Illustration

Skaadi Reborn

| Rolo

Well, I did it, I managed to redraw Skaadi’s legs and I can happily say that she looks like she belongs in the environment. It was not an easy task, at all. I asked my girlfriend to pose for me again so that I had some god first hand reference to draw from and even then I struggled; the position that the legs needed to be in meant that I had to use some foreshortening which is something I always try to avoid. I think it took me about 5 attempts to draw the legs in a way that they would make some sort of proportional sense, but it’s done now anyway and I guess it was a good learning exercise, I can’t avoid using foreshortening forever, especially since I hope to go into comic design someday. I think I need to practice doing foreshortening more, my attitude towards it isn’t the best and I managed to do it this time, so I should practice more so that I can get better and not struggle with it so much when I need to do it for a project again.

  • Stage 1 of Skaadi’s new legs.
  • Stage 2, the leg line work.
  • The colouring of the legs.
  • The finished product.

I’ve managed to finish my development board now too, I took what my tutor (Sarah) said to me in mind and decided to layout Skaadi’s character poses and weaponry in a straight line across the centre of the page, they look really uniform now and I’m quite pleased with it. My second board primarily has Skaadi’s expressions on it to show the different sides of her, from her brave elven side to her horrific demon persona. I wrote a few paragraphs explaining each part of Skaadi in detail so that the audience could really understand her and hopefully feel for her because she is in such an awful predicament.

  • Final Character Board 1
  • Final Character Board 2
Character Boards

I feel like I’ve come a long way as a person and illustrator since I was last on this course over a year ago, I’m more willing to adapt to using digital art methods and try new things, things that I was rather stubborn about not using in the past. I’m realising that I don’t always need to make things difficult for myself, and that I’m not as bad at art as I used to think. I still have a long way to come with my confidence but at least I feel like I’m getting somewhere. This project is coming to a close soon and I’m not so worried about getting everything done on time, my sketchbook is up to date, though it could look a lot neater and my work could be presented in a better way. I really need to work on my sketchbook presentation skills, I feel like a lot of the pages look grimy where my pencil sketches have smudged on to the other page, or where glue has stuck to the wrong parts of the page. I do try to make things look nice but I quite often get so caught up in actually producing the work and writing the annotations that I don’t focus enough on how I put it all together on the page. I hope I don’t miss out on too many marks because of this. Maybe I should start wearing gloves when I stick things in my sketchbook, it would stop me making marks on the page where my fingers have touched, or put pieces of scrap paper over pencil sketches to protect my sketchbook pages. I guess a fixative spray could work too, but it’d have to be one that wouldn’t change the colours or anything about the sketches. I should really look into getting some fixative spray and maybe write a review of it on the blog… is that something I could put on this blog?? I don’t know, why not.

Hopefully by the end of next week I will have handed in the project and everything will be all well and good, after which I’ll be straight on to the next project, there aren’t many breaks in 2nd year I’ve noticed, even when we aren’t in uni we’re doing some sort of project.. well, I am anyway, I’m not sure how other people on the course work but for me it’s pretty much non stop. I guess I like it that way, it gives me something to do and I feel like I’ll be able to become a professional illustrator someday if I keep putting the work in.

Tutorial Week

| Rolo

Over the weekend, ahead of tutorial that I felt was looming over me, worrying that I had not done enough, I finally decided to make a proper start on my character development board. Had it not taken me so long to refine my Skaadi poses, I probably would have started them sooner. Nevertheless, I made a start on the first board, I displayed both the refined Skaadi dynamic pose and the side pose, alongside her small arsenal of weapons and her treasured necklace; for the text I decided to show Skaadi’s character profile, rather than the whole story because I wanted the board to be just about her. After much deliberation and minor alterations, I just couldn’t get the layout to look professional, my illustrations looked a bit haphazardly placed and the board didn’t look neat.  In hindsight I probably should have spent more time looking at how other Illustrators laid out their character boards; but I was running out of time and panicking, I really wanted to have something to show my tutors for when my tutorial came on the fast approaching Monday.

My first attempt at creating a character board.
CareHere. (2019). Featured App-Stop, Breathe & Think. [online] Available at: https://carehere.com/stop-breath-think/ [Accessed 24 Oct. 2019].

Monday came and my time was up, I had to go in and face the tutorial. When I got there, Sarah (one of my tutors) was surprisingly happy with the amount of work I had done over the week off and offered me some guidance on how I could improve the layout of my development board, things such as making the character profile categories stand out from the rest of the text and laying out all of my illustrations so that they formed a straight line across the centre of the board; this is something that was mentioned to the class earlier in the project but I guess it slipped my mind, I do have trouble focusing on what is being said to me, primarily when the tutors are speaking to the whole class, my mind tends to wander off. It is paramount that I work on being present in the moment when I am in class because I won’t always get the chance to speak to my tutors one to one, I can’t avoid group talks and class conversations, and while I can’t help getting a bit anxious and close in on myself in those environments, there are ways I can improve it. Perhaps I could try mindfulness again, I used to sometimes use the Stop, Breath & Think app which did help, i’ve heard the Headspace app is a really good one to use too, maybe I could try it and share my thoughts on whether it works for me.

Skaadi’s legs just don’t look right.

Anyway, getting a bit off topic, as well as talking about my character board, we also talked about my final illustration, more specifically, how the dynamic Skaadi illustration would fit into the environment that I created over the weekend. After placing Skaadi into the environment it became rather clear that she didn’t quite make sense in the piece, it was pointed out to me that her legs were facing the wrong direction as they should be leading the viewer up the path; I had kept her legs side on in the hope that I wouldn’t need to change a pose that I had spent so much time on refining. It has been a few days since my tutorial and I am still struggling to change the position of her legs and I’m growing increasingly worried that I might have to change her whole body in order for my final illustration to make sense, a task that I’m not sure I have time left to do as the deadline for this project is only a week away. I’m going to try and get my girlfriend to act out the same dynamic pose as before, but with her legs in a different position so that I have some good first hand reference images to get a better idea of how I should draw Skaadi’s legs in a such a way that she is leading the audience up the path. I really hope that I am able to achieve this over the coming weekend so that I can focus on finalising the overall illustration and finishing the character boards from Monday. If not, I will have to redraw her whole body which could trip me up on the last hurdle of the project, watch this space.

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.

Well, that was unexpected.

| Rolo

This week has been a bit of a mixed bag, on the plus side I have just about finished colouring up the Skaadi side pose on Illustrator and Photoshop and I have also digitised some of the essential items that Skaadi carries with her. What hasn’t been so good is finding out that we yesterday morning that our Thursday class isn’t happening any more due to a teacher training day, and also that we’re off all of next week for a reading week; followed by a tutorial on Monday the 28th of October. Normally this would be fine, however, I still feel a bit rusty with Illustrator and Photoshop (having not been on a course doing digital art for over a year now) and I have so much I need to do and very limited idea of how to do it. I guess I am going to have to watch YouTube tutorials on Photoshop processes and figure out how to finish this project to a high standard.  

  • Coloured in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet.
  • A Family heirloom handed to Skaadi by her mother before she died.
  • A sword forged by the forest elves before their collapse a long time ago, this sword is oozing with elven magic. Skaadi found it after the sword called out to her in the forest.
  • Skaadi carved this weapon herself from the wood of an ancient ash tree, it was one of the first weapons she ever owned and she hasn’t parted with it since.

While I am rather shocked at how little notice was given about not being in Uni today, I have at least managed to do the digital line work and colour for the Skaadi side pose. I did this by scanning the initial sketch on to the computer, opening it in Illustrator and using the pen tool to trace the sketched line work, similar to how I created the line work on Skaadi’s dynamic pose previously. As I mentioned on my last post, instead of colouring my work in Illustrator as well, I exported the line work and opened it in Photoshop to colour. I found this process a hell of a lot easier than colouring it in Illustrator, partly because I have painted in Photoshop in the past. It is just so much quicker and allows me to spend more time on doing details and shadows/highlights, the use of which I have learned from researching how Fiona Staples creates them in the Saga comics.  This is subsequently also much easier for me to do in Photoshop. I have cautiously high hopes for how this project is going to go from now on, I do feel as if I am improving a lot with digital art and it is quite surprising because a year ago I wouldn’t have even attempted to get good at using computers for art. I do still love doing traditional art and digital could never completely replace it for me, however I am final seeing the benefits of using Photoshop and Illustrator to create and enhance art and hopefully I will continue to do so in the future.

Skaadi Side Pose

I do have one small qualm about the way I have painted Skaadi so far and that is that she doesn’t quite look alive yet, like she doesn’t pop out of the page or look like she is a living being, this is something that I really need to rectify and quickly because she is such a complex and active character and I want to portray that life and spirit in the illustrations of Skaadi. Hopefully over the next week I will be able to push myself to learn more about how to use Photoshop and also what alterations to make to Skaadi to give her that bit of oomph, all without my tutor’s guidance. As well and adding life to Skaadi, I really ought to figure out what kind of environment Skaadi is going to be in and design it. I mean, I know she lives in a forest and I know in my head what the whole world she inhabits looks like, I just need to show it in my art. It is certainly going to be a busy week.

Skaadi Returns!

| Rolo

After a week of absolute manic panic, I handed in the Fat Lass Preserves Project, which, to me went really well and I am happy enough with the final outcome. I have finally gotten back to doing the project I really enjoy doing, the Skaadi Project. Unsurprisingly, my fat lass design didn’t get picked by the company owner, which to be quite honest, doesn’t bother me because it was the first time I have ever attempted to draw and finish a larger person, so it was always going to be a learning curve, yet I am definitely feeling more confident about drawing larger characters again in the future and also in my ability to create plus size characters of my own.   

  • Initial plus-size superhero sketch.
  • Developed version of my plus-size superhero sketch.
  • Final version of the Fat Lass superhero

This week I have focused on digitising one of my dynamic Skaadi sketches to put on to an A2 development board that we have been asked to create as part of our final outcomes. I sketched out a variety of character poses last week during the fat lass project; they were really rough and sketchy and didn’t really look like Skaadi at all. To rectify this, I scanned the sketches on to a computer and opened them in Adobe Illustrator, I then used the pen and pencil tools to trace over the line work, while slightly changing the proportions of the Skaadi sketches to fit how I see Skaadi in my minds-eye. Once I had the line work I proceeded to colour Skaadi in Illustrator using the paintbrush tool, I decided to focus on colouring the dynamic pose because I am really happy with the proportions and I am considering using the dynamic pose on my final comic panel. I took photos of my girlfriend to use as reference for each of thew poses because I am still getting used to drawing humanoid characters and having first hand reference really helps me figure out the proportions of my characters.

  • Dynamic pose Reference
  • Skaadi Dynamic Sketch
  • Skaadi Illustrator linework
  • Skaadi Illustrator colour
Dynamic Skaadi Process

I found colouring Skaadi with the paintbrush tool very awkward and fiddly, it was extremely time consuming to just create a basic fill layer, whereas I know that in photoshop, it is possible to fill entire areas with simply one click. It wasn’t until today (Thursday) that I found out from my tutor that there is a much easier way to fill colour in illustrator and also that we don’t actually have to complete the whole design in Illustrator, I was under the impression that it was an Illustrator project based on the content of the computer sessions so far. I guess I could have found out differently earlier if I had found the confidence to outwardly ask for help. Nevertheless, I will be using Photoshop to colour my designs in the future from now on and I will keep to Illustrator for the linework. I’ll probably take the dynamic Skaadi pose over to Photoshop as well because, while I am happy with the pose, proportions and the colour choices I have made, I am just not satisfied with her face and she looks rather flat, I feel as if it will be a lot easier to add highlights and shadows in Photoshop.

Overall, I am rather happy with my progress on the project so far, as well as how I have chosen to manage my time, especially without the support of my tutors, having been on a reading week.  I definitely need to work on my confidence and anxiety, I should ask for help and information when I need it instead of just struggling unnecessarily for ages. I am so pleased to be working on the Skaadi project now and my character is finally starting to come take some sort of shape, I’m aware that time is running out to do this project but now that I know we can use Photoshop as well as Illustrator, I am fairly confident that things are only going to get better from here.

Fat Lass Preserves

| Rolo

This week came as a bit of a shock to me, after focusing on developing my personal comic project for so long now and with November quickly approaching, we have been thrown completely off the tracks with a new project that is due by Monday. The tutors did mention that we would be given a live brief at some point, but I didn’t think it would happen this quickly or that we would have so little time to do it. The brief we have been given is to redesign a confident, plus size superhero that will become the logo for a local company called ‘Fat Lass Preserves’ that sells jams, chutneys and other preserves. We have been asked to do this because the image that the owner of the company is currently using is technically protected by copyright as it depicts a large version of Wonder Woman which she isn’t really allowed to use. One person from the class will have their logo chosen, receive money for designing the logo and it will be featured on local TV, so while this project temporarily throws a spanner into the works of my other project, it is a great opportunity.

Fat Lass Preserves Current Logo: Deane, B. (2019). Artisan preserves with a modern twist. [online] Fat Lass Preserves. Available at: https://fatlasspreserves.co.uk/ [Accessed 27 Sep. 2019].

Nevertheless, I am finding it extremely difficult to complete this project because I am so invested in the ongoing personal project and find it slightly challenging to just jump from one project to another and back, however, I know that this will provide me with valuable experience for when I become a professional Illustrator.  As well as this, I am still developing my ability to draw humanoid characters and designing a plus size character creates a new set of challenges for me, such as, the muscle definition is not as visible on plus size characters which makes it more difficult to know where each muscular element should be. So far, I have primarily been using anatomy books as reference for human proportions which don’t necessarily focus on the proportions of plus size people, who often have different proportions to the average human being.   It is because of these things that I have never really tried to draw a plus size humanoid character thus far, I am however looking forward to the challenge in the hope that it will help me to develop my illustration practice further. While I have struggled with the transition from one project to another, I know that this project is good training for real world scenarios, because when I am a professional Illustrator, I will rarely get to choose what kind of character I design and I’ll also probably have a short timeframe to complete any project that is given to me, as well as multiple ongoing project at once.  This project is providing me with a dose of reality and should help me get a better idea of what it will be like to be a professional illustrator in the future.

  • Fat Lass Preserves Pose 1
  • Costume Concept
  • Fat Lass Preserves Pose 2

So far, I have attempted to draw a confident fat female superhero in 3 different poses, including the pose that the commissioner really likes, and so far, all of which I feel need improvement.  I researched the company to get an idea of what their ethics were and what kind of imagery and colours I should use for the costume and I have come up with a pretty solid idea of what I want the finished design to look like, I am just finding it unbelievably difficult to turn that idea into reality. It is currently Thursday, and I have until Monday to finish this. Help.

Fat Lass Preserves Pose 3

Things are finally happening!

| Rolo

This week we finally began to develop our summer comic projects even further, we were told that the final outcome of this project would be a fully finished singular comic panel that showcases the main character in a scene from our story. This is going to be a lot easier than completing the whole comic by November so I am rather happy with this, the comic will be finished during another project at a later date.

The main focus of this week was facial expressions, continuing on from the expression work given to us during the first Illustrator session, we were handed an expression sheet that contained 25 boxes and the names of 25 different expressions that we needed to draw. The purpose of this exercise was to make us think about how to draw different expressions that we may not have done before but may need when it comes to drawing our characters and comics. I wasn’t initially very pleased with this task because I really wanted to focus on improving the design of my characters and also develop the environment that my comic would be set in, I’ve had the idea to show Skaadi either in the middle of the forest fighting a demon, or to show her standing guard in the middle of a blasted heath, protecting what little forest remains; the fire demons and light elves having already destroyed  swathes of her homeland. However, after a while I began to realise the importance of this task because as a comic illustrator, I will have to express the emotions of characters that I draw through recognisable facial expressions that readers will be able to understand. I can’t just create emotionless characters that never show how they feel; I have to be real about this. I definitely found this task quite daunting and difficult when I started it as I am not used to drawing faces and I am certainly not used to expressing emotions through faces. To make it a bit easier we were asked to take selfies of ourselves making the facial expressions that we were asked to draw so that we had accurate reference to draw from; to be perfectly honest I found the prospect of this even more daunting than the drawing itself, I never take selfies! And I won’t be posting them!

 I tried to do as much of the sheet as I could using reference from the internet and memories of when I have seen people use these expressions. Ultimately I gave up on the sheet and talked to one of my tutors, Sarah, instead, she suggested that I focus on 3 main scenarios that Skaadi would likely face and draw out how she would react to them, this idea seemed a lot more favourable than drawing 25 expressions so this is what I did. I managed to get around taking selfies of myself by getting my girlfriend to model 3 expressions that Skaadi would make during the three main scenarios that I came up with. Once I had the reference imagery, I draw out Skaadi with the expressions, changing the design of her face as I went along.

  • Skaadi;s Demon Face
  • Skaadi Inquisitive Expression
  • Solemn Skaadi
Skaadi Expressions

I found it rather difficult to add light and shadow effectively to show depth in my characters faces so I decided to look at how other comic illustrators use light and shadow in their work. My main inspiration for the redesign of Skaadi’s face came from the comic series Saga; I gave her a much sharper face, more expressive eyes and changed her hair so that it looked a bit more realistic than before. The outcome of this redesign was a much more comic-like character in a style that I was finally happy with, I have been trying to find a comic style for a long time and finally managed to achieve one that I was happy with.

Saga Art by Fiona Staples

I am extremely happy with how I am progressing on this course so far and I hope that I am able to keep this up in the future. I am so pleased with myself for drawing Skaadi in a style that I am happy with and one that I would use in comics any day. There are still some tweaks needed to the style, it’s not exactly refined yet, or coloured, but oh my god I have something that I can work with. From here on I will developing the newfound comic style even further and refining it so that it will eventually be something that I am proud of and could possibly use in other comics in the future.

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.