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This week I visited Hyde Park, I went for around 4 hours. I spent a while wandering around the park to see what different areas there where and finding my own areas of interest. Then I found places to sit and began to sketch on location as well as take some photos to reference back to and make further developments with. I found that I had a big interest in trying to capture animal behaviours and drawing these from the photos I took. Also I really like parts where the plants and man made structures are interacting. These are a selection of the photos I took of locations I drew at as well as ones I used for later developments.

I did a study of a few different squirrels. I was lucky to get close enough to film a few and make sketches of their movements. I tired this in a few different materials, pencil, biro and marker pen.

I really like this Beatrix Potter inspired style of drawing animals. I start with a biro sketch then add watercolour. I hope to capture more animals through out this project to do more in this style. I also took inspiration from the illustrative style of the Lost Words.

I also did some biro and watercolour sketches of areas that particularly caught my eye. I like this area because there was lovely interaction with man made objects such as the sculpture and bench with the plants and bushes. I also liked how the plants where clearly only supposed to be growing in certain areas but had overgrown.

I chose this areas because of the pink leaves on the tree which had a very interesting twisted trunk. This style was heavily inspired by the documentary illustrators that I mentioned previously such as George Butler.

This dynamic marker pen style is something I will develop throughout this project. This is a sketch that I did on location.

Then I did a study of some flowers in a similar style.

I thought my first trip to Hyde Park was a success as I was able to create lots of sketches on locations and from photos I took. I will continue to develop from some of the photos and make at least 1 more trip to doing more observational drawings. I also have a greater understanding of my interests and the theme I was the images from my project to be centred around. I want to capture animal behaviours and the interactions between plants and man made objects as well as some pieces which simply reflect the beauty of nature.

Next week I plan to visit the Bonnington Gardens to do sketches there and take photos for reference. Also I think it will be important for me to come up with a title to help keep my illustrations focused and on theme so I’ll try to figure that out by next week.

My proposal is to document different areas of London with rich natural beauty. I will focus on the landscapes, plants and hopefully some animals. Also I will document some interactions of people and man made structures with nature. I want to focus on natural environments to highlight the how much natural beauty there still is in cities like London and the importance of maintaining these environments. While areas like Hyde park are not all natural I want to show that nature is still thriving. I will use primary observational sketches and photographs to document the areas. I don’t want to interact with the people there as I want to capture authentic and genuine interactions with nature. 

I will produce an art book with my sketches. It will have 2 chapters, one for each location I visit. I plan to visit 2 locations, 1 well known and famous location and 1 more obscure natural area. I think it will be interesting to compare them as well and just being enjoyable to experience drawing in different types of locations. I’ve done some research about different areas and the popular location I’d like to visit is Hyde Park. The smaller area is in Vauxhall and it’s called the Bonnington Square Pleasure Gardens. Before drawing at these locations I plan to visit all of them to check that I’m happy to use those locations and see which particular bits interested me to document.

Here are some photos of the locations I’ve mentioned, Hyde Park and Bonnington Pleasure Gardens. I visited the Gardens in Vauxhall and there was lots of parts of it that interests me so I’m definitely gonna use this location.

Next week I will try to visit Hyde Park and finalise my plan then I can move onto creating the illustrations. I was doing some research of nature illustrations and found a website called the Society of Wildlife Artists and I really like some of the artists style so I’m gonna take inspiration from some of those including David Measures and Marco Brodde. Also a big influence on me since my childhood has been the work of Beatrix Potter. I love her natural illustrative style as it’s very warm and sweet and I’d like to try and capture this through my images.

David Measures

Marco Brodde

Beatrix Potter

Below are images by 3 documentary illustrators that I will be taking inspiration for when creating my illustrations. They are George Butler, Lucinda Rogers and Jim Butler (in that order).

Also I will be taking inspiration from this book titled the Lost Words. It depicts a different animal or plant for each letter of the alphabetic as a way of documenting and preserving the worlds natural beauty. I both really like the concept and art style of the illustrations.

I’ve been thinking more about the central theme that I want to tie all my images together and I’m leaning towards the ideas of nature taking over. This is in reference to the animals that come and enjoy the areas then move on and the growing of plant life.

In this session we continued on with the Graphic Novel Your Life workshop with Rachael Ball. I learnt some very important things in this session such as the fundamentals of making an engaging story with interesting characters, how to pace a comic and how to effectively storyboard ideas. Most stories, even those with complex plots can usually be simplified down to a main charters goal, obstacle and action. This is key to creating a story and I’ll keep this in mind for the future. In the session we took the story we had thought of with the characters we’d created and create quick thumbnail sketches. These are my quick thumbnail sketches that I did to show my story.

These are very rough sketches, just enough to get the point across. After making these I looked through them and began to add in frames and remove ones to adjust the flow and pacing of the story. This is a good idea to do in the early stages so that you don’t waste time on lots of detailed sketches just to remove them later on. Rachael also taught us about framing in a comic and how this can impact the message it conveys. For example wide shots are good at the start to show the location and close up shots are good for drama.

After creating the thumbnails I made the layout for the comic strip. My story is not a complex story it’s just a short wholesome story so I wanted to keep it within 2 pages. Some boxes are bigger than other others demoing of the importance of the frame. The frames where me and my sister are imaging what the surprise could be are large to give me space to show the vivid childish imaginations.

I then developed my comic strip into a more detailed storyboard. I used the layout from above. The images stay fairly similar to my initial sketches but are all more refined and neat. I really like how the pages turned out with the consistency of the images and pace of the story telling. I can see the Disney character inspiration coming though well in the illustrations. If I was to colour this comic strip I would use a simple and bold style to make the illustrations eye catching and help reflect the childish and light hearted story.

Creating characters and comic stripes is something I want to do more of as I’d like to improve of showing emotion through dynamic, caricatured characters.

This week we went to a trip to various places in London such as the Royal Festival Hall and Tate Modern to practice our documentary illustration skills. For the trip I solely focused on drawing people on sight so none where done from photos.

We were given a series of tasks including sketching people in 2 materials. I chose pencil and biro and decided that biro would be more beneficial because of the permanence of the marks, making me be more bold with the marks I made.

These sketches where from the Tate Modern. I think the sketches improved throughout the day as I became more confident in drawing in such public locations.

At the ‘Poets in Vogue’ exhibition we had to sketch a couple objects that interested us so I chose these collars with eyes in the middle and a dress. I loved the boldness of their colours and wanted to add a hint towards that by layering some of those colours over the black biro sketch.

This exercise tested me as we had to draw 1 figure with our right hand and 1 with our left hand. I’m right handed and rarely try using my left hand so considering this I’m pleased with how the figure turned out.

In this session we had Graphic Novel illustrator Rachel Ball come in and deliver a workshop about a different type of documentary illustration. This type is all about visually documenting a memory or experience in the form of a comic strip. This is something that really interests me as I enjoy reading comics and like the process of character design. This is an example of a page from one of Rachael’s Graphic novels.

We began the session with Rachael explaining about her own work and creative process. Then she began giving us exercises that she uses when beginning her process. For example think about things such as weird dreams, embarrassing moments, favourite films, advice for your younger self. These were all a way of generating inspiration and thinking about things we like. After this we got into the main focus and that was to think about some early memories. From these we began to develop them into stories by changing bits, adding fantasy elements and just generally playing around with a memory to turn it into an interesting story.
I had a few different ideas but the memory I chose to use was of me and my sister (Eloise) meeting our baby sister (Hannah) for the first time. I wanted to play on this and how me and Eloise loved to play made up games and try to capture this childish imagination. The rough idea for the story would be our parents come and tell us they’ve got a surprise and me and Eloise start thinking of what it could be and end up shocked when they introduce us to our new baby sister. I want to included images to illustrate our imaginary ideas such as dragons and aliens.

So for this story there are 5 characters I will need to design, Me, Eloise, baby Hannah and my parents. Designing these was the focus of the afternoon session.

Rachael taught us some ways to being the process of designing a character such as creating fluid lines and turning them into animals or people, drawing people from observation, researching other artists. One in particular that stood out to me was the idea of caricature which is where you exaggerate features to capture someone’s essence. I to ok this into our first exercise where we had to draw characters faces from different shapes such as ovals and triangles. I enjoyed just picking a shape and turning it into a made up character.

When designing my characters faces and body shapes I took a lot of inspiration from Disney Pixar’s character designs such as Deanna Marsiglise. It’s an art style I’ve loved since I was a child and have always admired how well the artists are able to convey emotions and personality through the facial expressions and dramatic body shapes.

Then we moved onto creating figures out of shapes. I tried to caricature the figures by really exaggerating the proportions or certain body parts.

I started these with bendy stick figures to create more dynamic figures to try to express movements or emotions which are key to graphic novel art.

Then I started to develop one of the characters that I wanted to use in the comic strip (myself). I tested out different expressions, angles, and poses to begin to get an essence of the character.

I digitally sketched the face and body shape for one of the characters and started to think about colours for the face, hair and clothes.

I then made another character sheet for my older sister (Eloise). I aimed to keep the shapes of the body and face consistent to both characters. At the bottom of the page is a full sketch of the 2 characters I’ve worked on so far.

After try out lots of body shapes these are the ones I’ve decided to go with for each character. They have a similar style that makes them look cohesive but each figure has key differences to make the easily distinguishable and recognisable.

I really enjoyed this session about graphic novels and character design. Rachael Ball gave lots of good advice that I’ll try to implement into my own work such as building bodies and faces from shapes caricaturing someone to exaggerate features. I look forward to expanding upon my characters in the next session.