Technology Isn’t Always reliable. I Need to Make Timetables, But The LWL Project Has Been Handed In- A Review Of This Week

LWL Final Front Cover Design

It’s done, I’ve handed in now and there is no going back. I wish that I was better t managing my time because the past weekend and week have been draining. I left myself so much to do and didn’t even realise it until the last week of the project. My sketchbook was a bit behind; my layout was only half finished and my final front cover design hadn’t been put together. It was a mess. From the outside I look organised and my tutors seem to think that I am, but on the inside, I am screaming. Not literally but you get the point. I keep saying that I am going to make some sort of timetable or planner, anything to help me organise my time and I ironically never get the time to do it. Part of me thinks that I work best with the stress, and in some ways, I do, I do lots of work in a small amount of time and then rest. Some people do bits of work over a long period of time and I just can’t work like that. But, it would be handy to create myself a timetable that works for me, something that helps me plan which days I will work on the book illustrations, which days I will work on my blog and which days I will do coursework for college because right now I just feel stretched and a bit all over the place.

I have found out that as part of the final project, which is starting on a week or two, we will have to plan the whole project ourselves and will need to show it as a part of our process. This is similar to what I had to do during the final project of my level 3 course, and I managed to get distinction then. I know I have the capacity to be organised, it’s just difficult for me sometimes, especially since I largely plan things in my head and change my plans according to different circumstances. I guess this final project is going to be a test for me since it will force me to be more organised again and actually show it on paper.

LWL Final Double Paged Spread

Anyway, all that aside, I ended up working like a machine over the past weekend and week, I tried out a bunch of different layout designs, redrew Blanche for my front cover, created a new trippy background with soft pastels and put everything together. I then found out that I hadn’t scanned my images to a high enough dpi which resulted in them being pixelated when I printed, so I had to rescan my spot illustrations again, and the front cover design again to try and stop the final designs from being pixelated. This all worked at first, until I got to the final day of the project and tried printing everything to hand in and I once again discovered that parts of my final design were pixelated which was an absolute nightmare because there wasn’t much I could do about it at that point. This time I knew it wasn’t something to do with how I scanned them because I got my tutors to check my scans and they were fine. Something went wrong with the software, whether I edited it too much, moved the file around too much or I don’t know what, something went wrong in the software and it has kind of ruined my final double paged spread on hand in day. Sometimes I forget how unreliable computers and digital art can be. I had to hand it in anyway and hope that it doesn’t cost me any marks because my tutors know that it wasn’t my fault. I’m going to have to redo the design when it comes to putting the work in my portfolio because I can’t show potential clients a pixelated piece of work. As stressful as it was sometimes, I have thorughly enjoyed this project and it has given me an interest in Editorial Illustration that i didnt have before, I am even conisdering it as a potential career path.

I have an essay due on the 19th of March and I decided to focus on the LWL project first as the due date was sooner. I am off next week while the project gets marked so I will use that time to do all of my research for the essay and get a first draft written ready to show my tutors on the Monday, I will be fine.

Save The Koalas

It’s been just over a week since I returned from my holidays in Poland and Edinburgh, and after spending 3 weeks away from the course, I have been finding it quite difficult to readjust to university life. I didn’t draw enough when I was away, instead I focused on going to galleries and exhibitions in Poland so that I could try and get some more inspiration for where my project and coursework is going to go next, as well as enjoying myself because hey, it was Christmas and new year’s. While the time away was really nice, it has meant that it’s taking me a while to get back into the flow of things, when I returned, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do for my final print, despite seeing so much amazing art abroad. It wasn’t until I was scrolling through Facebook and watching the news at home that an idea hit me horribly, the Australian bushfire crisis.

Please donate to help save the animals in Australia!- https://support.wwf.org.uk/australia-bushfires

So far during the print project, I have been creating art that tackles topics such as climate change and pollution, two things that are having a horrific impact on our world and wildlife, yet to me, aren’t being tackled enough. I wanted to try and change that, not necessarily on a large scale, I have to be realistic, but if I could reach just one person with my art it would be something. Having tackled these issues so far on the project, it was obvious to me that I needed to stick to similar themes when it came to be designing my final print, I just wasn’t sure what issue to tackle, there are unfortunately so many. For a while I considered tackling the meat industry, but this seemed too hypocritical as I was still eating meat, albeit little, at the time. I have stopped eating meat fully now and have for the past week, but still, I didn’t feel as if it is enough to start hitting the meat industry now. When I saw the horrors of the bushfires and just how much of the environment is being destroyed and how many animals are being killed, it made me feel sick to my core, it’s so upsetting that (at the time of writing) one billion animals have been affected. Having loved animals and nature since I was a child, sometimes more than humans, this topic hit close to heart and I just knew that I had to try and do something to help.

Now that I had an idea of what I was going to illustrate with my final print, I started sketching ideas of just how I could show the Australian bushfires and the impact that they are having. I made a few rough thumbnail sketches in pencil to get out some of my ideas which included:

  • The world being consumed by fire with a koala’s face emerging out in fear because the bushfires are the latest of the wildfires that have devastated the planet in the past year.
  • A Donald Trump earth laughing at the fires while a koala fell off the face of the earth, symbolising the risk of the koalas going extinct and just how little Trump cares about the environment (I thought this might be a bit too political so I didn’t take this idea forward)
  • A koala’s face on the Earth as it melted away in the flames, which would show the impact of climate change and how it is causing the ice caps to melt, as well as the impact the fires are having on the koalas.
The sketch I decided to take forward.

All of these ideas seemed a bit too wide, they focused on the entire world, rather than just the area and the animals that are being affected by the fires, on previous projects I did focus on showing the environmental impact of climate change, but I haven’t really focused on the impact it is having on its inhabitants, with one billion animals being affected by the horrific blaze, this time needed to be different, the animals needed the centre stage. I kept the idea of having the flames framing the illustration, but instead of showing the whole Earth, I drew a lonely koala clinging to a tree for dear life amongst the oncoming flames I showed my sketches to a few people to get their opinion and to find out which one they thought would get the most attention, and they agreed that the lone koala in the tree was the saddest of the sketches and would get more of a reaction from the wider public.

Digital Koala Development

With the design picked, I developed the thumbnail sketch further by drawing it out in a larger scale in an a4 sketchbook before scanning it onto my laptop and going over the line work and colouring it in Illustrator/ Photoshop so that it looked more professional ahead of college on fast approaching Thursday. My tutors liked the design but pointed out that I had two styles going on at once, with the fire and text being done in one style and the koala being done in another. I had struggled with how to depict the koala, I went with a rather realistic approach because I didn’t want to do a cutesy cartoon koala that would take away from the seriousness of the situation, but the realism clashed with the rest of the piece so I agreed that I needed to redesign the koala. The problem I was having is that the koala isn’t a monster, it’s a victim and up until that point on the project I had been depicting climate change in the form of Lovecraftian creatures attacking the planet and reclaiming their home. This time however I was trying to show how vulnerable the animals in Australia are right now, they needed to be cute and upsetting, to evoke feelings of sadness and vulnerability so that people would do their best to help them.  I redraw the koala 3 or 4 times before I finally came up with a design that felt right.

I looked at Australian aboriginal paintings of koalas as a source of inspiration which really helped me to figure out how to show the koala without making it too realistic. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the design right until the end of the day on Thursday, meaning that it was too late to send my design off to be prepared for print, which means that I am going to have to wait until next week to do this and come into college on a day that I am not scheduled to be in so that I can finish the project before the deadline next Thursday. This is fine for me though because I want to raise more money for charities to help save the animals in Australia, no matter what, and in order to do that, I need the prints. I just really hope that I am able to get everything done in time and that people do buy the prints when I try and sell them, this is the only way I know to raise money for the charities without having much reach in the field of illustration.

Final print design

Disclaimer; I am aware that Koalas are only one of the thousands of species that are being affected by the bushfires and I am not ignoring their struggle, but koalas are more well known and loved by many so I feel that they will help to get the attention of more people, which means that I have more chance of selling the prints and donating the proceeds to charities that are fighting to save all of the animals that are being affected by the wildfires.

Pollution Apocalypse- An Illustrated Response to the ongoing Climate Crisis

Pollution Apocalypse Initial Sketch

It’s Riso print week next week, which will be interesting considering how iffy my one-page zine went. We aren’t doing it this week like I thought as one of my tutors wasn’t in so they’re giving us more time to get our sketchbooks up to date and do more of the prints we have already.  I’m hoping that my risograph print goes better this time, at least the one-page zine experience taught me what not to do when it comes to risograph printing. I am still sceptical though of whether or not I’ll be able to achieve a good result though because the last riso print was only a 2 colour one and I’ve decided to be a bit more ambitious this time and try a 4-colour print, which might be my downfall, but  I’m really happy with what I have designed so far so I really, really hope that I am able to create a good print out of it.

For the design I have once again decided to stick to the Lovecraftian/climate change theme that I’ve got going on right now, only this time I have made it blatantly clear that this is the issue I am trying to tackle, compared to my previous designs which were more subtle in tone. I have written ‘Pollution Apocalypse’ around the outside of the main design so that there is no confusion to the issues I am trying to convey. While apocalypse may sound a bit drastic and exaggerated, scientists would disagree given the fact 11,000 scientists have declared a global climate emergency, which sounds like the beginning of an apocalypse to me. The main focus of the design is a heavily polluted city that is pumping noxious gases into the atmosphere, causing the city to flood and attracting all manners of monsters to its’ centre. The creatures represent the end of life as we know it, as well as mother nature fighting back against the destruction that we as a species have caused.

Pollution Apocalypse Photoshop Design.

11,000 scientists declare global climate emergency and warn of ‘untold human suffering’.

Weston, P. (2019). 11,000 scientists declare global climate emergency and warn of ‘untold human suffering’. [online] The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-emergency-scientists-emissions-letter-climate-change-a9185786.html [Accessed 5 Nov. 2019].

I’m going to Poland for Christmas next Thursday and I’ll hopefully be visiting a lot of galleries, exhibitions and also doing art with my girlfriend’s dd who is a full on, free spirited artist and actually makes a living out of it. So I’m hoping that I’ll be able to write a lot of interesting blog posts while I’m away because I feel like my blog is a little bland right now, I haven’t really had time to go to exhibitions and things like that because I’m so invested in each project that I don’t get out much. But yeah, anyway, hopefully a lot of interesting posts and photos of Polish art and inspiration happening in the coming weeks. I’m really looking forward to immersing myself in all sorts of different art that I haven’t seen before, and hopefully seeing some of Van Gogh’s work because he is one of my favourite artists of all time and I’m pretty sure some of his work is on display at a gallery in Krakow. The only thing I am slightly concerned about is the fact I am going to miss 2 days in college before Christmas which could potentially set me behind in the project before the hand in day in January, however, I have already done a lot of printing and my sketchbook is almost up to date so I should be fine, as long as I do some work while I am away.

Print, Prints and Printed- A Gallery of My Riso, Relief and Screen Prints

This week has been a fun one, we’ve done so much printmaking, including printing an unexpected one-page zine on Monday. I kept with my Lovecraftian theme and created a bestiary of his monsters, I was really happy with the designs I drew, but the finished zine did not go to plan at all. I think I rushed the background a bit and I hadn’t done risograph printing before, so despite having researched the process, I wasn’t entirely sure how it would work in practice. I drew my monster sketches in pencil and scribbled the background in pen, which in hindsight wasn’t the best idea because when it came to printing the zine, the background overpowered my illustrations and the risograph printed wasn’t able to pick up much of the detail of my pencil sketches so the final zine looks like a bit of a mess. It was a good learning exercise though, at least I know that next time I riso print, I need to make my line work bolder and the background needs to be done in a lighter tone to the foreground.

The zines were only the first part of printing we did on Monday, in the afternoon we went to the print workshop to make our screens for screen printing the 2nd of our designs. It cost £14 for the screens which is a bit on the high side for me because I’m having some money issues in the run up to Christmas, but after actually using the screen, I know it was a worthwhile investment because I can print that design as much as I want now and also change the screen and use the same frame for any other designs I make in the future. I managed to do a design that I am really happy with, it depicted one of Lovecraft’s monsters, a Mi-Go, perched over a power-plant and feeding off of its fumes. I chose to depict this because in Lovecraft lore, the Mi-Go awakens from its slumber when it gets warm and power plants heavily contribute to global warming. I wanted to show how horrible and horrific the world could be if it keeps heating up at the rate it is, using the Mi-go to depict the horrors of what life would be like in a scorching, desolate Earth. I’m once again not 100% certain if my illustration conveys the message that I want it to though, I know what it means, but I’m not convinced that other people will, they’d probably just a cool giant bug creature so when I do more designs this project I need to make the climate change and global warming message clearer, while still using Lovecraftian creatures so that I stick to the theme that I’ve chosen for this project.

Relief printed with an acrylic block and ink and put through a roller press.

I had to send my first design back off to the wood workshop place to be re- laser cut because I made a mistake with the formatting when I send it off the first time (no surprises there) so some of my design was missing from the acrylic plate, this all got sorted by Thursday though so I managed to create a lot of prints of both of the designs. I’ll post photos of the prints next week once the ink has all dried. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed printing so far, I’m just not sure about risograph printing yet, probably because it is the one that went the worst for me. I totally get the appeal of risograph printing, it’s so easy to create a huge run of prints, I just haven’t quite figured out how to make the process work for me yet, hopefully over the weekend I’ll be able to create a design that works because we are creating an A3 riso-print on Monday. It’d be great if I had another design to add to my permanent print collection. I already have some ideas of what I’m going to depict, I plan on showing a modern polluted and poisoned world with buildings that everyone should be able to recognise, inspired by Lovecraft’s short story ‘The Colour Out of Space’, I’ll leave a link to the story on this post. I’m hoping that I can make my message clear this time, hopefully 3rd time’s the charm.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.aspx

Skaadi Reborn

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.

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.

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.

Well, that was unexpected.

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.  

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!

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.   

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.

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.

Week One, The Return

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.