ASS4 - Project character develpoment

       

Character Development

    For this exercise, I have to create two characters and show a front view side view and back view. 

To start off with my initial research I am going to look on pin interest at characters to get some ideas

Here are links below:

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/GemmaMlees/animal-characters/

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/GemmaMlees/children-character/

      Whilst starting this exercise, I have been in touch with an author to illustrate a police dog called Jake. It's a children's book for the police to teach children of safety. I thought this was a great opportunity to help create the character. First I am going to look at a few dogs and look at capturing facial expressions and trying to draw a few images to see what I think would be best.

The dog is an Alsatian which is a typical common dog for the police. As above, you can see my sketches. I have tried out and some facial expressions. I am happy with my dog with the forward hair coming over his head I think he looks like a good Alsatian and an ideal character design for the book. He looks brave and happy and looks like a hero that children can look up to.

     I am now going to sketch final drawings of the front, side and back with pencils and then using fine liners.

      Here above are my final sketches. I think he's going to turn out really well. The next thing I want to do is now create him out of my 3D style with paper.  I am now going to attempt to make him and using brown paper and putting black marks and colours to capture the essence of an Alsatians fur and personality.

  When I do my 3D paper illustrations I have to look at the sketch I have created and decided what is stacked up on top of each other to form the 3d effect. For example, looking at the back view of the dog I can see that his head is the furthest away so this will be the bottom layer this will also be the same for his two front feet. Next would be his body for the second layer and the third layer would be his tail. Put all together with double sided sticky tabs will create the 3D effect.

       Above you can see my finished Alsatian Jake. I think he is coming out rather well and the proportions are correct to my drawings. I have used white pastel, fine liners and coloured pencils to capture the overall character.

I am now going to again carry on with my paper style and create the front view and the back view of him.

  As you can see he has worked out very well I have now got him on a green board as a main base to show him off:

    I emailed the author of the book with my finished character and this is what he had to say:

'An entirely new way of looking at Jake – but I love it. Different, unique, has the opportunity to get kids to make their own Jake’s in school or at home. Go for it and we will try together to get a publisher, one story or part illustrated one as an example for the pitch. I will send you a copy of one of my publisher's letters.' 

     I think this is very good feedback and I really love my style of creating 3D illustrations there are not many people that I know that use the same style as me some people do you use 3D paper in illustrations but then don't put details on and just leave the paper blank.

 For my next character, I have done a spider diagram further and this time decided that I am going to do a person as it is usually animals that I draw and I want to push my 3D illustrations further by creating a person:

     I've been thinking about what I want to do and brainstorm different types of people girls boys and thought of a memory when I was younger when I was at school and my mum dressed me up as tiger lily from Peter Pan. I felt this is my inspiration to create a young native girl with feathers and her outfit to suit.

I am going to now sketch out some quick ideas and see what I can come up with:

     As you can see I've got quite a few rough ideas and I feel the native girl with the feathers in her hair as well as on top of her head piece is the best looking one that appeals to me she is really sweet and is how I imagined her to be to illustrate a young native Indian girl.

    I am now going to illustrate a final image of my character a front, back and side view using pencil then using fine liner to make the lines visible:

      As you can see I am happy with this outcome I have got a quite a lot of detail here to think of when creating her out of paper it was a bit difficult to look at the side of her holding the stick but I would rather do this side as it's more challenging for me to discover and think about how I'm going to do this using paper to create a 3D effect.

I am now going to begin creating my native girl and to start off I am going to do the front of View.

Just a note here I lost my photos of my step by step I did here. So I could not show how I made her. 

Please see the finished pics below:

      I am so chuffed how she has turned out the colours are bright and vivid. Tricky parts that I came across were the feathers on the top half of her headdress as they were quite small to make and get correctly placed on her head.

. The next thing I found difficult was the hand holding the stick, as I couldn't understand where the fingers went and in the end, I had to ask my partner to hold something so I could see what had to be done on the illustration. It now looks correct.

I have also managed to get all three view point in proportion to each other well and I am happy with the outcome. 

    Here above is the side and back view of the native girl, hopefully, you can see clearly how I have created the layers.

     Overall I think she's turned out really well. She is completely what I had in my mind but better now I have got the colours involved too.This was a great memory of my childhood and it was nice to put it out on paper for other children that age I was to enjoy it.

London weekend trip Camden  town and the house of illustration

     I recently went to London and I have been wanted to go there for a while to go to the house of illustration here are some pictures of when I attended:

Below - Quentin Blake

Below - Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan

The first UK exhibition of architectural illustrations for classic anime films, including Ghost in the Shell

     I have to be honest the house of illustration wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I thought that was going to be lots are illustrations from different people for children's books and advertisements, but in fact, there were only two exhibitions going on and I was quite disappointed. I took in what I looked at that was available. I will keep updated with their news as they do post on Facebook for events as they have been having illustration conferences around England and I'm hoping they get to do one in Birmingham later this year.

Here below are some pictures I took of Camden Market area:

    There were some great sights here to look around there was graffiti brightening up the streets of Camden Market and 3D stick out sculptures on top of buildings such as shoes, dragons and food. In the market, there were some interesting artists.

 Below-  work which was made up of colleges that formed well-known characters which are very commercial:

 Even though it was commercial I like the idea of using certain items in colleges to form an overall object or person or thing. They were very bright colours and I am not sure however who the artist was as there were no names on the store but I did like the ideas that were used

    I also came across this artist here above, who does artwork on shoes she did everything from Disney to Marvel and personalised your own name on them. She was very good and I asked her and she works with acrylics and fabric paints onto the trainers. She very much enjoyed her job as you could tell from the quality of  her artwork

Dragon Mural

     During the summer months, I have also had a project on where I have painted with my friend a back garden fence. We ended up painting a dragon on to it using home paints and it was really fun to do in the hot summer weather here is the photo below:

 Wolverhampton Art Gallery Exhibition

Charlotte Hodes -Remember Me

Paper cuts and Ceramics

     Recently I went to Wolverhampton and thought I'd stop by in the art gallery I couldn't believe my luck when I realised there was an exhibition on which was by a lady called  Charlotte Hodes.

     She created art using paper cuts and it was really cool to see her style it actually opened my eyes as her style was cutting out paper cuts and then layering them on top of each other, which not only created the 3D effect but it made you look through the top layer to find out what the pattern was on the 2nd and 3rd layers. When you looked at it overall it made an optical illusion as I foumd it difficult sometimes to realise which paper cut is on top of the other she also put human figures into her artwork here are some below of the photos I took:

     As you can see in the above photo she had quite a large exhibition and I was thrilled to actually find that a paper artist at an exhibition in an art gallery. I took a leaflet and have studied it. Her idea is to show through paper cutting how women in the pre-1980 were expected to be at home sewing and making ceramics. So in her paper cuts, she has created motifs of women and tried to make the layers of paper cuts to look like material that the women in her art were sewing. She also transferred the patterns created my her paper cuts on to ceramics. Her work was amazing and great to see it up close as her work was very large scale in the paper cutting industry. 

 Wolverhampton Paint the day Competition

     I entered another competition to illustrate an area in Wolverhampton. I joined forces with my friend and she did the Landscape technical drawing in black and white of a canal, which is local to me and then we decided to put a twist on it as though the canal was a pool party and used my animal illustrations. I created them so they were all enjoying a day of swimming and playing. Below is the overall outcome and some close-ups of my illustrations on there:

      What was a touching moment for me was once the work was finished we put it in the Newhampton arts gallery and people had to come in to vote for their favourite piece of work. We didn't win but as you can see children with very interested and that was most heart warming knowing that they are attracted to the characters, that to me was more of a win than the money in the competition.

      It was an overall very good day and we enjoyed the experience.

 Birmingham sleuth bears

      Last week I went to Birmingham and went on a tour on the hunt for looking for the Sloth bears that are now dotted around Birmingham until the end of September. They are really fascinating as individual artists have painted these in aid of the children's hospital. They really brighten up the city and here are some photos that I took below to show you:

     You can see they're all uniquely designed and every time I stepped up to one I was amazed by the imaginations of each artist who had designed them. Wolverhampton is also doing a similar thing but with wolves and the local artists, there are decorating them. I'm going to keep an eye out for when they do it again next year and apply so that I can do one as well. It was a lovely day to go on tour and have a look at these bears. I didn't get to see them all so I'm hoping to revisit and finish off my hunt and maybe even start the Wolverhampton Wolves ones.