#miriamproject

[ellenillustration2-blog]

Composition Experiments

I liked the original sketch I did of this illustration, but when it came to doing the final piece I really didn’t like the finished version. I think a lot of this came down to the fact that I didn’t really draw from a reference and therefore the girl looks very stylised and cartoonish. I also just felt that the composition was quite boring and felt too staged. In a tutorial, I was advised to try cutting up elements of the drawing and collaging them to create something a little more abstract and surreal. This did help me to think about the piece in a looser way and to make it more dynamic.

[ellenillustration2-blog]

Street Composition

Inspired by Bill Bragg, I wanted to experiment more with creating atmospheric scenes and using pencil. This was originally just a quick sketch of a New York street but I really enjoyed doing it and it ended up becoming part of one of my final illustrations. I think this worked quite well because it was on a smaller scale than the other drawings I’d been doing and therefore the shading was more effective.

I then photocopied and cut the drawing up to think about making it a bit more abstract and to make more use of negative space. I wanted to add a figure into the composition too and so did this both by drawing onto the collage and digitally.

[ellenillustration2-blog]

Compositional sketches

Trying out composition ideas for another image. Thinking about keeping the objects in the scene to the minimum needed to create the scene. I struggled a lot whilst doing these compositional sketches, as I found it really hard to place objects in a room and get the perspective on everything right to make it look like a convincing space. I ended up becoming very frustrated whilst making these images which I think reflects in them as they became very stilted and over-thought.

[ellenillustration2-blog]

Colour Experimentation

I created a final illustration that I was pleased with. I used negative space around and through the drawing to create a feeling of isolation and coldness, whilst using the railings behind the characters to symbolise how Mrs Miller is trapped within both her own routine and life and this situation.

In feedback, however, I was told that I need to use colour more in my work. I do agree with this, as all my work has been quite monotone recently. I did still want to keep the dark look of the 6B pencil however and wanted to find a way to combine the two. I started by drawing on coloured paper with black and white pencil. However i found the image became lost and it didn’t have the impact I wanted it to. I then tried drawing the figures with coloured pencil. I quite liked this but I thought that it felt a bit too colourful and bold for the gloominess of the story. I therefore settled in the end on using watercolour wash, as this gave the hint of colour I wanted without overpowering the image.

[ellenillustration2-blog]

Orlando Weeks - The Gritterman

I found this book in a shop and was instantly inspired by it. It’s a book for children about a gritter going out to work for the last time - “As the rest of the world sleeps, the Gritterman goes out to work. Through the wind and the snow. Through the blue-black hours when time slips away, he grits the paths and the pavements and the roads.“

The book has a very melancholic feeling created by the illustrations. It uses a limited colour pallet of black, red and blue to create the cold feeling of winter. Each image also stands isolated on a white page, creating a feeling of coldness and loneliness. This is something I wanted in my illustrations. I was inspired by this to think about using negative space in my work and cutting out background elements in an image to make it feel more isolated.

[ellenillustration2-blog]

Bill Bragg

After finding his work on the cover of a book in a shop, I became interested in the work of Bill Bragg over the course of this project. The atmosphere in his illustrations is exactly the sort of thing I imagined for my own work. His drawings have a real feeling of darkness and lonliness, I think maybe because they only ever show part of a scene and the detail is never completely in focus but rather lurking in shadows. This eerie lonliness is something I wanted to recreate in my own work. I therefore started to think about heavy shading and soley using soft pencil to create my illustrations.

[ellenillustration2-blog]

More Compositional Sketches

In a crit, I got the feedback to try looking at the scene from a further away perspective to create more of a feeling of isolation and loneliness. Using reference images of 1940′s/50′s living rooms, I tried different compositions. I also started experimenting with how shading and colour creates atmosphere.

[ellenillustration2-blog]

Composition Sketches

After reading through and highlighting the story, I picked out the scenes I thought were the most important to the narrative, whether through atmosphere, character or action. The first scene I was drawn to was Mrs Miller sitting alone in her flat, as I thought this introduced the character and the setting well. I started to experiment with compositions. In these I wanted to introduce her and also show things in her room that are important to the story such as the bird cage and vase of fake flowers. However, I did feel that these compositions felt a bit too crowded and messy and didn’t have the lonely feeling of the story.