Tuesday, 12 November 2013

Spirituals Chickens

My initial sketches on the day of the workshop focused on creating the character of the man in the poem.
I intended on creating the image using vectors on Illustrator. Below is a rendering of my sketch.



On the day I really didn't like this although now it doesn't seem so bad. Either way, I didn't take this any further.

I was struggling with the project at this point, I wasn;t working in a style i was happy or comfortable with and I felt i wasn't being myself.
I decided to look at my own personal source of inspirational images and stumbled upon this piece of street art.

I wanted to create a piece with these kind of characters. I wanted the focus to be on good quality line work and use of minimal shadow and lighting.

For the first time ever i started using my tablet, meaning my drawings were going straight onto the computer, cutting out the middle man so i did not have to use a scanner. Also, as i was using Illustrator, it meant that the lines were very clean and smooth as they were turned into vectors, meaning I spent a lot less time refining my pen work.

My characterization of the chickens was my favourite of the project. I felt they had a really strong look and were consistent with each other. Above were some of the possible compositions.

I kept on doodling the chicken characters, until I had enough that the piece was coming together itself. I started colouring the chcikens in photo shop with only a handful of colours.




The picture took a huge amount of time due to there being constant rearranging of the chickens, and therefore to the shadows.

If I had thought of a composition beforehand, perhaps the image would be a little easier to read, but after several hours of work I felt I had come to a natural conclusion.

It has been mentioned that the nature of using Illustrator to ink my work takes away some of the character and style from my hand drawn work, but I feel I will continue to experiment with this way of working and better incorporate my style into it.

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