Introduction
Finishing this assignment took me much longer than I had anticipated. I think all-in-all I have put about 50-60 hours into it. I also don't think it's finished. As you'll hopefully see as I walk through my process, there comes a point where something is good enough to move forward. I am not sure if the finished result of this assignment is ready for it to end up in my assessment portfolio but the point of an assignment is to learn so that I where my focus will be in this write-up: To learn, digest and move forward positively.
Exploration
I started the assignment by reading through the given text and making notes and relational maps in my sketchbook. I explicitly didn't go looking for the original works or other artists' illustrations of Octavia. I had seen a few interpretations in the past while observing and interacting with other OCA students who have completed Illustration 2, and so I decided to try and keep these away from my working memory.
As I wrote and doodled, ideas started to pop into my head as well as connections. I wanted to try and think of the city as a living breathing thing. An approach that felt strong for me was to engage with the sense of worldbuilding. I then spent time doing image research and building up a mood board that could also serve as a springboard for further exploration.
I printed out my mood board and cut out the individual images - pasting them into my sketchbook. Initially, I started by creating white space around clusters of the images so as to be able to sketch and explore ideas visually in the sketchbook, and as I turned the page I thought about exploring a different way. Learning from my previous Visual Exploration module I decided to start placing the next batch of images like a collage, trying to build up a composite image to see where ideas and connections might emerge.
Lastly, I explored ideas of perspective. Drawing on my own experiences living in Oman, I explored real-world locations that I knew as well as other similar geological features. I imagined this city being suspended between the sheer precipitous walls of Wadi Al Nakhr, and used Blender as well as satellite data to explore the physical space more, much as I had in Assignment 5 of Visual Exploration. This took up a lot of time for me, but I think it was useful to explore the difference between reality and effective composition. I felt ready to move on and explore some thumbnailed compositions.
I was pleased with the variety of ideas that I was able to come up with. Now that I had a stronger sense of the city in my mind's eye I did some brief research into other illustrators' interpretations of the city. I was pleased to discover that there were many variations out there, and my thumbnails had a great deal of variation in comparison. Some of my compositions implicity lent themselves more to specific styles of illustration but I don't think I was consciously factoring that in at the time - in retrospect, I think I should have.
I shared my thumbnails with friends and other OCA students for feedback. Whilst there were many opinions, thumbnails 7, 9 and 12 had a lot of cross-over. While I was waiting for feedback to come in, I went back over my notes and saw the idea to see if I could add a randomised element into the creation process. So I had a play with ink, letting it drop from a bamboo pen onto the paper in splodges and then using the bamboo pen and a glass dip pen closed my eyes to create lines through the blobs of ink. Then I made more conscious connections with my eyes open based on what I found on the page, making some kind of order out of emergent chaos.
Once dry, I added a quick bit of watercolour for contrast and used white ink to add in starts and lights. I quite liked this 2-D approach, but it felt too similar to other renditions of the city, so decided to not explore that composition further but to allow the experience to bleed through (no pun intended - my sketchbook was a bit of a mess!) into the next stages. I decided to pursue thumbnail nine and moved to my sketchbook. I used a scan of the thumbnail and quickly realised that the perspective was off somehow. I used some 3D models as well as a perspective ruler to maquette the tall canyon between two mountains I pictured in my head. I realised that to make it work better I might need to break the realism. I remembered something I had watched about the creation of the Into the Spider-Verse movie, and how they broke all layout and perspective rules in order to make a particular shot effective:
So I went back to my maquette and started to break some rules, and it seemed to work, I found an overall composition I was happy with and started to draw out some roughs.
In my head, I had an idea to explore a style more similar to one of the illustrators I had discovered during my first research exercise, Tommy Parker and to see if I could also perhaps animate the project like he does, taking one or two elements to animate within a scene and repeating on a loop. I must have spent at least 10 hours just trying to get to grips with animating the scene, let alone the stylistic challenge. I ended up getting frustrated and abandoning that approach. So I went back to the original roughs and decided to explore the colour space more, coming up with some potential colour schemes by roughly blocking in colours:
I shared the colour roughs with other OCA students to get feedback, there some something I liked about all of them. The first one had a lot of contrasting shadows from the hot sun out of shot. The second I really liked because the overcast sky would be challenging, and I liked the patchy colours that gave the scene a feeling of being in a jungle, or overgrown somehow - one of my student friends mentioned that it gave them post-apocalyptic vibes. The third rendition I liked for the challenge of lighting it all with artificial lights as well as the distant sunset.
I had done all of my colour roughs in the same digital file on different layers. As I was closing the file I then realised that I had accidentally left all the layers visible, and the sky from the bright first colour rough was not peeking through the clouds of the second one.
This was a very happy accident and it gave me a fourth avenue to explore that might allow me to incorporate aspects from all three of my original roughs.
I thought about how I might use sunlight from behind clouds, either as backlighting, sunrise or maybe even crepuscular rays ("God-beams", "sun-rays") to provide some interesting light. That got me on to exploring sunrise as a potential time of day so that I might be able to blend aspects of night lighting and shadows provided by sunlight.
I felt at this point that I was happy and ready to start constructing the final image. I am not sure why, but I decided to start with the colours. Using references, I attempted to capture the feel of the sky that I was after, but I couldn't get it right, and I was making everything too realistic and trying to be like my reference images. Frustrated, I decided to abandon the approach as it was taking me away from the simpler style I was attracted to in Tommy Parker's work.
So, then I thought about if I could be more abstract, leaning on what I had learned in my earlier exercise to use watercolour as a backdrop before adding details on top in a more 'digital' manner.
I let the watercolour run and tried to be as playful as possible, but I simply didn't have the skill to make the image look good. I was very very frustrated by this point. Each approach took me many hours only to have made no real progress. And for some reason, my brain was somehow blind as to how to make the rending simple and cartoon-like.
I tried to attempt another way, trying to emulate the mid-century style that I remembered so well from artists like Walt Peregoy in 101 Dalmatians. I attempted to add ink on top of the watercolours I had made to see if I could get anything remotely similar. I hated the results. Working on this assignment started to feel like wading through mud. Frustrating, with very little progress to show for my efforts.
By now my assignment was seriously overdue, only adding to the sense of pressure I felt. My day job work was extremely stressful as well. I was often putting in 14-16 hour days leaving no time or energy to focus on my coursework midweek. I had dumped hour after hour into the assignment over Bank Holidays as well, sacrificing my family time to try and make progress. I explained my frustrations with other OCA students, berating myself for not being able to experiment away from my work being so line-work-heavy. Another student advised me that, if I was drawn to this approach, why don't I just lean into it? At this point, I just wanted to make progress, so I resolved to that the advice and stick to what I knew. I started by creating some cleaner linework for the image. I found the process very meditative, and really enjoyed coming up with little details to make the city feel like it was lived in.
Then I added digitally inked line work, before adding in flat colours to the image. These would help me with the rendering part by providing local colour and a way to select different areas more easily. To achieve the sky this time I created a gradient and then overlayed the clouds. I first created a series of 2D blobs to represent the underside of the clouds and then transformed their perspective to fit into the scene. This gave me a template to help me think as I coloured them in more detail.
Overall I was happy with the palette for the sky, clouds and main detail, but with so much detail going on in the image, it was hard to get a sense of distance despite the perspective. So I then used colour-holds to colour in the linework, allowing the dark lines of the background to be lighter, simulating atmospheric perspective.
Then I moved to the rendering. I really struggled to work out how to manage the dark ambient lighting of the night, the emerging golden ambient lighting of the sunrise, and the hanging lights. To compound this, I couldn't find a rendering style that I was enjoying either. Smooth blends felt artificial, and rough approaches never seemed to fit. I just wanted the image finished, so I ended up using some simple glows and gradients. Enough that I could say that I could submit the image.
And here is the overall process in video form:
Conclusions
I am not happy with the final result. The lighting is simplistic and I didn't get close to adding in the details from other buildings in the scene. I think I bit off more than I could chew with this one. What still frustrates me the most is how I identify this as being 'from me' as an artist, and yet not identifying with it at all. It feels like it's impossible for me to do simple, to reduce things down to the simplest components by which I can communicate an idea. It's noisy and just - well - too much.
I am obsessed with the light being 100% correct even when I have broken the rules, getting sucked (once again) into this obsession with realism. I like the perspective, but wonder if I had chosen a different thumbnail, would that have let me make an illustration better suited to a picture book rather than a comic? I can see how my final image could be used as a full-page image with the book's text in some text boxes. But I wasn't trying to do a comic for this assignment. In fact, I wanted to try and push away from that and explore something different. I simply came back to it as the only way I could finish.
This makes me quite despondent in many ways. To feel like you have spent so many hours only to hate what you have created. But there is much to take away and grow from. First I finished and didn't let it derail me. I kept myself motivated even through a number of setbacks. I was resilient in accepting the restrictions that my employment imposed on my time to create and having to constantly travel in order to do so (given I have no space at home).
I actually feel determined to try and think of specific activities I could do to widen my stylistic approach whilst still leaning into the humourous, surreal and whistful. I hope that my tutor will be able to give me some direction here on how I can break free from some of my current habits and choices in a structured way.
Lastly - whilst the image presented in the assignment might not be the best, the idea behind Octavia and my interpretation is solid, and I am proud of the preparatory work I put into this assignment and that will still be useful and relevant when I come back to this nearer to the assessment window. I think it will be fun to revisit the assignment again having grown and learned over the next year, and I am excited to think about how my re-interpretation might come out.
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