First Story covers - design and presentation

Live brief to produce illustration covers for the anthology books of poems for schools.

Titles for each over are:

“My Voice as a Shy Tiger”

“Broken but Mending”

“I Can’t Imagine…”

“Journeys”

Decided to do covers that I can quickly think for design/illustration. 3 covers out of the 4 I had chosen to do are “My Voice of a Shy Tiger”, “I Can’t Imagine…” and “Journeys”.

Here are the illustrations I had produced for the chosen titles that I would be presenting for the schools, all averaging around 2+ hours to produce. These are slightly polished than I usually intended to do so I can express what the final product would look like.

Illustration for “My Voice as a Shy Tiger”

 Illustration for “I Can’t Imagine…”

Illustration for “Journeys”

These covers were then presented in groups for each cover to pitch my design/illustrations to discuss my ideas to the students to get an understanding of what the cover is intended to show and the ideas behind it that helps to draw some relevance between the image and the title.

I was surprised that one of my covers, the “I Can’t Imagine…” illustration was short listed, despite being one of my least favourite covers from the 3 in my honest opinion. Though this is something that I shouldn’t be complaining about since situations like this where your least favourite design is picked over some of your best covers that was made for the other titles within the professional practice. At least one of my cover is shortlisted by the students, better than not having any cover shortlisted at all. 

Finalised version of the cover ready to be sent to the school for their final choosing.

Children Expression - Child Drawings

Looking at photos of myself as a child and to make some studies/quick sketches on the anatomy of a child, something I have not touched upon in drawing people, although I have drawn child characters, but for anatomy studies. 

Most drawings are of portraits of myself as a child. To draw a child involved in an activity is hard and I did not find any photos that I can use as reference to help me draw a small sequence. Most of these sketches focuses on the face and facial features, something that I want to improve on when it comes to draw people, as they are the most defining feature of a person. 

Cardboard Head - Nonsense Narrative

Drawings based on the cardboard box head I had made and converted it into a character. Quick sketches. Did not add too much detail in order to maintain the simplicity of the head. 

Short narrative sequence with two characters from the masks we had all made, including my character. 

Practical Work, Cardboard Head

With the making of a cardboard box head that is tied with the children’s book illustration project, I am going to approach the task by creating something simple and not too complicated in terms of form and the structure of crafting. I just gathered any pieces of card, but most importantly a box, as that serves the main structure of the ‘helmet’ that it would be put on the head. I didn’t want to create something that is too complex, and decided to go for a simple robot look with circular cut outs for the eyes and mouth, and added an antenna looking object on the top.

There could have been more to the head or perhaps make it somewhat surreal by adding more stuff to it or applying some colour, but in the end I just wanted to create something simple, and not something that would otherwise make it look so complicated that would make the structure of the head fall apart due to the weight or complicated structures that would obstruct the surrounding area when wearing it.

Making it look like a robot connects with children’s illustrations more, because I think robots in a way are associated in many stories of children’s books, whether it’s being used as a companion or a toy (which is most common) or a metaphor within the story. 

Directional lighting on narrative sequence

By utilizing my chosen colour palette, I had applied it to my figure sequence narrative to experiment with lighting and colour mixing. The experiment turns out alright, with two colours mixing well (blue and red) although the third colour (orange) feels a little out of place slightly but overall the colours do fit alright with one another. I managed to get this exercise done on the day, which tells me that I may use this method for the sequential project as part of the creation of the content of my sequential narrative for it, considering there are multiple pages with at least 5 panels on each one, which would take long to do, however, judging on what I had produced today, it feels safe to say that I can get it all the content done by the deadline. 

Full colour narrative sequence using blue, red and orange as my limited colour palette.

Colour Workshop

I had chosen my 3 primary colours that will be the colour palette for the figure sequence narrative. Blue and red are considered my favourite colours while orange is a colour I think will go well with the other two for limited colour palette. 

Several experiments of mixing different tones of the same colour to see the outcome whether the same colours stands out between its own tint, tone, shade or from its primary hue. Most turn out fine, though there are a few that feels odd with the matchmaking, but it will allow me to identify which mix and match works best before experimenting the colours on my short narrative. 

Figure Sequence Using Different Viewpoints

A 5-Frame sequence using at least 2 different viewpoints to practice perspective within a narrative sequence and to apply it in a way to communicate the audience, whether its tension, suspense, adrenaline, etc. I quickly based the theme of the short sequence on 'hunting', where we begin from the hunters' point of view who are hunting for food, which then quickly swaps to the creature's point of view of ambush that is hunting them. The main focus I wanted to achieve the changing of point of view, from the hunters who are hunting for food, who then becomes the prey of a more dominant creature within the food chain, where the perspective switches over to.