UNIT 10: Picture book further research

A style that I really like is Maurice Sendak's 'Where the wild things are' picture book. I love the detail that goes in to his work and how he fills the entire page with illustration. I love the patters, colours and crosshatching techniques he uses and feel that my style of drawing is similar in a sense that I also love to create very detailed fine liner drawings.

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Another illustrator that I've been inspired by for years is Brett Helquist, who illustrated the Series of Unfortunate Events books. Helquist uses very sharp, straight lines and only subtle traces of colour which I prefer. Again, he makes very detailed work with interesting crosshatching techniques.

UNIT 10: Picture book primer & research

For this project, I'll be making a children's picture book.
I've started my research by looking at picture books that I find interesting to get inspiration for my own work.
I looked at 'The stinky cheese man and other fairly stupid tales'. This book includes classic fairy tales but with stupid stories. I noticed the use of text and the play on words. I really like that the book keeps the reader interested by using these techniques as oppose to just writing the stories in one font and size.

Some more classics I remembered were books like The Gruffalo, We're going on a bear hunt and The Cat in the Hat which were some of my favourites growing up. 

I looked for patterns in these books to try to figure out ways to create my own. I noticed that most of these books include a character (usually an animal or inspired by an animal). The use of different sized text is also important. Big writing in capital letters usually implies shouting or speaking loudly. Also bright colour's are very eye catching to keep young children interested in these books.

Although, these are fairly straight forward to understand and the language is simple, they usually include an important moral which is educational to the child.

Sell Yourself Event

The Sell Yourself event was a good experience as it was my first time selling my work in public.

I really enjoyed the day and think it was an important to put work out there professionally to understand what I could have done better next time.

I think it could have been organised better. People that weren't in the organising team had their work in boxes and in corners whereas the organisers had bigger areas and work on display.

I sold a few of my lino prints and a couple of my zines which was nice. I really wish I had made stickers though.

Sell Yourself Event

The Sell Yourself event was a good experience as it was my first time selling my work in public.

I really enjoyed the day and think it was an important to put work out there professionally to understand what I could have done better next time.

I think it could have been organised better. People that weren't in the organising team had their work in boxes and in corners whereas the organisers had bigger areas and work on display.

I sold a few of my lino prints and a couple of my zines which was nice. I really wish I had made stickers though.

Selling Yourself - Lino Prints

Since my zines are finally finished, I decided to make A6 lino prints inspired by my favourite drawing which was the one of Bastet. I also made A4 lino prints

I will also be selling these at the Sell Yourself event.

Sell Yourself - Making Zines

I really enjoyed making the fineliner drawings of the cats and decided to make more drawings of my interpretations of Ancient Goddesses. I chose the animal Goddesses on purpose because I really liked the challenge of creating a set of designs that worked together and represented the different animal Goddesses. With these drawings I've decided to create a simple zine of drawings of these Goddesses. This is the layout of the final zine:

Sell Yourself - Ancient Egyptian Cats

After speaking to George during my tutorial I realised that I only have drawings in my sketchbook with no purpose. I started to look more in to Ancient Egypt as I've been finding that topic really interesting.

I looked in to 'Bastet' the Ancient Egyptian cat God that the Egyptians worshipped and have started to draw Bastet in my own style.

I drew these three individually then realised I could have just changed the moon in to a star instead of wasting hours drawing two identical cats... but anyway I really like how these turned out.

I think I will make these in to prints for the sell yourself show.

Sell Urself: Diary & Research

I've been doing more random drawings in my diary to try and figure out what it is I want to make for my final work. I went to the Grant museum because I wanted to look at animals and bones as that's something I'm interested in drawing and thought it'd be a good starting point.

I then decided to go to the British Museum for more sketches and inspiration.

I really liked the cats in the Ancient Egypt area and took some photos to do drawings from at home.

Sell Urself: Macro Micro Diary Pt2

George showed us some videos of Yayoi Kusama today and I remembered that I had been to one of her exhibitions at the V&A years ago. I also had saved some postcards from the event. I really like Kusamas work and the way she repeats lines and patterns. I had a go at replicating some of her drawings because I found my style of drawing to be similar to hers. 

I ended up creating these little eye monster things. I really like the way these look and might come back to these later and draw different styles etc.

Sell Urself: Macro Micro Diary

I've been really enjoying drawing in my macro micro diary. I feel like this is the first time I'm really figuring myself out as an illustrator and understanding my style, what I enjoy and how I'm comfortable designing.

We were asked to do 20 drawings or more in a sketchbook in the form of a visual diary with notes, pictures, drawings.

I began by drawing Frankenstein as I was writing my essay about the novel during this time.

I really enjoy this style of drawing because I like taking my time and trying out different ways of using lines and textures.

These are some of my diary pages so far:

Sell Urself - Clay Day

We had clay day today. We had to find a photograph of a landscape that's important to us and remember it as well as we can including the textures, shapes and how it made us feel. Mine was a photograph I took in Turkey of sunflowers in a garden near my summer house.

I made my sculpture quite abstract but feel like it almost looks like two arms wrapping around. I also have a tree trunk and some flowers on the left. I tried to focus on texture as opposed to literally making a garden and sunflowers so I added dots for the grainy, rough texture of the houses in Turkey.  I made lines on the tree trunk and tried to make the flower petals look smooth.

We then chose an object/person important to us to replicate and I chose to make a Dobby sculpture (of course). I think this was quite successful considering I'm usually quite useless at making stuff especially using clay. This took me over 25 minutes to make as I wasn't sure how to make the eyes but later realized I just had to gauge holes into the clay then add small balls for eyes.

We then had to replicate this object and make it as similar to the last as possible. I found this challenging at first because we only had 15 minutes to make it but found it quite easy as I had already just made the exact same thing.

Lastly, we had to create a final sculpture to go with the last two to make them look like a set. So a sculpture that isn't necessarily the same but has similarities.

I made a third Dobby but with a longer, droopier nose and smaller ears. Again, we only had 15 minutes for these so I couldn't think about what to make properly.

Overall, I thought this was a really good lesson and a good way for us to think of illustration as a 3D product as opposed to a drawing. I really like my 3 Dobby's as a set and think they would look good as a wall hanging.