This is my initial test for one of my drafts. I made this using the puppet tool and I do quite like the effect it gives. I still need to work on sound though. I like the simplicity of the video, I think it creates quite a gloomy mood especially given the imagery is quite positive.
Moving on from my initial ideas for my final cover, I decided to look into weather there was any actual fingerprints or footprints from the real crime scene, which was a bit grim but I thought it would add a sense of authenticity to my cover if I referenced the actual event.
I first came across the fingerprints taken at the police station after the event. Although it is an interesting image, I thought it was much too complex to be turned into a book cover, and because of the quality of the image and the layout of their fingerprints, I couldn't really see a way of incorporating them into any imagery for the cover.
The next image I came across was the bloody bootprint from the crimescene. It's definitely worthy of being made into a really cool floating image for a cover, I just need to work out how I'm going to do it. I will make some mock ups now and investigate further.
For this track, I invisioned a surfing character moving across a wave, just from the general feel of the track. With the gritty intro i thought it would be apropriate to introduce the character a few frames in, having him move into the frame when the song starts to kick in.
I really like the really subtle use of sound in this first short, the immediate silence enforces the obvious feeling of isolation and despair, with the blustering wind adding to the feeling of height. One of my favourite parts about the sound used is the bottle tipping over and rolling off the edge, I was instantly waiting to hear a 'smash' sound, which obviously never came, again enforcing that feeling of height. Does the sound I use in my short necessarily have to be a musical track? probably not, but I don't think I will be using enough moving elements to justify using sound effects.
This next skit uses music in a much more typical way. The animator uses music to portray mood directly, moving from a slow, dreary song in the first part, straight into a more uplifting track. Coupled with the brighter imagery, I is instantly aparent what the skit is trying to project.
I wholeheartedly think I have completely tossed this brief up. Reasons why: I feel I have completely overlooked what I should have been getting from the brief. Towards the end especially, I have spent all of this time printing and experimenting and trying to allow it to change my practice, but I think my final prints do not reflect that work and I don't necessarily think I have used the printed elements to their fullest.
I feel my final prints are conceptually very weak. I seemed to have forgotten that I should have been trying to portray a message or mood within my prints, however, I feel they are t a certain extent lifeless and boring. I really don't like them. Although I think they do work as decorative prints, I feel I may have damaged how well I could have done within this brief by simply ignoring the idea generation process.
I totally flapped my attendance for this brief. And my work has 100% suffered because of it. Shit.
I think I should have stuck with my initial idea, as I think it was definitely a much much better concept for an illustration, and it used the printing process in a much more effective and definitive way.
My next consideration for the brief is the soundtrack, I have thought carefully about the choice of music in the skit and really wanted to find something that fitted the mood of the animation. Whilst producing the animation, I always had in the back of my mind a simple piano based soundtrack, which would hopefully create a creepy and mysterious mood, which will contrast with the imagery but hopefully fit how the animations move.
I didn't want to mess around with finding permission for the music I chose, so I searched for royalty and permission free soundtracks, which were surprisingly easy to find, and I easily found the perfect one relatively quickly.
Below are a couple of examples of my initial storyboard ideas for the moving pictures brief. After Fred's seminar on storyboarding, I decided to keep them relatively simple, so have chosen to eject the more complex 'animation' style ones.
These first ones are probably the simplest of the lot, with the simple imagery of a plant growing with the camera panning up, followed by a plain black screen at the end. These ones I feel may be a little too simple, however it would fit to somber mood I am aiming for.
This next one is somewhat more complex in terms of animation. However I dont think it would be too difficult to achieve. My only concern with this one is that it may be too fast paced for the music/ mood.
I think this one may be the one I will be moving towards. I thought a lot more about Fred's seminar and how we talked about using space outside the frame. I wanted to focus more on the actual mood of the skit and move the images slowly and simply, with simeple imagery of plants moving across the frame and small features altered within them, this is the one I will continue to explore, I think.
I feel like I started to move away from my author in the previous brief, and was starting to enjoy what I've made. However, I do feel like I've been shafted a bit by doing so as now we need to create a short advert for the author. Oh well.
My proposed idea for the sting is to produce 3x 10 second clips, very simple and quiet, and not using much sound. I feel like this would best respond to my author, as the imagery I have created does not necessarily relate to my author directly.
After working through the initial roughs, I went on to develop the cover digitally. With a rough layout and design in mind, I set about working out how the image would sit on a cover and how best to utilise the space I had.
Because the imagery on the page was very simple and pretty much already sorted, I decided to focus on what type I would use on the cover. I realised the type on a book cover is incredibly important, and because type is never something I have looked into before I was a bit of amiss as to where to start as I had no clue of the 'rules' and what would generally work well.
I decided to look at different types that would have been around at the time of the crime, if there was any lettering used specifically with the investigation or and handwriting I could have used. This lead me onto the actual article of the crime as published at the time and the fonts used in that.
I thought about what fonts would work well on a cover, and the headline text I thought would look great. As well as looking good, I thought the type perfectly reflects the investigative arc of the story and how much it was looked into by the media.
Here is my now current use of type on the cover, I decided to use a mixture of upper and lower case lettering to try and reflect the criminal nature of the book, as well as to enforce the multiple articles produced about the crime.
Thomas Danthony Thomas' work isn't nesessarily directly print based, however I love the way in which he uses screen printing methods to create incredibly clean looking work. His process strats off in a similar way to the rest of my favourite illustrators, hand drawn roughs, developed digitally. The image below is a good example of this, digitally produced work, prepped and screenprinted, the instagram link below shows the process. I really like his process. Most of his work is sold online and marketed on instagram.
Rarepress is quite a small intependant illustrator, but her work is heavily influenced by lino. Literally every one of her images is lino printed, and you can tell her drawings that she posts are really influenced by the process. She sells a lot of her work through merchendise and prints, merch such as bags and clothing seem to be her most popular commodity.
For my final cover design, I wanted to focus much more on the concept behind the image. Father than using general imagery of murders and detective stories, I decided to create a cover based directly on a part of the scene or content of the story. I researched a lot of things about the crime scene; the type of cameras the CSI would have used, the murder weapon, the type of clothing they would have been wearing and trued to work that into a working book cover.
I liked the idea of using a footprint or fingerprint, as I think it immediately suggests the idea of a crime and more importantly a crime that is being investigated, which fits in perfectly with the content of the book. I will continue to research and develop my ideas.
With the topic 'spiral', I wanted to tackle my practice which is usually very geometric, and include some smooth shape into it. My initial thought went to using shadow to create the spiral, rather than making the spiral the direct image of the illustration.
I thought about things that would cast a spiral shadow, and though about Chinese lanterns and their wooden structure. I started out with the image as i do with all of the others, roughing in the sketchbook or iPad then developing digitally. I wanted to keep quite true to my practice so the general aesthetic is pretty similar, however I wanted to add the subtle element of the spiral to add some interest. I am quite happy with the final outcome of the image. If anything it helped me understand how to incorporate smooth shape into my square heavy practice. I like the general aesthetic of the image, but I do think it lacks the spiral message a bit. I definitely focused more on process that the actual product, which is kind of why I wanted to take part in illustration Friday, the develop my practice further.
'Create a set of 3 digital inking brushes with no opacity functionality and that bypass flaws in Photoshop's current pressure system. The three brushes should fit cohesively in a set but differ in texture and shape.'
Research
Again, another in-depth brief which is mainly based around functionality. I wasn't really aware of a flaw in Photoshop's system, so my first job was to find out what it was and try and figure a way out a way around it. This turned out to be surprisingly easy and only took a couple of hours to figure a way around the issue.
I then went on to research inking brushes, as I've not really had much experience with them in the past I needed to find out how they work and what different kinds there are. I made a few marks on paper and went abut replicating them. Development
Once I had found out about the pens and brushes, I went on to figure out the three different types and textures I would use in the final three. This was relatively easy as I only had to figure out how to get the different textures into the brush whilst only making it a subtle change. Outcome
The outcome of the brushes were really good. I got a lot of information out of trying to work around problems that were presented by the software. The client was really happy with two of the brushes, however once I had sent of the final drafts, there were a few tweaks which needed to be made to one of them, I actually was pleased that they picked me up on this small mistake as because I am able to sell the brushes afterwards, I'd rather them be perfect. Final outcomes below.
I am fairly happy with my final design for the cover. I think overall it achieves what I set out to do, create a bold, graphic cover that explains the story well.
The imagery I used is really simple, with the repeated blood drops being the main focus, however looking past them I think one of the strongest elements in the cover is the use of type. I think using that old-school newspaper print definitely helped to demonstrate that the book is a murder mystery story.
I am quite disappointed that I wasn't able to develop the shotgun cover, as I think that could have been really interesting, however the time I set myself to complete the cover was up and I wanted to be realistic about completing the cover in a time which would have been allowed of me had it been a real live commission for penguin.
Today's seminar with Fred was really useful. I feel like I was struggling with storyboarding and how to properly portray movement and mood through moving pictures, probably because I haven't really had any experience with animation whatsoever.
The first task we were set was to create a 6 frame storyboard based around the word 'pop', all without any prior explanation.
Fred then discussed how animation can be used really subtly to portray a word or theme, without huge amounts of motion. KEEP IT SIMPLE.
We were then asked to produce another storyboard around the word float; this time considering our use of frame and movement withing the frame, with Fred explaining the possibilities of using all of the space within and outside the frame.
Our third and final task was another storyboard around 'plummet and splat', this time using all of the information we have talked about.
I think the biggest thing I am going to take away from these tasks is about using space outside of the frame and using subtle movement. I will look to utilise these in my own skit.
So throughout the christmas break, I have been investigating what I can do with my work to make it look less flat and less clinical. I have been playing in the past with complex textures with bold contrasts, however, recently I have been experimenting with really subtle textures and changes in tone. Which I think has worked out really well.
This example shows a simple pink block. The one on the left without any texture and the one on the right with a subtle texture and a slight colour gradient to show the difference it can make. I will look to start using this technique in my future practice to give a bit more depth to it.
'Create a fully functioning replica pencil brush, focusing on functionality (pen pressure, tilt for shading etc) to be used by an animator for roughing characters etc'.
Research
This brief was really interesting, but really daunting as well, this was the first time I had an actual client (animation studio based in Ohio, US). I started by making loads of pencil markings, and really trying to understand how and why the pencil works in the way that it does. Because this brief was so heavily focused on the functionality of the brush, I couldn't just get away with making it look good.
Development
I then went on to begin working on the brush. Because this brief had a longer deadline than most, I was much more relaxed and felt I had more time to really impress. I was in much more frequent with the client on this one, which was great as I had a lot more feedback to work with, but also made things much more difficult as sometimes the client could be a bit unclear on what they actually wanted out of the brush.
Because I had more time to play with, I was able to properly investigate functionality properly and start off using a hand made brush preset to work with (see below).
Outcome Personally I'm really impressed with the outcome, this was the first time I had to make a brush focused on functionality above all and I feel like I've learned a lot throughout this brief. The client was really happy and has actually commissioned me to make another brush for them, which I should have the details for in the coming weeks, they also paid a lot more than I had expected which is always nice! Final outcome is below.
Moving on from the quick roughs I produced I decided to proceed with working out some of the digitally and trying to get an idea of design and type. With this brief I specifically wanted to move straight onto working digitally quite quickly as it is generally easier to move elements around and play with type once all of the basic elements have been decided upon.
The first rough is really simplistic, which is the way I wanted to go with this brief. It is a bold, textured blood drop to help the cover stand out, overlaid with 'in cold blood'.
I wanted to use a mix of capitals and lower case in the cover to reflect the widespread news coverage that the story gathered, as well as the investigative element in the back story of why the book was written.
I am still deliberating weather to keep the back page blank or weather to add another small motif into a corner just to tie it in a bit more with the front and spine.
The second one I think is my favourite concept. I have tried to keep the cover quite dark and simple, and it almost looks like a title sequence for a murder mystery TV show.
The cover shows two shotgun barrels, with the ends of the shotgun coontrasted to the rest in which being used as the 'O's in the title, and the sight on the top of the gun being used for the 'I'. I think this is the strongest conceptually and is a little more interesting, however I still think the design and layout still needs some work. These are still just working roughs.
