Fight For Your Right...

I recently applied to work at another company that responded asking me to complete a design exercise audition type thing.
I just learnt today that I didn't get an interview, so I've decided to publish the design I did for them.

I had to jazz up a plain text television pitch, for a new show, ready to be sent to a major network. The content of the document is strictly confidential (so I've blurred out the details) but, for context, I will say it was a kinda "teen tropical holiday/party themed reality show".

 

I wouldn't normally use such a garish colour palette, but it fit with the subject matter of the show.

Preliminary sketches & ideas.

 

Comical

Inspired by a project called Twitter The Comic, wherein a group of artists illustrate selected tweets and turn them into short strips, I have decided to practice my comicbook illustration by producing fully-fledged comic pages based on tweets I find amusing.

Below are some preliminary sketches based on two tweets I saw today.

 I'll post more when I've collated some finished pages.

Faces in Places

I've been doing a fair bit of travelling recently; taking my sketchbook about with me to practice sketching during my downtime. I realise now why there's so prevalent a cliché of illustrators drawing on trains.

Sleeping woman on a train to Birmingham

The challenge is getting faces without people noticing you staring at them. Easier when they're further away, but harder to see details.

Workmen on a break outside the station

Travellers waiting at the station

Figures on the left were on a train, chap at the top in a cafe.

A Foot Note

I drew this critter on a whim, late last night.

I noticed his hands and feet were quite catastrophic. I've been meaning to work on my hand and feet drawings (it's something a lot of people struggle with) so I started doing studies from image and live references.

Flexercising

I watched a video, the other day, by a Youtuber I follow who is also a bit of an art geek. He has recently enrolled himself on a cartoon course and was relating the various tasks they'd been asked to perform on the course.
They reminded me of some of the drawing exercises I'd done over the years I'd been at uni.

One of which was making a series of quick 30-second drawings of random objects. I found a random object generator online and used a timer set at 30 second intervals to draw the objects listed.
Obviously they're largely imperfect and rough-looking, especially some of the things I obviously find more challenging to draw, but it's a good way to reacquaint myself with drawing, make quick visual decisions and learn what areas I should focus on for improvement.

30 seconds is a surprisingly short amount of time to draw some things, which you don't realise until you're doing it.

Started a new sketchbook

Using this to carry with me for sketching on the go. Had to do something garish, terrible and stupid so I felt less precious about marking in a fresh book.

Yes I Kafkan

My final year project is partially an animation project. For it, I am adapting one of Franz Kafka's short stories In The Penal Colony. It's set on a remote island, where an explorer is being introduced to the strange archaic methods of torture and capital punishment being used in the land. The characters are a zealous Officer of the old regime that is very much behind the process, his soldier assistant, the explorer who is against it but feels torn between his morals and his ethical need to not interfere with foreign cultures and the unwitting prisoner who is to be put to death. The machine that is to carry out to procedure is also a major feature.

A rough storyboard capturing the scenes I see in my head and the major plot developments.

Preliminary sketches of the machine. The design on the right is the one I prefer, but carefully reading the descriptions in the text, it will probably end up looking more like those on the left.

 

Bloody Ange!

More work on The Bloody Chamber. The final image elements will be scanned in and edited/assembled digitally. Several of the images were dropped and other changed to reflect the more subtle approach.
The theme of black & white with red highlights still remains, though.

Some of the red ink splatters used to make the bloodstains.

 

Page layouts for the final images, including the excerpts of copy I selected to illustrate.

 

Carter Catharsis

Working more on the Carter brief, looking at animal footprints for various critters named in the story. Wolf is of particular importance, obviously.

Research pages

Worked up some of the roughs into ink drawings (scenes/elements). The paw severing panel may be too extreme. Better to go with more subtle imagery.

Clean line drawings of the animal prints.

Bloody Chamber

A staple of illustration courses, in particular my own, the assigned project was to look at Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, a series of reimaginings of classic fairytales by the likes of the Brothers Grimm et al.
For this particular venture I was assigned the tale The Werewolf (a loose adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood) and had to produce a series of, at least, six images chronicling the whole story.
I started by reading and breaking down the text into particularly noteworthy events and passages, that conjured the best visual imagery.

Initial sketches of passages whilst analysing the text.

A hand (or paw) is a big feature of the story, so I decided to focus on hands/feet/paws for the scenes I was illustrating. This provided a good way to convey the action in particular scenes without getting bogged down in replicating the text to the letter.
Also since the tale is quite bloody, and based on Little Red Riding Hood, it seemed fitting to have red as theme in the images. I decided the visuals should be black & white with a particular feature highlighted in red. This was easy for the violent scenes and subsequent featuring of blood, but did result is some rather contrived methods of incorporating red into the preceding images.

Preliminary layout roughs for chosen scenes:

Mildly contrived use of red for the knife handle and the claws of the wolf (also the ring in the previous photo), kinda appropriate for the sock, and obviously works fine for the blood.

Red works much better for the scenes after the wolf attack, because of the severed limb. Although, again, bit of a stretch with the spectacle frames.

Red on the stones for final image is questionable.

Quick summary of the story (spoilers): The protagonist is tasked with delivering a basket to her grandmother. She is also armed with a knife for protection en route. Whilst travelling she is confronted by a wolf, which then attacks her, but she is able to use her knife to cut off its paw. The wolf beats a hasty retreat and Red wipes the blood on her apron and wraps up the severed paw, for reasons. She eventually makes it to Grandma's where she finds said matriarch feverish and delirious in bed. On closer inspection she finds her grandmother's hand has been cut off. She goes to check on the paw and finds it has become a hand - complete with her grandmother's ring. She denounces her granny as a witch and a werewolf and the towns people chase the old lady into the street and stone her to death.