For this second assignment, I had the opportunity to pull together aspects of the things I had learned through the exercises of this section. The final result would be to show a single place but at different times. Namely, as the title suggests, during four different seasons. I followed the instructions in the assignment to create four identical panels 18cm x 12cm on a sheet of A3. I did so on a sheet of hot-pressed watercolour paper, as I wanted to try and see if I could continue with my experiments with this medium.
But what to put in the panel? I went to my sketchbook to start developing my ideas. As I have come to the end of my current book, I have switched to an A4 watercolour sketchbook - I have found that when trying to draw expressively, and learning to ink I have needed more space for my arm and hand to move. Having a larger sketchbook also worked well for me when developing my ideas. I started by getting ideas out of my head. It wasn't my usual kind of mind map, but the linear approach helped me extend ideas as they came into my head.
As I was moving through the mind map, regardless of the ideas that came out of my head there was one aspect that was sticking with me. I couldn't shake the memory of reading one of my references for Research 2.6 - it was the book on colour and how it could set a sense of time and place. Now, for that exercise, I was mainly focussed on the sense of time passing. But there was another aspect that was now stuck in my head: how a Director of Photography and set designer had, when faced with recreating a historical setting, not tried to slavishly recreate everything with painstaking accuracy. Instead, they focused on making the set feel just like the original place through the use of colour.
So I wanted to try and do the same - how could I make each panel feel like the season through a combination of colour and details. So the next logical sense after selecting a topic for my panels was to create a combination of a mood board and reference. This combined what I had learned in Key Steps in Illustration with the reference accumulation in this section. I gathered the images together in four groups representing each of the seasons. I printed them out and stuck them in my sketchbook. I then went to my watercolour paints to select and experiment with my colours. I wanted to have a gamut of colours that I could work with but also evoked a sense-memory for each season.
Next, I had to think about the actual image I was going to create. Again I used my sketchbook to try out a number of different compositions. I went back to make notes with my thumbnails to help my decision making.
I selected the seventh image as the one that I wanted to use - I felt that it had lots of opportunities to use the different planes with characters. I took a simple page of A4 paper, drew an 18cm x 12cm box and then pencilled in a better version of my composition, using a fineliner over the pencil to create a simple but high contrast contour image.
I was just about to move onto the next part, when I noticed something bugging me. I really liked the composition, but I was forgetting all of the things I had thought about when creating my mind map. I was looking for a liminal space where I could see water and trees along with buildings and other vegetation. In my love for the composition, I had forgotten to give myself space to explore things that would make meeting the brief more effective. I wasn't doing a close-up, urban or interior shot. I couldn't utilise lots of incidental detail as I had with Exercise 2.4 to set the scene and reference the time of year. I had to rely on colour and other details.
So I decided I needed to change the composition. Looking back at the others, however, I was not really taken with using any of them. There were aspects that I liked with thumbnails three and five, so I decided to do a new composition combining the elements I like. I drew this straight onto another piece of A4 and then used a fineliner pen again to create strong lines.
Now much happier with my composition, I used my lightbox. I placed the template underneath each panel on my A3 sheet, in turn, using the outline to create as close to an identical base pencil drawing in each panel. Once I was happy this was completed, I used masking tape to affix the paper to a board ready for painting.
I used the templates as exactly that. Using erasers I knocked back the base pencil drawing and added in my own details for each of the seasons. Given the location, I really wanted to draw a puffin! With a bit of research, I discovered that the Puffin's breeding cycle worked really well into the brief, and was another aspect that gave a sense of the changing time periods. I drew in aspects of their breeding and habitation, changing the order of my images to best tell the narrative of their occupation.
I then set about adding colour to each image. I used my reference sheets in front of me at all times and looked at other references where I needed them to try and get a sense of each of the seasons.
It was hard to be detailed with the watercolour. So instead of worrying about that, I forced myself to have fun experimenting. I tried aspects of wet-in-wet to try and get interesting effects that I could use as textures. This worked well for the winter image. I tried in the summer image to get a sense of heat haze which worked a little but was less successful overall. I also used glazes to increase the saturation of colour and really enjoyed myself.
It all still felt rough, and I knew that I needed to add more definition and detail to the landscape. Unfortunately, my watercolour skills were not brave enough to attempt to do this with watercolour paints alone. So I decided to do some inking to add in the detail I wanted. I first started by giving each panel a border to frame the composition.
Next, I had to ink in lines and details. I was torn - I really wanted to use a pen and brush and put into practice the practical elements from earlier exercises. Ultimately, I was too scared to make a mistake with ink on top of my watercolours. So I ended up deciding to ink the lines in digitally. The benefit to this, however, was that was able to experiment with moving away from a single colour for all my inks. Instead, I chose to alter the colour of my lines, which I used to help accentuate details, focus the eye and make the most out of different saturations to represent environmental perspective. You can see my inking process below:
The more I went down this path, the more I got into it, and felt more relaxed experimenting again. I took risks to be messier, using colours to add in extra texture. I also rake brushes and halftones to add shading and texture, something I had seen in the Art of Into the Spiderverse [1].
Trying to get the cliffs to look the same was really difficult, and I made my life really hard for myself with the winter image, so for the others, I adjusted my approach to depicting the rocky faces and tried to make it more repeatable. I still struggle with creating realistic water effects, and doing this at this scale and composition proved regularly difficult! I didn't try and do any snow or rain in my images, I wanted a different kind of sky quality. Not doing these aspects using ink also denied me the opportunity to try out inking techniques to represent things. I am ok with that - I decided early on in this process that this image was going to try and tell its story through colour.
I actually like the bits where I went more cartoony the most - the puffin was such fun to do and I really enjoyed using halftones here and there. My favourite features are actually the clouds in the autumn image. I think I got the shapes down well, and I really enjoy the line quality in the clouds. The overall effect actually feels a bit cel-shaded which I also like. There is a graphic feeling which I really like, and I am curious if changing or combining my physical media will work well to mine that particular seam.
As the light was a big part of the story-telling, I am pleased that I tried to vary the time of day, as well as the time of year. It was a lot of fun to try and work out how the light would play on the landscape. My only criticism is that I was not brave enough to make the lighting direction more definitive when doing my watercolours. Everything is a little vague in that regards, and it made inking in anything more definitive a lot harder.
All-in-all I am pretty happy with the images, and I am more than happy with the things that I learned whilst doing this assignment. The work itself is not as polished and refined as my first assignment. But then again, it maybe didn't need to be. Things don't always have to work, and things can fail. But if I keep on learning when that happens, then I will still move forwards.
Finally, I completed the research aspect of the task. I am fortunate to own the book "Here" (Mc Guire, 2014) so I re-read it again as well as looking at the original comic strip. I also happen to be re-reading "Watchmen" (Moore and Gibbons, 2014) at the moment so was able to consider that work as well as part of the research task.
References
Zahed, R. and Bendis, B., 2018. Spider-Man, into the Spider-Verse - The Art of the Movie. 1st ed. Titan Books.
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