It's the FINALLL Countdown!!!

My final year at the Illustration and Visual Media Course

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Final Book

My graduation book showcase can be viewed via the link https://graduateshowcase.arts.ac.uk/projects/2955/cover

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Draft illustrations for the book

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Coming up with Illustrations.

I decided to do the characters and backgrounds separately and combine them in Photoshop.

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Book Storyboard

To plan my picture book I first drafted the thumbnails for each spread. I also thought about the rythm of the narrative. Back in September I attended a book fair in Moscow, where I participated in some workshops from childrens’ books illustartors. They told us that there should be “empty” and “busy” spreads in the book, so that the reader doesn’t get bored or tired.

My spreads go as follows:

“mugshot” of donkey

Every day he works to transport hay for a farm (shown repetitive actions)

One time he comes to the lake and sees his reflection, which makes his question the purpose of life

The reflection talks back to him and offers to switch places in another world

Donkey agrees and follows through a portal in the lake to another world. It’s a psychedelic desert.

Donkey encounters some animals who are having creative fun. Head-standing fox, bear playing a musical instrument and a sculpting mouse. Donkey is amazed that they’re not working in the conventional way.

Donkey wanders further away and up a hill. there is a dark tall figure on the hill.

The figure turns out to be Death, it looks like a suited person with a chicken head. Death reminds the donkey that life is finite and that he has a choice how to pass his days. Donkey first thinks, that he is just a simple donkey, but then changes his mind.

Donkey returns to his initial world, and switches back with the otherworld donkey.

Donkey finds a new purpose in life – planting flowers in pretty flowerbeds.

Donkey gains new friends who love his flowers: fairies and birds.

Donkey is happy

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Film Study. Au Hazard Baltazar.

Since I was drawing donkeys in my previous post, my tutor advised me to watch the film Au Hazard Balthazar by Robert Bresson and make sketches while I watched. The only copy that I found was in the original French language with Spanish subtitles. Luckily, I have studied French at my first uni, so it was enough to understand the general sense of the film. There weren’t much words to begin with anyway. I understand how it is considered a work of art, but personally I didn’t like the film much. It was heavy. A lot of people are behaving cruelly to other people and to animals in it. The main heroine is painfully naive and ignorant with a stupid look on her face 90% of the time. I had no sympathy for her. I later read in the Wiki article that it was a debut role of Anne Wyazemsky, an actress with Russian roots. Bresson liked to use inexperienced actors to create a “special sense of realism”. I’m not a fan of such realism in fiction films and books alike. It is too painful to watch for me. If I wanted to immerse myself in reality, I would just watch the news, there is enough darkness and pain in them.

But as a donkey reference, this film works perfectly as the director used the donkey named Balthazar as a kind of narrative driver and a lense through which we follow the story. Redrawing some frames also was a good composition and value study.

The film gave me an idea for my story.

The rough storyline might be as follows: a donkey\mule does the same mundane job every day, but one day, he sees his reflection in the lake. the reflection makes him question his purpose and identity. it might even be a portal to an alternative universe. And the donkey somehow changes after that experience. I want also to have Death as a character in this story. And possibly no humans if I can pull it off.

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Dali Donkeys

Tried out my Japanese calligraphy brush on some donkeys with long legs. My tutor saw just a donkey standing in water with reflection, this gave me some ideas for the story...

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Photoshop Experiments

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More Visual Experiments

Welsh version of the water horse spirit. Kind of like a black pegassus, but with glowing red eyes and a menacing look.

I made these stencils and experimented with the grattage (rubbings) technique.

And then I did some stencil prints (pochoir).

And here is a texture I made.

Coming back to the “Horse with no Name” song, I decided to sketch some desert landscapes with oil pastels. i really enjoyed doing these. Landscape drawings are always so meditative and relaxing for me.

Welsh version of the water horse spirit. Kind of like a black pegasus, but with glowing red eyes and a menacing look.

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50 Postcards exercise

I feel like this blog would be incomplete without the outcome, so decided to migrate some posts from Wordpress to here.

This is a good exercise for visual brainstorming and experimenting.

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Tumblr Not Working in my Country =(

Images are not showing without VPN, and I’m having trouble uploading images for blogs...So for the final project, I am moving my blog here

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FMP Research: Magic Horses

I decided to go with the Nix legend\ song by America topic as it appealed to me more. I’d rather study horses than the scorpion topic. 

Almost every culture has a water spirit. In Germanic folklore it is the Nix (male) or Nixe (female). In some stories, they are malevolent, in other stories - they help humans. The Nix is a trickster and a shapeshifter, sometimes they appear as a handsome young man playing a string instrument, and sometimes they are a piece of treasure or a horse. There are a lot of aspects to the male water spirit, so I would like to focus more on the brook horse in order to narrow it down. Male water spirits are often associated with horses, even the Russian water spirit Vodyanoy has a herd of special horses. 

The water spirit in a form of a horse appears usually by a body of fresh water on a foggy night. The horse is so gorgeous that people cannot resist sitting on it, and then they are bound by magic and are unable to get off. The Nix then rides into the water and drowns them. The enchantment can be broken by using an iron object and calling the spirit by its name. Here I made a connection with the song “The Horse with no Name” by the band America. The lead singer Dewey Bunnell doesn’t mention anything about mythology, but I saw the similarity between the lyrics and the legends about being carried away by spirit horses.

Somehow, I’m having problems uploading images, so here is a link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AmXmClOpkVRExfmnTFdWrGMMBwngdUNX/view?usp=sharing

The following is a drawing I did of the Slavic two-souler. The Slavs believed that some people can have a second, demonic soul, and that soul comes out at night, when the host is asleep. The second soul can assume a form of an animal, including a white horse.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10iXhwvkS1lA81no_CbTUJuvKaILqViIG/view?usp=sharing

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FMP Ideas Exploration 3

Human Sedatives

I had an idea that some people have a calming effect on other people. Everyone probably knows a person among their friends or family who can lull the arguments or make you feel better when you are anxious. This idea could be explored in a form of a picture book, or some other form.

I made a preliminary moodboard.

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FMP Exploration 2: Nixie

When we were doing the storyboard project in year 2, there was a song on the list that I really liked.

When I listened to this song, I had the associations with the demon horse legends like the Nix (Nixie or Neck). The Nix is a water spirit in germanic folklore, sometimes they can assume a form of a horse (like the Kelpie), and if they’re malevolent, they’ll lure a person to sit on them and go into the water with the person to drown them.

These narratives could make a good comic or picture book.

Here is a moodboard I made.

And this is a drawing of a water spirit I made.

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FMP Possibilities Exploration 1

Scorpion men. 

This was written down in my possible projects list, and I almost forgot what it was about. I must have thought it would be interesting to explore the mythology around half-men half-scorpions.

And here is a moodboard of the info I found.

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D&AD Critique

Yesterday we had a critique for our D&AD brief. Mostly my peers  and the tutor liked my orangutan idea, but two of the orangutans turned out to be too  scary to be in a commercial campaign:

My next steps would be redrawing them and putting them into the HSBC logo. Also only leaving the red and the monochrome.

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HSBC D&AD Project

I was researching about the bank, trying to find something that would speak to me, and I found this piece of news:

https://www.hsbcprivatebank.com/en/discover/news-room/2019/borneo-calling

It talks about HSBC taking business leaders to Borneo to teach them more about sustainability. And I thought about the orangutans of Borneo. I decided to draw some orangutans and jungles.

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London Zoo Trip Drawings

I did do some sketches while I was in the zoo. Mainly in the warm pavilions.

And at home I sketched some creatures from photos.

 I really enjoy drawing animals and nature in general. In the zoo itself I had to devise a way to sketch fast as the animals are often moving, so I did line drawings with blotches of colour. The last drawing is of an empty terrarium space, I liked how it was arranged and decided to practice environment drawing.