doodling my way to a degree

ASSESSMENT TWO: FINAL

Hooray, the final product!!

I’m quite proud of how this turned out - visually, it’s very close to what i had in my head, which is always nice. I’m also really pleased with the way the pastels play off the greys; the colours definitely turned out better than I expected. I seriously overcommitted on this one; 24 panels is like 3 pages, and I did nine and a half. It was definitely a lesson in exactly how much information can go into a panel; a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s also only one panel. 

It was a really good chance to play around a bit more with the idea of ‘beats’ and seeing how the dialogue has a natural rhythm - some exchanges can happen in a single panel, while others require three or four depending on what is being discussed or how much visual support is needed.

It was also good to experiment with shortcuts - for example cutting out the background in panels that focus on a character’s face. I think this has worked better in some places than in others, but the theory is sound. Sometimes the detail can distract from the story, so it’s good to know when to keep it and when to lose it.

EXERCISE TEN: Illustrate your illustration philosophy.

Q: “But Steph, aren’t you right handed?” A: “Shut up, I’ve already drawn the picture”

One of the most important realisations I’ve had as an artist and as an illustrator is that art has to be neither serious nor particularly realistic. And while I know that I’m capable of producing work that is both of those things, I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as drawing silly cartoons.

The goal of my work these days is to make people laugh - or at least to make MYSELF laugh and hope like hell that everyone else thinks I’m as funny as I think I am.

I tend towards a relatively reduced, linear style; partially because I’m lazy, partially because it transfers well digitally, and partially because why use miles of detail if you can get your message across in a simpler way?

PROGRESS!

All the pages have (FINALLY) been drawn up and inked.

ASSESSMENT TWO: PANEL LAYOUTS

After getting down a rough script, I spent some time figuring out how the story would progress over the panels - which panels needed to be large (settings) and which ones needed to be small? Which parts of the dialogue needed both characters visible, and which ones would work better as a closeup?

ASSESSMENT TWO: ENVIRONMENTS

ASSESSMENT TWO: JOKES!!

I knew roughly how I wanted the characters to interact when I started developing them, so for a while I just sketched out single-panel jokes to cement the dynamic.

ASSESSMENT TWO: CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

I had a couple of tiny sketches that triggered something in my brain, so I decided to draw around the idea for a while to see what happened.

ASSESSMENT TWO: IDEATION

FIRST STOP: COME UP WITH AN IDEA, AKA THE HARDEST PART OF THE WHOLE PROJECT.

I sketched around a few ideas - some autobiographical, some less so.

EXERCISE NINE: EDITORIAL ILLUSTRATION

The task for this exercise was to create an illustration for an article - in this case, ‘When You Text ‘til You Drop’by Bryan Burrough.

The article discusses the book iDisorder, which focuses on how our use of technology can affect us mentally, and offers techniques on how to overcome these challenges.

A lot of my initial concepts were, I felt, a little too dark for the subject matter. There’s a lot of writing about technology and its effects out there, and a lot of them take a little bit of an anti-tech, scare-mongering approach. This article isn’t that, and I didn’t want to use something that, in my opinion, is a little bit overdone. (images of people ignoring each other for their phones, of people being chained to their phones, screens as eyes, etc etc).

Within the article, the author of the book refers to people emerging from their ‘Techno Cocoons’. I decided to take this a step further in the illustration - people emerging from techno cocoons as techno butterflies. I felt it was appropriate, with the butterfly being a useful metaphor for transformation and freedom. I added a circuit board pattern to the wings to indicate that these aren’t people totally breaking away from technology -that instead of relying on it totally, as a butterfly relies on a cocoon, they are instead able to use it as a tool without it weighing them down.

EXERCISE EIGHT: CHARACTER DESIGN

MISS MARBLES: THE SEQUEL!

5. draw a slightly larger circle beneath the first one, edges touching.

6. draw a small circle on either side of that circle, about halfway down, overlapping the edge.

7. draw a slightly larger circle beneath each of these ones. don’t draw them directly beneath; lean them towards the inside a little.

8. draw smaller circle beneath these ones, again towards the inside edge. have these circles touch each other or overlap a little.

9. draw a semi-circle across the torso circle to create a neckline.

10. draw a much larger circle under everything else, with all the small circles overlapping the top of it.

11. draw a squashed ellipse at the bottom of the big circle.

12. draw a smaller circle inside the big circle, again overlapped by the smaller circles.

13. outline that smaller circle with a number of semi-circles.

EXERCISE EIGHT: CHARACTER DESIGN

MOUNTAIN MAN MARTY: THE THRILLING CONCLUSION

7. draw another, slightly larger square. the top of this square should align with the bottom of the first square (or, the top of the triangle you were just drawing in). this sides of this square should reach about halfway along the triangles on the side of the head.

8. on each side of that square, draw another square. these squares should be touching the big square, with all the tops aligned, and be about half its length vertically.

9. draw another square on each side. these squares should be overlapping the join between the big square and the smaller one on each side. (so, about halfway down the big one, and halfway along the smaller ones).

10. draw two evenly spaced horizontal lines on each of these, starting in the middle and going in until you reach the edge.

11. draw a straight line connecting the bottom edges of those squares.

12. draw a straight line on each side from the inside edges of these squares up to the top if the big square. draw another about halfway between the first line and the edge of the big square.

13. along the bottom of the big square, draw two more squares - one on either side, aligned with the sides of the same big square. make these about a third of the width of the big square.

EXERCISE EIGHT: CHARACTER DESIGN

MOUNTAIN MAN MARTY: PART ONE!

1. draw a square diamond.

2. inside the diamond, draw a regular square. make sure the corners of the square touch the edges of the diamond. you should basically have a square with a triangle on each side.

3. In each of the two bottom corners of the square, draw another square diamond, making sure the outside corners of those diamonds touches the edge of the square. draw a dot in the middle of each diamond.

4. between the two diamonds, draw the sides and bottom of a square, but not the top.

5. above each diamond, draw a short curved line.

EXERCISE SEVEN: Illustrate the preparation of your evening meal.

IMAGEUP FINAL WORK

Behold, the final masterpiece!

Ultimately I think I ended up with a fairly generic message i.e. “don’t put your butt on the internet”, but I think it’s a message that bears repeating given how prevalent the issue is.

I’ve also tried, as mentioned previously, to indicate that it’s not just blatantly sexual images that can get you into trouble.  Additionally, I’ve tried highlight that as well as embarrassment, there is some actual real danger in sharing things online.

The music and sounds I’ve used here (attributed below) are all royalty-free, and I’ve tried to use them to set the tone for the piece - a lighthearted reminder at the beginning, a short interval of SRS BUSINESS, and then bringing the tone back up again at the end.

Attributions:

"Carefree" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

IMAGEUP - FRAME EXAMPLES/STORYBOARD (PT. 2)

...aaaaand here’s the rest of it!

IMAGEUP - FRAME EXAMPLES/STORYBOARD (PT 1.)

Tumblr only lets me upload ten images at a time which is a travesty so I gotta upload this in two parts.

This is what I ended up with for the style of the final piece - low colour, low detail cartoon lineart. 

Because this project is intended for display primarily on smartphones, there are technical considerations to be had - in particular, the resolution and aspect ratio of the final piece (resolution referring to the actual number of pixels on the screen, and aspect ratio referring to the ratio of the pixels - i.e. Instagram posts usually feature square photos, indicating a 1:1 aspect ratio).

Because there’s about a million different kinds of smartphone, there’s also a lot of variety in screen resolution. My goal is to figure out what’s going to be usable and at least semi-near universal. 

According to technology news website Gizmodo, the trend in recent years is towards the 16:9 ratio (that’s 16 pixels on the long edge for every 9 on the short edge). This is also the aspect ratio for the widescreen format used by most TV shows and movies; given that people are consuming media on their phones more than ever, it makes sense for smartphones to also adopt this ratio. (Nield, 2017).

Common resolutions for the 16:9 aspect ratio include:  1024×576, 1152×648, 1280×720, 1366×768, 1600×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440 and 3840×2160. (Neagu, 2016)

1920 x 1080 is the resolution used for Full HD and incidentally is also as big as I can make my animation whilst catering to the A6 page size used to illustrate the frames, so that’s what I’m going to go with.

I’ve also opted to create my video in a vertical format rather than the traditional horizontal. This is for a couple of reasons:

1) the style of my piece focuses primarily on single characters standing in frame. To do this in a horizontal format would leave a lot of room either side and this feels like wasted space to me, when I could more effectively fill the space simply by changing the format.

2) the ImageUp app also operates in a vertical format; this means that when the user hits send and the video plays, they will not need to turn their phone around to view it at a bigger size.

References

Neagu, C. (2016).  Screen resolution? Aspect ratio? What do 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 4K and 8K mean? Retrieved from http://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-screen-resolution-or-aspect-ratio-what-do-720p-1080i-1080p-mean