Critical Report and references

Critical Report

The tale of Frankenstein explores some extremely strong and powerful themes, mainly life/death, love and a morality. This gives birth to some extremely powerful imagery especially as it all revolves around something that completely isn't human, but at the same time is only made of humans and just wants humanity and love. These are a few of the main reasons as to why I chose frankenstein as my book.

Over the many processes that we've been taught I think I really enjoyed working with flat images from week one and then learning how to make brushes enhanced my experience of that, allowing me to give textures to shapes and helping me solve creative problems that I may not have been able to do before. The opposites theme in our third weeks work really shows how creatively I pushed myself to experiment with layers to effectively produce artwork. I drew a lot of inspiration from another graphic artist, Olly Moss who also creates flat, minimalistic styles of landscape work and plays with the composition of an image to get his meaning across. He really knows how to compose a flat graphic scene, effectively and his colour scheme contrasts withe the burning orange sky really well. (1). I wanted to take that into my work moving forward so I knew that any scenic work I would make would be in this flat manner.

Experimenting with paintbrushes opened a completely new way of varying my style of work, changing, altering and defining what a brush is and how I use it. For my woodland scene where frankenstein wanders the woods in a fit of rage, I created multiple individual tree brushes. This allowed me to just simply stamp them in where I saw fit and was easily able to create an entire forest on a mountain scene without having to draw each single tree silhouette out. I also used the clipping mask feature in photoshop to give shadows to things like the clouds and add rocky faces and different colours to the mountains. The colour palette starts with the darkest colour at the front and descends up the palette into lighter tones eventually when it gets to the lightest shade, and at the back of the scene I went back to the darkest tone to contrast with the lighter colours to stand out.I also looked at books on concept art just to find out how I should compose my scene and what features to include and not include (2), I realised that if Frankensteins monster is a very small figure at the front of the scene it would contrast really well with the vastness of the genevan mountains and forest. I also took inspiration from on of my own concept art books, The Art Of The Last Of Us (3), it has some really good imagery and ideas on nature growing in places like the forests and woods but also cities and its effect on humanity. 

I really enjoyed working on the quote and I personally think it came out very well, learning how to manipulate font in illustrator played into how I made the textures on the letters aside from that I didn't use illustrator for any of it. I found the process in illustrator to be very long and drawn out for something that can be done very quickly in photoshop. I create some paint stroke brushes and used those to cut away from the font to give it a really grunge-esque look, those same brushes are also how I stamped in the green ooze seeping out of the stitches utilising a simple mask overlay. I did some initial research into type using The fundamentals of typography, but it didn't really feed into what I wanted to create, however I did find some really unique type faces and it gave me the idea to use a typewriter font for the word love as if it was desolate and apart from the image, which ultimately what frankensteins monster is desolate and disconnected from everything else.

My final gif was the most difficult thing for me to create as it consisted of around thirty frames and adjusting the opacity of individual layers constantly to create the illusion of light and dark took a very long time and was extremely tedious, however I am pleased with the final artwork. One artists who I developed the idea of portraying frankensteins monster in this way is Jakub Rozalski (5), his art usually showcases mechanical beasts and fantasy creatures in big open landscapes near smaller figures to show contrast of their giant size.In this example he only lightly suggest how the monster looks not giving too much detail to the viewer on his armour but enough information to see that its something to be afraid of. This is what I wanted to emulate in my gif, except only really showing frankensteins monster when the lightning struck.

References:
1.Olly Moss. (2016). Firewatch Art By Olly Moss. Available: http://ollymoss.com/firewatch/. Last accessed 1/5/2017.
2.Lilly Elliot (2015). Big bad world of concept art for video games: an insider's guide for students. California: Design studio Press.
3.Naughty Dog Studios (2013). The Art Of The Last Of Us : Naughty Dog Studios.
4. Paul Arthur (1971). The fundamentals of Typography. Lausanne Worthing: AVA Acedemia.
5. Jakub Rozalski. (2014). The Art of Jakub Rozalski. Available: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/W2XJE. Last accessed 1/5/2017.

Final Artworks

Here is the gif Describing the scene just after the monster has woken and starts to torment Dr. frankenstein by breaking through his window 

Then I have the illustration of The chapter in the book where frankenstein Wanders the woods after he destroys a cottage where he was learning from people.

The last piece is the illustrated quote If I cannot inspire love, I will Cause Fear.

Rough designs for our final artwork

Rough Designs

Each of the roughs below show the final process of each of my final outcomes for the frankenstein book.

This is the illustration for the chapter when frankensteins monster is given life and starts to torment victor once he tries to get some sleep. After drawing this scene I realised its potential to be turned into a gif, maybe having lightning strike in the background and causes the figure of frankenstein start to glow in the light. The rain in the back window will also be falling.

Next rough is based on frankenstein leaving into the forest after burning down the cottage where he was taught to read and learn. I tried to use a flat layered landscape effect to distinctly show the layers between the mountains and hills. Here is another rough that I made digitally, maybe not using this specific colour scheme, maybe something more rotten like an array of dull greens.

The last piece of digital art we have to create is based on a quote from the book, I decided to go with old gothic text as the base font whilst transitioning into old typewriter text for the word love. Fear uses one of my favourite types of font, like the word was splashed on to the canvas in a hurry.

week 9: Creating a template for Laser cutting

Scanning my drawing of the font to be arranged in photoshop

Below are the scans, they have been scanned in upside down, so im having to arrange font as well

New document

Here I am separating out the words

This image just needs to arrange the order of the words, I had accidentally drawn the sentence backwards

Once all the words have been arranged in order, the template is then ready to be sent over to the laser cutter

Week 8: Creating textured letterforms in Illustrator

Creating textured letterforms

In this lesson we overlaid textures from images we took on to drawings of letters

Here is the scan of my alphabet drawn from text all over worcester

Taken into photoshop and adjusted the contrast

After selecting and cropping an individual letter I used the threshold tool to make sure it was only black and white

Here i'm adding the threshold to make sure that the image is only black and white

Done, not much difference

This is one of the textures I plan to overlay, it's actually a spiky hedgehog in a bucket 

Im going to apply a grayscale filter to the image 

Nice and monotone

Created a new document in illustrator

Placing the font on illustrator, its different to pasting the original imaging, as placing it allows us to keep the size of that image small and adjusting it doesn't lose resolution

I've opened up image trace on the font after placing it on the correct layers

Placing the texture on the mid layer whilst creating a compound path

Once it's finished it gives the font almost a spooky, ghost like appearance.

Another example

A clearer viewing of the texture on this one

The texture is much harder to see depending on the colour you use it with

Creating a good contrast of colours gives a variety of different effects

A darker version of the last image

Conclusion: This process was actually very difficult to utilise effectively, it seemed to take an excessively long series of tasks to perform something that could have been done much easier on photoshop. However the results were interesting and there are some clear advantages to doing this process on illustrator over photoshop; such as the vast amount of features to use on image trace and the detail of editing the font on a more intricate level.

Week 7: Drawing faces in Illustrator

Introduction to Adobe Illustrator

Our introduction began with a short tutorial and overview of the display in the browser as well as creating a dog.

I only managed to get a few screenshots of the dog process, you can clearly see the basic shapes that make up the face and how it goes on to form the end product

I used some reference and also changed the color scheme to a mix of light and dark blues

The next project was to transfer and colour a portrait sketch, here is one of my friend

I brought the image into photoshop

After adjusting the levels and placing it in illustrator, I moved on to painting

Using the blob brush tool, I started to colour the face, I used red just a bright colour to contrast well with the sketch

I filled in the image and changed to red to a more skin like tone

I pushed the colour layer behind the sketch

I then moved on to the hair and bag straps with the same process

Continuing the process with the clothes

Orange shirt to compliment blue, finished

The next project was using the image trace to reproduce a portrait image, here is the image i'm using

I started by removing the backround

Placed the image in illustrator

Her I image traced the portrait into a dark filter

This is the same image except with a 3 colour filter

Here is the image again with a 9 colour filter

This is the trace I will be working with

I started by using the blob brush tool again to lock in the base face colour

Here is the image with highlights added on to it over the base face layer

Added the rosy cheecks

The dark of the eye and lips were added

This is how it looks so far, haven't finished the hair

the orange of the hair

I also added the pink of the hair in

 Finished

Complete

Conclusion: I don't particularly like the image very much as it just doesn't have a very clean appearance, I can see the relation to the original picture but i'm just not a fan of the style. It is very reminiscent of a pop art piece. I like how the colour contrasts with the black of the image trace, that is quite effective especially in the eyes.