Designs for the Shine Project

After being inspired by the batik and screen-print patterns of Zimbabwean fabrics, I decided to replicate the effect using brusho and bleach. It seemed to work quite well... I've had to make my own bleach pen so I don't have the problem of drips when using a brush but that's been a useful invention for future brusho projects too. Keeps the lines much cleaner.

I've drawn designs today for the endpapers, characters and general layout of the book. Although this book is for a very young audience, I like the idea of having little visual jokes and a beauty in the design for the parents and older children to appreciate too. For example, I've designed the pages for the 'lost shoe story' so that there is a clear narrative progression across the double page spread by following Tatenda's footprints (this story is only one double spread because we are limited on the number of pages we can print), but I've made the footprints a little joke too by making one a shoe print and one a bare footprint. Poor Tatenda!

Character design

Alphabet lettering mock-up

Zimbabwean Home sketch

Sample of animals in brusho/bleach style

Basic layout design

More bleached animal designs

Character design - Tatenda has lost his shoe!

Endpaper design - pre photoshop touch ups and letters/numbers.

Miro and More

I've got several things on the go at once at the mo, but the music video I'm helping out in is proving to be really useful to my other projects too. Everything is connected!!!

Installation piece from the YSP 2 summers ago.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I'm heading down to the studios to do some character designing with a painter called Robin, who is also collaborating with ABK on the music video. He's drawn some lovely patterns, bird and warrior designs and symbols already, so we'll be using a similar style of drawing using Chinese inks for the main characters too.
Working with someone like Robin, who is an older, more experienced painter, has made me realise that I need to constantly be looking for inspiration in classic and contemporary art and sculpture, as well as in the 'here and now' artists. We've been drawing inspiration from Joan Miro, Picasso and Paul Klee to name but a few and it's allowing me to explore styles I would never have come to on my own. Collaboration seems to get more and more useful and interesting the further you delve!

Doodle Dissertation

I decided to do an alternative submission for my dissertation as it was all about how multi-media forms of communication aid learning, with a focus on how NPOs use this to their advantage when making adverts. It seemed hypocritical and countering to my message if I then chose to present my research in the form of a written essay rather than something more multimedia. So I created a website, featuring links to my various sources and gifs I'd made, which was then used as a visual aid to a lecture I gave to the first years.

I think it went quite well, but this topic is so broad and interesting that one 45 minute lecture barely even begins to scratch the surface. It was a really lovely way to draw together everything I'd been looking into since the summer that was informing all of practice this year though, and I think it's helped me in storyboarding my own charity animation to delve a bit deeper into what has worked well in the past and more importantly why it has worked!

My research had told me that visual (particularly moving image) aids work well in holding your audience's attention, and that breaking up dense factual material with pop culture reference points and humour all works to the speaker's advantage. I tried to put this into practical effect in my talk by including gifs, audience participation, illustrations, animated films, a few jokey moments and some pop culture references, as below:

This is the website, which will now be available to the first year illustration students as a learning resource:

http://cargocollective.com/doodledissertation

The Shine Project - Zimbabwe

You never know where your next project is going to come from... Often it's the most unexpected of places! This project was pitched to me thanks to Instagram of all things! A past acquaintance of mine saw my climate change sketches on Instagram last week and approached me with the opportunity to create illustrations for a children's book for The Shine Project in Zimbabwe, which she works on.

The Shine Project seeks to improve sanitation, nutrition and education amongst children in Zimbabwe, and they wanted to create an illustrated children's book aimed at 2-4 yr olds and their mothers. Despite being incredibly busy right now (about 5 projects on the go at once eeeek) I couldn't turn this down because it was just such a wonderful project and it fit so seamlessly with my dissertation!


I'll be designing about 8 pages in total which focus on the alphabet and basic numbers in a story format. Lots of bright colours and pattern is what I'm aiming for in  the design. I'd love to have weeks/months to work on this ideally but the turn around is ridiculously tight thanks to shipping deadlines. We have to have it designed and 3000 copies printed and ready to be shipped in 3 weeks time!!! CRAZY!

In order to make it as culturally relevant as possible I've been looking at Zimbabwean screen-printed textiles and taking inspiration from the colours and patterns in them. They're just gorgeous! So I've been making images by dying paper with brusho and then using a quill dipped in bleach to mimic the batik effects here.

Fun with 16mm

So I was kindly granted access to the 16mm projector and some blue leader film to create some abstract, experimental 16mm footage for this new music video I'm helping out ABK (Antony) with. This stuff is just the coolest way of creating really beautiful, funky abstract footage in a quick way. We managed to get about 10 loops done in a single afternoon and these will be really useful when ABK is layering everything up for the abstract dance sections of the video. I love the really soft murky quality in the second video (this happened by using a non-permanent pen and smudging it onto the film with my finger).

Dancing, shapes, marks and colour - Carnival

Loose watercolour and pen sketches for dance motion.

For this music video project I'm helping out with, myself and the art director are focusing a lot on colour and movement, line and texture. Thanks to my tutors at MMU I've managed to get some 16mm film and access to a projector so we'll be making and filming some cool abstract 16mm footage for the backgrounds. This stuff is effortlessly beautiful and all you have to do is draw onto and scratch into the film itself to create abstract film that has a gorgeous grainy, flickery effect to it. It's something that you could never recreate in a digital medium, and it's much more fun to play around with real film anyway!

I'll be rotoscoping some tribal style dancing for this video too, in a really loose, painterly style and so I've been looking at 'Carnival' by RCA graduate Susan Young, which was made in 1985, and captures dancing figures with very minimal mark-making and strong coloured lines. I think this is the way we'll go, trying to abstract the figures as much as possible, and just capture the movement. I love the way Antony approaches a film like this, because he combines a narrative/figurative element with more fun, abstract and experimental filming/animation. It's really inspired the way I think about narrative structure in my own work.

This is all feeding into my designs for the Claire House Hospice animation too, giving me ideas for abstraction and characters before I know the narrative elements.

Carnival - Susan Young

<iframesrc="https://player.vimeo.com/video/43310581" width="500" height="363" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="https://vimeo.com/43310581">Carnival</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/susanyoung">Susan Young</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

Abstract pattern designs for Claire House

Character designs for Claire House animation - inspired by the work I'm doing with Antony.

Abstract pattern designs for Claire House Project

Radiospiration

After a suggestion from my flatmate, I've started listening to podcasts in the background whilst doing my work. It makes a nice change from music occasionally, and on those days when you have lots of 'mindless' drawing or colouring etc it's nice to listen to a narrative. I used to do this with audiobooks as well, but the podcasts are normally based on real life so they offer me more inspiration than fiction. 

I listened to this last night and loved it. http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/strangers/love-good-and-bad
 The structure of the story-telling was really inspiring, and I think that as an audio for an animation (my charity animation in particular) this would work really well, as it's sort of a collage of people's experiences and stories, but held together with a more poetic narrative metaphor. 
For me, this is the audio equivalent of what I want to achieve with my animations; a collaged mix of abstraction and narrative/figurative elements. I think it's just really artistic as a radio piece, and the structure is so effortless. I'm definitely taking inspiration from this for my structure in my films. 

N.B. This podcast would be beautiful to animate as well with the imagery of the fog, and the sea and the loss of love. (Future project?) I mean, just look at these photos from the town in Newfoundland where the inspiration for this podcast came from! Stunning!