Sunday 25 March 2012

Assignment 5 Seven Days

Such a broad brief. Where to start?
 I thought about nursery rhymes, festivals, a news story that unfolded over seven days and some old fashioned advice to a housewife which had her washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays etc.

I've often thought it would be interesting to draw a plant like a daffodil every day from the flower budding through blooming to dying off. So moving on from that I thought of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk which could be spread over seven days from planting to chopping down.
Some studies for figures;


and for the beanstalk

 and I needed a giant who would look a bit fierce but not too scary. I sketched some famous figures not too accurately to get some ideas
then created my giant

 I also wanted to make the story slightly three dimensional so I played with  scrap paper and pop up engineering
I didn't know what medium to use but wasn't really happy with the way this collage was going
(and the computer insists on putting it upside down....)

because of the way the design has evolved it's difficult to properly show the staged of evolution. I started on day 6 and worked backwards. Here are some of the roughs;





Sunday 18 March 2012

Travellers


For a variety of reasons I've been hanging around airports recently collecting and delivering my daughter which has given me the opportunity to practice drawing in public. I know I should put more background in but I love the challenge of capturing the people without being spotted...

I am working on my final project in the background but it's a big task so it may be a while before I can post about it.

Waiting room

Drawing to pass the time

Wednesday 7 March 2012

Educational Strip What's happening to my body, it's all going mad!!

 I know I've said this before about other projects but I found this hard. I couldn't decide what to do so I did some brainstorming
I decided to do menstruation partly because it seemed a difficult subject to tackle so there was something to fight with (and I might be judged lightly if it didn't quite work out :-))



I did a lot of doodling (this is just a selection) to try and find a character and decided I liked something based around the menstrual cycle. As it was schoolgirls I thought it would be nice to use an exercise book or graph paper as a background.
Reviewing this now the exercise book looks good but at the time I chose squared paper. I liked the characters for the previous exercise Scary so I tried to use similar ones for this project.


Then for the characters to discuss the implications

and then some sort of outcome. The girl showing her friend that she was prepared and it wasn't too much of a problem. Drawing the bag wasn't too bad but getting the girl to extract the package in a way that looked normal was!

 I think this makes sense, so with colour and text you get

She does look a bit wooden but she was a difficult to get right. I laid all the images out
In my struggle to tell the story I didn't pay enough attention to how the pictures fit together but I think I've just about got away with it.....?

So now for the character for the cover. I think the eggs are the stars here but to just draw an egg would be cheating?  Maybe a series of eggs?

so I put the girl in the picture holding the egg. It's a bit misleading as it implies that the egg is big enough to see. Also she doesn't look as though she thinks her body is going mad.

Maybe the 2 characters from the strip would be better?

None of these adequately represent "it's all going mad" so I did some more sketches
This character looks a bit staid

 but I think this one is a bit more zany