secret 7 - rolling stones

I wanted to make something dreamlike for this song, create a landscape which could be quite alien with spacey colours. I did a piece last year for PPP which inspired this slightly

- piece

I loved the combination of multicoloured mountains, bright stars and mixed up proportions and wanted to create something similar, but maybe in a desert setting with big desert rocks like in the Grand Canyon. 

I found an image of some desert rocks I liked and tried out some different colours multiplied on top of it from a paintbrush stroke I did - so that there would be some texture.

I wasn't sure which would work best with the setting so started to put together the scene to see how everything works. I found a good image of stars from a book, and used the same trees I used in my PPP illustration from last year but in a different perspective. 

I used the original colour of the rocks but it looked way too bright for the composition, it takes away too much attention from everything else. I'm also a bit stuck of what to put in the space between the trees and rocks. Also the rocks look too much like they are just floating there, theres no depth to the image, so I will have to work on it some more with some more tests. 

visual development (propercorn)

I decided to try and change the direction of the my propercorn idea slightly and try out some cut out shapes for my ingredients rather than watercolour or digital, I feel it gives a nice handmade quality which 'Propercorn' really try and promote on their packaging. Here are some I tired:

I like how it gives it a bit of a 3D feel but in quite a naive style. I tried out a take on one of my test designs I had before, with the ingredients at the bottom of the page with some floating up to popcorn at the top. 

I played around with the opacity so it looks like the veg is going into the distance giving the impression that there is a lot of it. I think this could be an interesting start to something so I will develop it more. 

secret 7 - the supremes, development

I did some test compositions for the supremes

I used stencils and my ink pad for the figures which I feel works quite well as it is still clear who they are with minimal detail. I also think the contrast of black with the yellow is really bold and striking as an album cover idea. 

The first design with the black outline of the circles doesn't work at all, along with the lines, it all distracts from the figures. I think the simplicity of the second is much more effective, so I will try develop that one further. 

secet 7 - initial ideas

I've decided to take on secret 7 as one of my individual practise briefs. The challenge is to take one of the well known songs given and make an album cover for it without mentioning the song name or singer. The winning covers will be displayed and sold in an exhibition, the buyers won't know the song choice until they have bought the cover, and all the money goes to charity. So it is an exciting brief to be involved in. But to make it a substantial brief for the project I will have to create an outcome for several of the songs, do several designs for the same song or develop the imagery for a song into further products. 

So far I have chosen:

The Rolling Stones - Dead Flowers

Underworld - Born Slippy

Diana Ross and the Supremes - Reflections

Some initial ideas I've had on the songs

Rolling Stones

When listening to it I felt it could have been set in a desert, as if there is a long car journey down some outstretched road.

But also maybe a dream like environment - maybe with multicoloured mountains which aren't quite right. 

The rolling stones are known for having taken lots of drugs throughout their career, so it could possibly have some psychedelic element. 

I could try and literally represent the song title - maybe depicting dead flowers, possibly in plectrums to relate to the important guitar element in the band. 

Underworld

This song is mainly famous from being in soundtrack for the film 'Trainspotting', which is about a group of people's experiences with taking heroin. So again the cover could maybe relate to that aspect in some way with 'trippy' psychedelic imagery. I am quite drawn to using the trainspotting colours for the cover as they are very bold, rather intrusive colours which the song kind of feels like.

The song feels like it is set somewhere quite urban so I wanted to include city imagery but also make it quite abstract, with elements slightly out of proportion- I like the idea of using the imagery of street lamps and have them towering above maybe or a heavily repeated pattern using them. 

The Supremes

The Supremes have a very distinctive look which I really like - with the three ladies with big hair. I like the idea of taking their silhouettes, maybe having them in a mo-town bar with quite dim colours. Or possibly just taking the shape of their hair to illustrate. Or maybe using some loose watercolour and limited colour palette to depict the inside of a bar with a vague outline of the figures

OUIL504 end of module evaluation

 I have really enjoyed this module, I feel it has taught me a lot of valuable skills and made me consider aspects of creative practise that I had never thought of before, like animating my illustrations. Narrative work is something I am really interested in, being able to take important information from a mass amount of text; diluting it down into something understandable and then communicating that information visually is a very useful and important skill that I want to keep progressing with, as it is an essential part of some illustration practises. I feel that I have done that with this project; George Orwell’s books are very dense and have many complex underlying themes, I managed to pick out what I wanted to communicate – like the sense of oppression, and the convey it in my prints and animation. This was largely due to the initial tasks where we worked with motifs to explore the tangible and intangible themes. Although I didn’t use any of my motifs in my final pieces, it helped a lot to experiment with materials when you only have a limited subject matter, but also made me think about the different ways I could communicate one motif, like a windmill – this process of working became very useful when coming up with imagery for studio brief 1 and 2 when I didn’t want it to look too literal.

Animation was something I had never worked with before, or ever thought I would, I think I preferred drawn and stop motion animation to a completely digital method because I love the handmade aesthetic of those processes, but I ended up making my final animation on After Effects because it was much easier to link all the parts together. But I feel I still managed to keep the handmade feel because most the elements like the smoke, figures, some background, were handmade stencils that had been scanned in. I was really pleased with how my moving brief turned out, I feel like I got the aesthetic of it just how I had originally wanted, I had kept it very textual and to a limited colour palette which had a big impact on the atmosphere of the piece which I think did depict a bleak, gritty, Orwellian landscape. The finished piece did run slightly faster than I had planned, and I did have to cut out two elements I had initially wanted to include, but I don’t think that makes it any less recognisable as related to Orwell.

I had a lot more trouble with my printed pictures; I was a bit lost with what I wanted to show and how I was going to do it. I started off with etching but it didn’t make sense to be doing it, as it was so different to all the work I had been doing in my visual journal, and mono printing seemed a lot more relevant. It took a while to properly understand the process in order to know what I wanted out of it. I found the experimental nature of it an advantage in the sense that it was very quick to make prints and you could add many different stencils, textures, mix colours and still be pleased with the outcome. But I found it more difficult when trying to create final prints because it was very hard to determine how prints would turn out which got frustrating. I was pleased with my final prints, although I think the ones that contain strong structures were more successful as they came out very bold and imposing which is what I wanted. I’m glad I chose mono print though, it gave me a lot of problems but I feel I managed to get through them and create a set of professional looking prints.

I feel my visual journal was the most lacking within this project, once I had started developing ideas for studio brief 1 and 2, the work in my journal decreased a lot as I felt it was no longer needed. I know that it would have helped my project even more if I had been continually drawing and developing imagery I was using alongside the prints and animation, but I feel that the work I did in it at the beginning really influenced my final pieces, so it was definitely a necessity.

My strengths in this project have been taking my original intangible themes and finding a way to communicate them, I feel I have worked a lot on trying to get the right aesthetic – especially in moving pictures. I feel my colour scheme in both briefs helped this a lot, I have had trouble finding the right colours in past briefs but I think I got it right for this subject.

I feel I fell behind slightly on my contextual references for both briefs, for moving pictures I did quite a bit at the beginning and although that didn’t carry on any further, it really did influence how my final sequence turned out. Especially the use of a rolling background in ‘The great escape’ by Alex Produkt and Kathleen Weldon, which inspired my rolling background of factories. For printed pictures I felt a bit lost for what to look at, as my final prints aren’t typical mono prints as they have more block colour than faded texture. Although I set up a Pinterest for mono printing, I felt my development mostly came out of experimenting in the print room.

I feel I have learnt a lot from this project about using different processes, working from literature, and creating a finished product that fits into a contextual environment. I am pleased with my results and felt I actually managed my time pretty well as there wasn’t a massive rush to finish everything at the end. I wasn’t expecting to like animation, but I definitely want to do more of it in future projects.

project proposals

OUIL504 Illustration 1: Process & Production

STUDIO BRIEF 2 PROJECT PROPOSAL: Moving Pictures

I intend to produce…

A 50 second sting to promote a documentary about George Orwell’s life and works. I want the animation to give a brief insight into what the documentary will be looking at. I plan for the animation to be made mostly out of a rolling background that leads the sequence into different elements of Orwell’s life or books. I want to depict Industrial Yorkshire (because of the time he spent there to research for a book), the Spanish Civil War (as he spent time fighting in it), elements of his books 1984 and Animal Farm.

I chose to do the longer sting rather than the 3 short stings because I felt it was more suited to my subject, because Orwell’s life feeds so much into his novels it made more sense to connect them all in one sequence rather that coming up with 3 completely different ideas.

The content will focus on…

1.     The industrial landscape with miners on the way to the factories and mines (smoke, workers, factories)

2.     Soldiers in the Spanish Civil War (trenches, guns, war planes)

3.     1984 and Animal Farm landscape (workers, intimidating buildings, eyes, windmills, animals, whips, guns)

I will be aiming to communicate…

1.     Themes of oppression, war, hardship

2.     Gritty, bleak, dystopian landscape

3.     Prominent elements and themes of Orwell’s’ life and novels

To an audience of…

1.     Fans of Orwell’s books, who are interested to know more about Orwell’s life and how it fed into his work

2.     Those interested in a documentary involving political, historical and social underlying themes

3.     Those interested in dystopian fiction

(I mostly kept to this proposal, in terms of how I wanted it to look and the themes I wanted to communicate, but I had to cut the parts about the Spanish Civil War and Animal Farm as it became to complicated and long for a 50 second sting)

OUIL504 Illustration 1: Process & Production

STUDIO BRIEF 3 PROJECT PROPOSAL: Printed Pictures

I intend to produce….

A set of 6 art prints made using mono printing, which will be depicting the intangible themes in 1984. They will be in a variety of layouts (size of print) but will have the same colour scheme and style so to be a consistent set. They will also contain similar reoccurring motifs that are recognisable to the book. I want the prints to be simple yet bold, and to be focused more on the atmosphere created rather than depicting actual scenes from the book.

The content will focus on…

1.     Key motifs from the book (figures, lonely figures, barbed wire, rats, tall imposing buildings, eyes, cameras, poorly built houses, bombs)

2.     Using format and composition to create atmosphere

3.     The intangible themes running throughout the book

I will be aiming to communicate…

1.     The idea of people with no identity or individuality, who are oppressed by those in power

2.     The symbolic motif of one figure singled out as rebellious against the mass crowd of figures following the rules

3.     Themes of oppression, dystopia, rebellion, loneliness

4.     Prints that are recognisable to 1984

To an audience of…

1.     Fans of George Orwell’s books, particularly 1984

2.     Those interested in prints that are textually strong

3.     Those interested in prints that relate to literature

printed pictures

For the final prints, I bought some watercolour paper to print onto because I felt the paper I had been using was a bit thin for final prints. The paper took the ink really well and made them look much more professional. 

I am pleased with my final prints, I think the colour scheme I have been working with looks good and relates well to the feel of '1984', with the hints of red symbolising the theme of revolution. I feel that some of the prints are stronger than others - the buildings and poster prints came out best I think. But I think they do all work well together as a set even if some compositions are better than others. 

I had fun with mono-printing; it is such an experimental printing method, that it is hard, almost impossible to determine how the prints will turn out as they are different every time, so trying to expect final prints became very difficult. I'm pleased with the ones that I got, some of them are a bit messy around the edge or slightly out of place but the prints themselves came out how I wanted which I think is the most important part. 

Prints once I had trimmed them all the the same size, they look much cleaner and more professional I think, and any grubby marks are much less noticeable:

moving pictures

The finished animation along with sound

george orwell animation from Astrid Weguelin on Vimeo.

I am pleased with how it turned out, I think the textures and colour scheme work really well and add to the gloomy feel I wanted to achieve. Also the size of the structures in comparison to the small figures gives the imposing feeling that I found to be an important intangible theme in the book. I think the sound works well with the sequence as well; the low droning is repetitive which is what I wanted as it links to the figures following each other in a mindless, repetitive manner like in 1984, also how it gets louder to a sound that is quite uncomfortable to listen to adds to the ominous feeling I wanted to create. 

After I rendered and exported the sequence it seems to run a bit faster than I had wanted, so in parts - like when walking past the posters, it isn't very clear what they say, this is also because it gets quite dark. I also think the movement of the eye could be made slower to give it more of a feeling of suspense.