Diagnostic

Project titlecrossed paths

project summarythe development of four characters, giving them lives and stories using different mediums

Field of studymainly narrative illustration, illustrators and agencies that may specialise in this specific area of illustration and comic book culture

Who is it forchildren aged 10-14 to show them in the story various career paths, encouraging kids that they can be anything they want to.

How will it be madei am currently experimenting with different materials to see what may be the most effective for me, so far i have used playdoh, paper and newsplast( similar to fimo molding clay) to create 3d models of my four characters.

Rationalethe project is important to me because it is helping me develop my skills in illustration and telling a story, i feel this will help me for the area of industry i would like to get into. This is important to GRD because its not just simply illustrating pretty pictures i am trying to give my characers full identities and stories attached about there lives.

Skills and evidenceillustration and story building have been the foundation of my project without these two elements the project would be nothing. I have been working on 3d constructions which have been successful but at this stage are to raw they would need to be refined to a more polished standard.

Risks and challengesthe biggest challenge i have faced with this project is the amount of illustration work, drawing the characters in different poses and with various expressions on there faces. In the beginning i struggled to move past drawing the characters in there original poses so they were not really telling a story but know i am drawing them more they have more of a personality. the risk factor is wanting to create toys from my characters but the issue with that is the time it would take to have four characters made or attempt to make them myself.

Research into character design

These books gave me a insight into illustration and character design,the first book “urban survival” is about a boy from the country who goes to London to live with his grandmother and his life drastically changes when he meet the kinds of people that he had only seen on t.v. The illustration s are precise and do well to capture the different kinds of people you may come across in London i.e taggers, cabbies, bouncers, dj’s. The second book “complete book of drawing” breaks down illustrating teaching how to draw faces and drawing people in various poses, This book helped me push my illustrations further.

Research into narrative illustrators

Tyler Jenkins, comic book artist and illustrator from Calgary, Alberta Canada.

These are two examples of his comic style illustrations, the one on the left is a fantasy character , the thoughts that come to mind is power, aggression and also a sense of survival in a broken world.

The illustration in the middle tyler done for halloween, what i like about it is that it is does not look like it has any direct relation to halloween but it is still quite a dark illustration.

The illustration above is apart of a series called ‘zen in the workplace’ and is my favourite one out of the series when i look at it i think of peace and serinity, the illustration does well to combine the stress of work with the sense of peace and relaxation from medatation.

Draw draw and draw some more

I started off drawing for a least 3-4 hours a day to improve and develop my characters further. This new discipline helped me improve and move past the point of drawing my characters in the same way, from this stage things started to take more shape. I still need to work on drawing more scenery to create atmosphere i.e Marse in the supermarket or Leo in a club working.

Ilustrator work

These images were worked up on illustrator and i think it really brightened up my work, they are all doing different things. i am glad collevtively the illustrations work together , In the coming weeks i will have many more of these illustrations to do for the story..

Character merchandise

I starting thinking about my characters becoming toys or merchandise hats, cups mugs, stationary it would be aimed mostly towards school children. I had not though about the degree of difficulty to make these or have them made, i think this may be something i will do later on.

The start of my 3d construction, playdoh was the first material i used to try and construct my characters, they were ok for a intial experiment. They didnt dry well they crumbled up so this would never be an option for a final piece.

3d constructions continued, next i used newsplast to make my characters, definately a good material to make molds and rough prototypes but may be not so much for a final out come. There is a rawness about them when they are like this but i like it, next i tried making them with paper i did not enjoy making them it was to fragile and difficult to get to the standard in the picture u see in the bottom right. I do not think i will carry on trying to make the characters instead i am going to focus more on illustrations as i think it is more of my stronger point.

Here are my latest illustrations, i have been thinking more about making the characters do different things aside of the things they are assoicated with originally i.e rick playing the guitar. So here i have Rick in a kungfu mediation by the sea and Marse is playing football with some kids.

Here is Rick the jazz musician teaching a piano class to kids as part of an after school club, on the right is english teacher Lennard posing for a portrait in his old basketball team uniform, He is actually painting a portrait of himeslf . Doing these illustrations helped me delve deeper into my imagination so i think the end piece will have a mixture of things that are fairly normal and have parts that are more imaginery.

These are the women of the characters Marse on the left and Mary on the right side, Marse works with children in a hospital entertaining them with singing and dancing ,Mary is a athlete she has run in may marathons and is very competitive, So here i illustrated them in there elements.

Evaluation

I am passionate about this project it is extreamly challenging but i am enjoying developing my characters and improving onmy illustrative skills . I have seen the difference in my work since starting the F.M.P the group session have helped me becauseother people can see my work and i have a chance to see if they understand the concept without to much explanation and from therei can work on improvents. From the beggining i wanted to make toys and have been quite determined to do it but i am now realising to create them myself to a professional standard is out of my reach, my strength is the illustration side of my F.M.P. I was given advice to talkto someone at university that might be able to help make the toys but i think it will be to time consuming and it would be like handing overmy project for someone else to do. So i am now going to carry on illustrating and i will explore the possibilites of making a book or maybe usingissu to publish the story.