Final Globe Research and Starter Sketches

Monday, the 9th of April

Final Researching Day

First of all I collected together the pictures from the Globe's website of the Midsummer Night's Dream range and their bestselling ranges. You can really see from the Macbeth and Hamlet lines, that the darker themes sell far better. I also looked at existing images of Midsummer Night's Dream. They are generally of a very light mood so it will be interesting to put a more dark twist on it.



I then continued by making a mind-map of information and specifications. This was followed by a mind-map focusing on atmosphere, quotes and elements I found particularly interesting, faerie-character design ideas, which creatures were present in the scene etc. There are basically the faeries and the creatures of the night. I feel that scale-wise the creatures should be far larger than the faeries as this will make the faeries seem far more fierce if they can hold off/kill such huge beasts.




I continued my research by making a visual mind-map. I focused on lighting, colour, atmosphere, scale and a little bit of creature research. On this page I also included a section to typography, I don't generally remember to do this until later on. I think text made of natural substances, such as sticks and twigs really could be quite cool. They fit within the natural world scene but also have a scariness to them if left bare (no leaves).



I then built up a decent database (61 images - below a small taster) of photos of the creatures in the text as source pictures for drawing.




Tuesday, the 10th of April

First Sketching Day

As Meghan and I discussed, the faeries should be scary which is actually mythologically correct. Faeries are not kind sweet things, they are mischievious pests. As I want the faeries to look a bit different to your regular faeries I focused the day on developing ideas for that. The other creatures in the illustration will probably only be larger in scale and a bit scarier. I started by doing some general sketching, basically just what came to mind. A lot wasn't right, but there were a couple of interesting ideas in there.





Some were a bit insect-like (skelletal frames and six legs/arms) which worked well for the idea of making them scarier but still faerie-like.



I wasn't quite happy though at first and thought it would be interesting to make a faerie with bird-like elements. Philomile singing is a reference to a mythological lady who was raped by her brother-in law and afterwards was turned into a nightingale. I thought that this could be an interesting base for making the faeries bird-like. I did some bird studies first. I then very quickly remembered (from earlier projects) that I really don't like misforming birds to create other creatures. I couldn't just use the wings because that would make them angels and I couldn't completely substitute the faeries with birds because this to me doesn't leave enough magic in the story. The faeries need to be foreign but still something you can relate to. Nightingales don't exactly have that fear factor either.



I then went back to the original sketches and thought about the insects. I had to be careful how I made them look because there are some insects that are driven away by the faeries, actually only beetles come to think of it. I thought about which insect I find most terrifying. The answer would be the weta. This a a giant grasshopper which lives in New Zealand. It has really long antennae and there are hooks on the ends of their legs so they can lock their grip onto things. Theoretically they're harmless, but bloody terrifying all the same. I started again by doing some study sketches to just properly look at their anatomy. That's as far as I got so when I pick this up again I shall be combining the weta with my original insectoid sketches and then continue to sketch out some different scenes with the faeries in them.



During the day I also searched through our fifteen year collection of National Geographics (just looked at the spines for relevant subject titles, not page for page :P) for good source images for this project and the other projects.