to do it because I really want to do the character of Skaadi justice and finally develop and finish a comic which is something that I have hoped to do for years. This week was a lot different to what I thought it would be, I had fully expected to immediately be thrown back into chaos, that I would have to start fully realising my character, story and finish the entire comic from the get go, this was not the case however, instead we did some peculiar group tasks and a refresher session on how to use Illustrator, which is something that I found rather useful as I hadn’t used it that much during my time away. The tutors also came around to have a look at what we had achieved over the summer and to offer advice on where to take the project next, this was also very useful as I did have some doubts about what I had done and I wasn’t entirely happy with the designs of my characters as they all seemed to be drawn in different styles, my bad, really. After speaking with my tutors, I had a much clearer idea of what I was going to do with my comic and agreed that I needed to try and stick to one style.

Overall I am rather surprised and also happy about being back, the project side of things hasn’t been half as stressful as I expected it to be (so far) and it is nice to finally have a direction for me to go in with my art. I lacked direction when I wasn’t in university and it was something I was struggling with… not anymore! The only thing that I am really concerned about is that fact that everyone on the course is new to me, I’m kind of an outsider, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because I want to solely focus on getting my degree this time around. I just wish that I didn’t have to be around so many people, it is a bit of a culture shock and isn’t making my anxiety any easier. I should really talk to them about it at some point.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit off track here, during the Illustrator session we were asked to create a face which a variety of different moveable facial features so that we could construct a range of expressions. I ended up creating a random character called broccoli- face and primarily focused on different eyes and eyebrows while keeping the rest of the face the same. Even though I only changed a couple of minor features, the results were far from minor. His facial expressions ranged from; angry to scared, from psychotic to painfully sad and just outright weird. I was amazed at how much difference the eyes could make, although it shouldn’t be too surprising as the eyes are the windows to the soul.

I am looking forward to the rest of the year and I am sure that I will find a way around my anxiety so that it doesn’t interfere with my work in anyway, I’m going to try and keep a low profile because I feel socially awkward around people and this is my last chance to get a degree with funding from Student Finance and I am determined to make the most of my time at uni.