Assignment 5: ‘Seven Days’

I started on assignment 5 today, which asks me to write myself a brief for a project entitled ‘Seven days’. It says;

‘These can be the seven days of the week or random days that tell a story. Your interpretation can be objective or subjective. You can produce seven separate, one large diagrammatic or a continuous strip illustration. You can decide on the media and methods you will use; the context – magazine, newspaper, book, brochure or poster; and the intended audience. You need to write yourself a brief that is clear and challenging but manageable.’

I started out by creating a mind map of my areas of interest to as the assignment brief says this assignment gives me a chance to explore the areas that interest me. I have been thinking alot about this recently, as I had started to realise what areas of illustration and which genres I am most passionate about.

Once I had done this I did another MindMap of ideas. I have just gone on holiday to Canada so have a range of ideas around that and my cat’s journey who is here with me for the winter. Also, perhaps her friendship with our other cat here. I am just about to compete my quarantine so that is a subject area that would be relevant to me and many others during this time which I could create illustrations around.

I typed ‘Seven DAYS’ into google IMgw search to see what come up. I found mainly illustrations for teaching children the days of the week, but also album covers and movie posters, which I can see working very well with the topic by doing a single illustration to go with the title of a film, song or album.

I made files on my computer of stock images of cats, sleeping, eating and playing etc and the did some loose sketches from these photos and of my own photos of my cats.

I then did some watercolour paintings, however, I did not like how these turned out. They were on a tiny scale so I found it difficult to do details and feel i ruined them when I did the eyes. I realised I needed to now do some research into other artists work and also do some tutorials an practice to improve my watercolour and find a style that will work for my illustrations.

I looked at work from Eve Farb who is an artist I love. She works digitally and she tends to draw animals in a cutsey way. They are really soft however, so they look like watercolour paintings to a degree. She also draws people in scenes and will sometimes distort them so that the characters are way too tall for the surroundings etc. She has a very soft and whimsical style and tends to use a soft colour palette. She has recently painted a cat so this was great for me to see how she approached this. https://www.instagram.com/eve_farb/?hl=en

After searching for general watercolour paintings of cats and not finding relevant images for the style I wanted to see, I searched for cat illustrations in children’s books. I found an artist called Jen Borror who’s style I liked for its simplicity. Technically, however, her work must be very time consuming as she uses micro dots in pen to produce illustrations. https://dribbble.com/shots/11224697-Cat-illustration-childrens-book

I looked at work from Anita Jeram who illustrated the popular giftware, card brand ‘Guess’ and children’s books, with the ‘Guess how much I love you’ being the most recognisable with the brown bunny with big lop-ears.’. I have always been a fan of these illustrations. Her illustrations look like they are done in watercolour and are lined in ink in strategic places to emphasis areas. I feel inspired by her work as one of the subjects I love to illustrate the most are animals and i like the simplicity to her work and the way she leaves out the backgrounds, sometimes in full or part. Her colours are soft as her audience is mainly children. https://anitajeram.com/

I stumbled across an artist called Birgitta Sif, I hadn’t heard of her before, but I instantly fell in love with her work. Her pretty ever so slightly limited colour palette and her mixed media techniques in which she produces some beautiful rough textured, expressive line work, which creates a lot of interest and depth in the images. https://www.birgittasif.com/

I researched comic strips as I though that this would work well for my images. I used to read comics as a child, but I have not looked at them since, therefore I collected reference images to compare layouts. Rather than a picture book, I wanted to do a short series of images. A short story.

I decided to use my cats as reference for my characters. I decided to do set of images, showing a cat attempting to play with the other household cat. Initially, I thought I could do 4 illustrations for each of the 7 days in order to show the story effectively. But after some thought and writing down the 4 images per day I realised I could condense this down to just 1 image per day and then present them as a sequence of 7 images telling a story with no words. I wrote out a brief to help guide me.

Brief:

• To create illustrations for the title 7 days.
• To create a set of 7 illustrations, one of each of the 7 days of the week.
• Your subject matter can be of your choosing.
• Create a continuous strip illustration to be published in a newspaper.
• The medium is of your choosing.
• Tell your story with pictures only and do not include any words.
• The final images will be printed to fit a 25cm wide column for the strip of 7 illustrations altogether, With the maximum height being 7cms.
  • The illustrations are to be in colour and will be printed on a white background.

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I did lots of tests and character development. This is the first time I have tried drawing characters with emotions of any kind, so I found this challenging. This is something I would like to spend more time on and develop as I found this assignment very enjoyable. I am unfortunately out of time for this module, so have to submit this today. I am happy with my illustrations as a starting point, but I feel there is much to be developed and more variations I would like to try over the next couple of weeks. I struggled with the female cat’s features and need to keep practicing how to draw a cartoon cat’s face. My cartoon strip shows a new female cat trying to make friends with the male cat.

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I did lots of tests for these to try to get the right colour combinations and to try to get the characters to feel more cohesive as a pair as I felt that they originally looked like they were from separate worlds. I feel like they are much more cohesive after reworking the female cat, but I still know I need to do a lot more to improve that character and also so that I can draw her easily from all angles. The male cat was much easier to draw due to him being round and not having an angular face. I am becoming much more confident with watercolours, so these illustrations were much quicker than usual and I did not have to repaint any of them due to errors or smudging so that is quite an achievement for me. I think this was helped that I did tests beforehand. I have had feedback from my tutor that I need to re-evaluate my final illustrations and re-do and re-think them in order to push myself further, which I now see how to do that and how much further I can push myself. Previously I have been struggling with my coursework due to not understanding assignments and not having a process. I would get stuck and take too long at the beginning stages. Since recently starting sessions with my study tutor I am managing to get going on exercises and assignments much easier. I now have methods of how to break down briefs and how to extract the important information so that I do not get lost in it. I am feeling much more confident going forwards with my studies and I am gutted that I ran out of time for this module. I have learned a lot of lessons from my poor time management and lack of study skills, which has been a big frustration for me my whole life and something I am keen to and trying to overcome. I feel like I will be able to tackle the next module with much less difficulty, now that I have support for my dyslexia. Because of this, however, my work has been rushed to meet timelines, to make up for the time I lost at the beginning. As they say ‘, ‘with hindsight’… which I have now to take forward on to my next module.

I am aware I could have pushed this assignment much further if I had more time. I would have really enjoyed doing so too. I am planning on doing some more character development and will find some tutorials that can help me gain some techniques that will help me improve. The two characters I created here I will continue to develop further and see how far I can push them and use them to learn how to portray different emotions and movement etc… I have really enjoyed Illustration Key Steps 1, as I have been tasked with many exercises for things I have never done before and would very likely never have done if I hadn’t have been doing this course. I am grateful for the opportunity to step put of my comfort zone and try new things, even if I have been overwhelmed at times and left my fear of failure get in my way. This first module has been a steep learning curve and I really had no idea of what to expect with doing a degree. This year has been a big wake up call and also has lead me to start finding my way in illustration and realising the areas and topics that are of interest to me and that I would like to develop further. Thank you to my OCA tutor for being so patient with me whilst I bumble around!