Ok so after changing my mind four times on the current project that we've been working I ended up writing a short story about a raven. I should mention at this stage that the project revolved around a word that we were given at random - my word was "Birds". I've been hitting dead end after dead end but after reading Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (at the request of Matt, our head of year for illustration) I decided it was either illustrate that book or write my own short story. Being a total cunt, I decided to write my own story. Anyway, we also had a really good (but perhaps too long for my twisted spine) lecture from the illustrator Matthew Richardson. His collage work really influenced the way that I thought I should illustrate my short story and you can definitely see that I've nabbed his style for the purpose of this project. Here's one of my final images that I completed today, it's written for the scene where the raven fledgling is found by his elderly companion.
I should also point out that I have been without my graphics tablet for a good couple of weeks now and so working in this way is not only convenient but the only way possible!
Eugh, today we had to do laundry and it was fucking boring but I still tried to do some drawing there (see below) aside from that I did a weird collage thing that looks rough as hell and then coloured in one of my other sketches in photoshop. I wouldn't normally colour in a scanned image without redoing the line art but hey, experimenting is the point eh.
These are the first few pages of my a6 sketchbook that I'm using for the drawing approaches unit of my course. These were all drawn on location except the squirrel on the left because they just will not keep still as you can see from my poor attempts to capture them on the lower page. I snagged a photo and sketched it out quickly when I got in from the cold. Some of these pictures were done using blind drawing and then I scribbled some shading on afterwards. as well as watering the ink down in places. I'll probably use my a6 sketchbook for initial sketches and take those images into experiments in a larger sketchbook... maybe?
After a little tutorial with Matt, he explained that I shouldn't try to add too much information that already exists in the words I have written to the images that I produce so here are the next two. One more to go!
I'm not working in order at all here but here's another image for my short story... Hopefully it's pretty obvious what has happened here but if not I can summarise the image. The yellow light on the elderly woman represents his revelation/objective. The shape in the background is his other objective (the front door). The red circles obviously indicate blood and obviously she has an eye missing which just so happens to be in his beak... DO THE MATH(s) ;)
