2013. Adaptation & Illustration warm-up begins.

Happy New Year all.

Have managed to maintain a steady work flow over the festive period, (Thankfully). However, the majority of work has not necessarily been created to support my honours project; Although some of it has.

I'm applying to DARE to be digital in the near future and so a chunk of time now has to be allocated to that also.

Obviously I won't be able to share any of the artwork for DARE yet. But I do have some new project work to reflect on.

Adaptation designs for story. 

Practice Based Research. 

Visual development of visuals for a short story. 

Story:

 “Fundevogel” by The Grimm Brothers. 

Focus Characters.
Forester.
Fundevogel’s mother.
Bird.
The two Children: Lina & Fundevogel.
The Old Cook.  

Locations.
Forest.
Forester’s House.

I quickly got to work sketching in PS. 

I didn't know what to do first, so instead of thinking about style or time setting or any of the details, I just quickly started doing some sketching of how I initially pictured the characters in my head while reading the story. 

I started with the forester. Because he is the first character the reader is introduced to, he helps you build your own picture of the world and perhaps affects how you imagine the other characters. 

The character I initially pictured as the forester was naturally, not that interesting, because, well, the only words you are given to imagine him in your imagination is "forester". So I quickly began varying the design of the forester, quickly, just for fun. 

initial forester design stage.

As you can see, the silhouettes are quite vague. I couldn't decide if the forester should be a nimble, agile explorer, or some sort of rooted type, Father Christmas-y, figure. 

I decided to take the nimble design a little bit further, because the story informs us that the forester can climb. It wouldn't look believable seeing an enormous, bulky character dotting up a tree, as if gravity didn't exist. 

...Or maybe gravity doesn't exist in this world? These are the kinds of fundamental questions I keep having to consider when piecing together these visuals. 

Anyway, it was the nimble design that was taken further to begin with. 

quick, (badly painted), forester next step.

However, I really lost interest in the piece as I was working on it. The design itself was incredibly boring  and non-original. 

So then I actually began to think about the importance behind the designs of the characters and how greatly they can be used to convey personality in an awesome way. I wanted to be working on one that would be symbolic, interesting, original, and appealing - not wasting time on a bland, badly thought-out piece. 

So I went back to the drawing board, and I'm still there.

I'm currently beginning to play with images of different trees, to influence the symbolism behind the characters' designs. 

"La Luna" (Pixar, 2011), does this in such a charming way, which really helped create some very memorable characters, despite only being less than 7 minutes long. 

La Luna (Pixar). Note the facial hair in relation to the brush and mop. 

So for example, this is the sort of thing I'm going to be doing with the designs. (I made this picture in literally 2 minutes, purely as an example). 

very rough example of using objects to influence design. 

So I shall hopefully have some interesting designs to update with in the coming few days.