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.
