Fundevogel Progress Update.

Today, after I finished my previous post's experiment, I started painting for the "Fundevogel" adaptation tests once more.

Fundevogel's Mother is briefly mentioned at the beginning of the story, as she sleeps against the tree which contains Fundevogel.

In my head, the Fundevogal's Mother lived in the woods and travelled them often, so I designed her clothing around foliage, plants and trees.

Visuals from an Instrumental.

It is likely this won't benefit my final works; However, the task I decided to undergo today ended up being very interesting personally.

I had the idea to create a painting from an instrumental piece of music. I figured it would be a great way to be create something personal and truly subjective.

What I did was basically listen to the piece of music, and sort of just paint what came into my head as the song played. I didn't know what I would actually gain from doing this, but I figured I couldn't lose anything, either.

The piece is by an British Musician - Bonobo. And is entitled "Black Sands"

And I painted this: 

The song to me sounds completely separated from society and people as a whole. If hills could make music, I imagine it would sound like this song.

The song also strikes me as rather oriental, so the colour schemes and atmosphere became heavily influenced by that.

I feel the song also glows with promise and magic. It seems to create this by lulling into the song very slowly, building, and building, eventually delivering an over-whelming culmination of sounds.

Listen to the song and look at the painting, maybe even let me know what you think about it?

Thanks,

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.

Little Goil.

It's a little goil. 

Art again!

With the research proposal out of the way, I can finally back to working on what's most important,(IMO), the arts.

This was just a warm-up exercise, I plan to do a massive amount of artwork in the next few weeks. 

I'm going to make a start on doing some small scale adaptation art. I've found a few short stories which I think could make for some interesting visuals. So I aim to do a lot of sketchbook development for that, and then take the designs I like best into photoshop for painting. 

Render ideas.

Needs tidied. Focus on character rendering, thus the pasted rocks in the BG. 

Life Drawing 4.12.2012

Tried to pull off a more stylised appearance this week.

Wouter Tulp Colour Study.

I love this illustration.

Wouter Tulp's illustration for the classic Grimm tale - " The boy who set out to learn fear." 

you can check out his other illustrations here, they all demonstrate a fantastic consideration of character and mood that the story almost tells itself in the one image. 

Here's my quick take on it. 

My little take on the original.

I adore the colour scheme of the original illustration so much. The use of lighting gives the character so much appeal and adds so much atmosphere that it's quite amazing. I'll hopefully use this colour scheme to come up with my own composition in the near future. 

Research Proposal? Oh, I had a meeting with my project supervisor today, Ryan Locke. The meeting was real helpful, and Ryan helped me out with a bunch of useful links including the god-send of journal habitats, game studies. 

He also cleared up some questions that were bugging me. (Can you reference videos in your literature review? Is it a good idea to do visual tests such as the ethnography one I created recently?) etc. 

He also stressed that I should be doing more of the "WHY?" Something I've addressed before as being a problem. More reflection, basically, is paramount to my improvement right now. 

The "Why?" behind this is quite simple. Illustration is a form of adaptation as I see it. It's the telling of a story through a series of still images. The charm of these illustrations shines through in the vision of the illustrator. Although usually illustration is mainly focused on the message and clarity, as opposed to design, it is still the act of taking a fictional "creation" and bringing it to life the way you think is best. 

So although I plan to design an appropriate universe myself, I do plan to bring together the characters, props, and environments together into compiled images, which will allow the me to showcase the designs they way they would be in the final adaptation. The layout of these will be an important tasks, and so studying illustrations like these with such dynamic, appealing compositions really gives me a flavour for it. 

I plan to use maya or after effects to do this. Namely, environments and characters on separate layers animated to give a sense of being present in the scene. (Similar to Atomhawk's "The Realm" trailer.)

(around the 1:12 mark)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ipFY7L_Jirw