Shakespeare in London Planning and Sketching

Tuesday and Wednesday, 17th and 18th of April

I started off by looking at the Shakespeare locations that I went to/tried to get to.  I then selected which I thought were best to represent visually.  I decided on:

The Globe Theatre

The George Inn

Memorial First Folio

St Bartholomew’s Gate

Westminster Abbey

Southwark Cathedral

V&A Props

I thought this was a good mix of places directly related to him, places from his time, tributes and Shakespeare in modern times.  Other places not on the image will be included in the write-up on the other side.  I decided I also wanted to include the Thames river.  To me this is a real part of London and its history and I love the way in divides the city it two. 

I then made a visual mind-map.  It is very basic as the majority is based on having been there so I just gave a few things to show this.  Thinking about the different places blue really springs out for me as a colour.  I think it's also a good colour to use in combination with ochre.  The ochre shows the old historical side ill the blues shown below have a more modern and fresh feeling to them.  I skipped doing a written one as I had already made somany notes on my trip to London I felt this unnecessary.  

 Something very noticable about London is the vast size of it and the huge amount of places and things to see there.  In my nine days I saw so much much looking at the city overal there's just so much more to see.  I really that feeling to be included that there's a lot in a small space with nothing in between, because to me that really is what London is like.  

I first had the idea to include many pictures of Shakespeare on the map with the different locations.  But when I started sketching I didn't really feel this was right, a bit like saying the same thing twice.  I was better of using the space for the locations.  I also tried with less images of Shakespeare surrounded by the locations but I thought they were dull.  

I then tried using the Thames as the dividing line, at first I thought this might be a bit obvious but I decided it was actually a good idea to help keep it an interpretation but still some sense of where the places are located.  I put the locations North of the Thames above and South beneath, very logical. I also though this was a good break in the very full picture and good way of incorporating the text.  Above in the mindmap, you can see a lot of inky text, which of course can also be interpretated as water.  

This is just a basic sketch of approximately how it will look.  I wanted to play with the scales of things to make it more of a mitch-match of places.  The Southwark stained-glass window I have portrayed as larger than the cathredal itself and although not visible here the window is a mix of two of the windows commemorating Shakespeare.  The George in needs mor people in it so it becomes a lively tavern. I don't think the pillar from inside the Globe should be stretching over the Thames either.  I decided to change the sculpture inside Westminster Cathedral a bit.  Instead of leaning against the pile of books he's leaning on a giant version of the signed skull prop in the V&A and instead of him pointing to a scroll is now pointed into the socket of the skull.  I have now done a basic trace of all of the loose elements and will be working on them indivisually.  This is so that I can scan them as I don't have a good enough camera to photgraph a whole large picture but I also want to be able to easily manipulate the sections seperately in photoshop.  This also maked it easier to change the bits if unhappy at a later stage.  I'm going to be using the same method of acrylic and fineliner so I can really work on this style development and potentially add a bit of the background from the Herne picture earlier.  When this is completed this will work as one side of the "map", more of an tourist information pamphlet really, and it could also function as a poster.  I will ask what Elizabeth and Meghan think in both senses.  Just one of those things I'll try out further down the lign.  Obviously the Thames only looks like a ribbon at the moment, but as the good old expression goes: "children and idiots..."

 

Hellblazer Sketching and Start on Cover

Monday, 16th of April and a bit on Saturday and Sunday, 21st and 22nd of April

Sorry about the weird picture layout, blogger had decided to change all the settings, and it is really bloody annoying. 

I started off by doing different sketches, for ideas for the cover.  They were mainly character based as I prefer this kind of illustration in general.  Lots of the sketches were based on a kind of entrapment concept.



I decided to carry on with using the large fly portrait combined with the bottle that is used for containing the dmeon Mnemoth in the story.  I liked it how Constatine was on almost all of the covers but sometimes indirectly, so I wanted play with this as well.  I thought at first I could position the bottle behind Mnemoth with Constantine's reflection in it but as soon I sketched this I found the composition really dull.  Instead I positioned Constantine as a reflection on the eye holding the bottle.  I already thought this had more potential.  I then change the positionn of Constantine within the eye.  My preference goes to the straight on portrait as this is more forceful (like Constantine) while the other is more of a worshipping pose.

 












I then started to illustrate the fly portrait.  I had said earlier that I was going to try and focus on bringing more unity to my work and look at combining painting and pen drawing.  I have already tried this out with a picture of Herne (Clannad "Legend" CD Cover).  At first as I said I was quite happy but after leaving it for a while and coming back to it I decided that it was too digital.  I liked the background and thought it successful: painted but due to photoshop layers a extra dimention of light was added.  My main problem was that the ink drawing was too rough and that the large amount of digitally added details were, well too bloody digital.  I decided with my fly to start off by painting the portrait in acrylics the same way I always do: pencil drawing to mark out basic shape then paint over the top in a relitively realistic manner.  Looking at my visual mind-map I used the green which seemed to be very dominant and added what has become a trademark colour, brown ochre :D.  I then quickly painted a very rough insect leg and used a black fineliner over the top to test it out before I started on the fly portrait.  I then went over the painted portrait highlighting the shapes, adding extra shadow and details such as the hair. I was and am very happy with this result.  These really are the two ways of working combined that I enjoy the most and I feel that they really compliment and strengthen each other.   
 

 After having down this I photoshopped the painting into a rough template of the cover to see how it would look and I added the sketches of Constatine in the eye.  I didn't think it was quite there at first so I enlarged the fly, zoomed in and tilted it.  Now looking at it it's actually too close up so I need to get a composition between the two. Obviously the text colour, still needs to be played with and the background will be different, black elements on Mnemoth enhanced etc but that all in the fine tuning at the end. 

I then started with the pencil sketch of Constantine.  I have a bottle the same shape as the one in the pictures so I take a photo of my Papa holding it so I can get the hand right.  Might still need a bit of work round the mouth.  I'll then finish the pincture in the same way as the fly, paint and fineliners.  I drew him smoking as this is one of his largest character traits.  Also then I can position cigarette smoke in the foreground, projecting the viewer into the position of Constantine.  In theory Mnemoth should also be reflected in the bottle and so on.. I'll have a look at what this looks like towards completion time, it might be too much, we'll see.

WIP Constantine

TIME COUNT 09/04-13/04

TIME COUNT

33 hours 11 minutes - Overal week's hours

+- 2 hours - Blog Update (Not including London Updates)

I will show the complete breakdown this one time and then from now on I'll just show the total daily Time Counts.

Breakdown of work time:

Monday 09/04
11:30-12:40
13:13-1753

4 hours 40 minutes

Tuesday 10/04

9:30-12:10
13:20-14:09
15:06-15:24
16:00-16:49
17:04-18:07
18:40-19:55

6 hours 54 minutes

Wednesday 11/04

9:30-12:06
13:04-16:00
16:33-18:31

7 hours 30 minutes

Thursday 12/04
9:17-12:33
13:53-18:10

7 hours 23 minutes

Friday 13/04

9:24-11:55
13:05-15:05
15:20-17:33

6 hours 44 minutes

Hellblazer Cover Research

Thursday, 12th of April

Research: Background and Imagery

I have definitely picked the first issue of Hellblazer to illustrate the cover for. It is part 1 of 2 of the storyline "Hunger". The story is about John Constantine, a moody chain-smoking anti-hero, who is tracking down the cause of strange occurances. He discovers they are linked to the hunger demon Mnemoth and then continues to contain the demon in the second issue.

To start I looked up Mnemoth, I was curious whether he was actually a historically listed demon or devil. I discovered he wasn't but was in fact created by the writers in this very episode of Hellblazer. The demon causes people to devour what they desire (food, comics, women, themselves etc.) with full compulsion and they eventually die from starvation as the demon drains them of their life force. Mnemoth appears in the form of a monstrous giant fly or a swarm of locusts.



With a real interest in this character I want to focus on Mnemoth and these themes in Hunger. First of all you see here the original cover, with and without the text. I have also added the pages that refer visually to Mnemoth and some pages of the hunger compulsions. I picked out a few existing covers to put on my first research page as well. I discovered that Constantine is always on the cover (except on two or three of the more recent covers, out of more than 150 indiviual paper comics this is pretty minimal) whether in the foreground or in the background. On one of them he's in a mugshot lying on the table with someone else sitting behind the desk. So he doesn't need to actually be on it personally to on the cover.



As always I also made a mind-map of my thoughts and research discoveries.



While searching through the National Geographics I found an article on "Flies that Fight". I thought this was a pretty good visual source to keep at hand. I also researched other source pictures on the internet.



I finished off my research by making a collective page of images relevant to the atmosphere needed for the cover. Colour wise it seems to have come out at mainly greeny-browns with hints of red. Naturally it is of a very dark atmosphere and mainly creature/people based.

Clannad "Legend" Research and Imagery

Wednesday, 11th of april and the morning of Thursday, 12th of April

Research and Concept Development

Like in the previous project I started by collecting the images of the existing product. The covers are purely photo based (except for one drawing of Robin on horseback) and is very strongly linked to the TV-Programme "Robin of Sherwood" of which Legend is the soundtrack.



What I've noticed while watching Robin of Sherwood is that the songs are used at very particular times, just like most movies it's not random. I watched bits of the programme, skipping through the majority without sound, to figure out when the songs were used. Some of them were a wee bit hard to find but I got them in the end. I mind-mapped this while watching. As I really want to base the project on the combination of the programme and the music I thought it was very important to have this properly figured out.



I also made visual mind-maps of the different songs, as they all have their own atmospheres and relevant characters from the programme. I included pictures from the programmes, art works and concept based pictures (the trees, which I'll get back to in a moment). From doing this it became clear to me that some of the songs aren't visually particularly important or interesting. It may be better in the long run to visually support five songs and make those really interesting and good instead of doing ten not so good images.







I made a mind-map of my general thoughts on the programme and music. Although at this stage I was very clear on what each song stood for I didn't really have general idea/concept to hold it all together.



I decided to have a look at the song lyrics. I hadn't done this earlier as I wanted to focus on the tv-music connection first. Although some songs hold little content, for example in the first song "Robin, the Hooded Man", is merely repeated throughout the song. When I got to number ten though, "Ancient Forest" I found something quite meaningful and relevant. Here are the lyrics:

Ancient Forest

Came upon an ancient forest
A guiding power that led me there
Walking through the mystic forest
The legend tale of times gone by

Once its whisper in the black night
Reflection deep in wooded lands
A floating mist that circles shadows
A legend tale of times gone by

Giant trees are falling night and day
For many years and ages past
Will they ever share the answer
Of legend tales and times gone by?

Walking through the mystic forest
I'm walking through the mystic forest

They really summed up that the whole story was a reflection of an old myth. While reading the lyrics, I could imagine walking through a forest and having this amazing story of heroism and bravery revealed to be by the trees. I felt that this could be a theme that would hold together all of the elements. I looked at the inividual songs and connected types of trees or tree forms that went with their own themes. "Herne" got an old gnarly oak (Herne orignally showed up first in Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor" as a ghost. There is a larger story but it is said that he was hung from an Oak Tree for thievery. That oak still stands at the grounds of Windsor castle.), the oak being a tree connected to the Druids as these trees held a huge amount of knowledge due to their age. (There are naturally many other factors of their Druidic importance but I won't get into that now.) "Scarlet Inside" got a split tree. This song is played when Will Scarlet is throwing one of his tantrums generally due to an argument with Robin or while he is melancholy about his wife who was raped and murdered by the Sheriff's men. I felt that something split or broken revealing it's inner self was relevant to the theme. In this way they all got their own tree related theme. (I haven't made a selection on the most visually interesting songs to focus on yet but will be doing that when I start up this project again.)

Friday, 13th of April

Start of Artwork Atmosphere Sketching

I often have the comment from teachers that I still don't have a style which is uniform across all of my work. I think it's mainly because I like doing so many different things. It generally comes down to relatively realistic acrylic painting or pen line drawings. I've generally kept these two things seperate and have only combined them now and again but not really develloped the combination properly. I really want to focus on doing this so that I have more uniformity in my work. I tried to at least make a start at this on Friday and although it still needs work (obviously) I think it was a good start.

I decided to start on Herne as this was a subject I had tackled before and thought I would be able to focus more on the atmosphere. I started by doing a pen drawing of Herne and then I seperately made four more images: ecoline inked figure colouring, ecoline inked background, acrylic painted figure colouring and acrylic painted background.






I then scanned them all and photoshopped them together. I continued to add more detail and adjust colours in photoshop, still not quite finished with that but good enough for a sketch.



I think it definitely has the right atmosphere due to the colours, lighting and shadows. I also feel this is a good way of combining my skills and love of different materials and digital/photographic work and certainly a good step in the right direction. The colouring of his face still isn't right, something that will need working on for the real images. More detail in the original painting I think might do it, a wee bit too much reliance in the computer in this sketch.

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.

Part of A Midsummer Night's Dream Script

To start off, here is the part of scene II that I will be basing my project on. I thought I should keep it seperate from my general update post, so here it is.

SCENE II.

The wood. Enter TITANIA, with her RETINUE

TITANIA

Come, now a roundel and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence;
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,
Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats, and some keep back
The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders
At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep;
Then to your offices and let me rest.

She reclines. Fairies sing and dance.

FAIRY I
You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong,
Come not near our fairy queen.

CHORUS
Philomele, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby,
Lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm,
Nor spell nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So, good night, with lullaby.

FAIRY I
Weaving spiders, come not here;
Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence!
Beetles black, approach not near;
Worm nor snail, do no offence.

CHORUS
Philomele, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby,
Lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm,
Nor spell nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So, good night, with lullaby.

[TITANIA sleeps.

FAIRY II

Hence, away! now all is well:
One aloof stand sentinel.

[Exeunt Fairies.