Working on Character Personalities

One of the things I was told to work on was the personalities of the characters I have created, and with the recent holiday season I decided to make some Halloween inspired art with my new characters.

Here is a drawing of the dragons with their pumpkins.

Here is a series of drawings inspired by how people react to Halloween being over.

New Characters

After my initial critique of this project, I decided to focus on character design and concept art for my butterfly dragon character and the world he inhabits. After playing around with different body shapes and wing designs, I settled on two different designs for other dragons that may live alongside the original Butterfly Dragon.

The two new dragons are in the style of the Pearly Eye Butterfly and the Blue Morpho Butterfly, to go alongside the original who is styled like a Monarch Butterfly. I am yet to work on their character traits.

The Observers Book of Butterfly Dragons

Back in first year when I completed the 'Map of Bournemouth' Project, I bought a second book along with the 'Observers Book of Sea and Seashore', and since beginning the PMP this book has become incredibly relevant to my work.

As Paul suggested in my first tutorial, I have thought about expanding the small world that I created with my Butterfly Dragon character, and this book has come in very handy. Using a small piece of paper, I went through the book and drew small windows in which I can draw dragons to correspond with the butterflies.

As the book itself is mainly descriptions of different species, I went through and selected the ones with the most interesting colours and patterns. The dragons were all illustrated in Gouache, as this was an idea inspired by Bridie's workshop.

JR's Printing Workshop

Today I had a workshop with JR which focussed on how to produce high quality printed work for our Pre - Major and Final Major Project. He gave us many different pointers on how to print our work appropriately.

In Photoshop...

1. If your page is A3, allow a 3mm bleed.
2. Use 'Rulers' to mark A3 size on canvas.
3. Always paint into the bleed to allow a margin for cropping your image. 
4. Use 'Canvas Size' to add bleed, click 'relative' and add millimetres. 
5. Use CMYK for low end printing, RGB for high end.
6. In general, use 300dpi for printing, 600 or 720 for Giclee or high end prints.
7. Use JPEGs, however using PNG allows transparency in an image.
8. Export using 'Save for Web', this is also how to export gifs
9. 'Save As' feature will not reduce the dpi of an image

In InDesign...

1. Use to export a PDF
2. When you export, make sure the only box ticked in 'General' is 'View PDF'
3. Make sure that 'Crop Marks' is ticked on 'Marks and Bleeds'
4. Ensure that you save the settings as a preset.

The perfect set up for an A3 page showing rulers and the 3mm bleed.

Bridie Cheeseman's Composition Workshop

Today I took part in a Gouache workshop lead by Bridie Cheeseman which focused all around the composition of an image, focussing on the importance of tone and colour. She advised us to use primary colours and mix from those, as working with a limited palette makes your work more harmonious. She also explained how colour and tone and colour can isolate a focal point, such as using the colour blue, or areas of high contrast.

Bridie then gave us each a small photo of a bird, and then asked us to draw the image in greyscale, converting all colour to tone. She asked us to use only 3 greys, along with black and white.

She then showed us a colour scheme and told us to translate each of our grey tones into a specific colour. But there was a twist, we had to make each colour the same tone, so when viewed in greyscale the image is all the same tone. 

With our limited palette, we then had to paint imagery from our project. My colours were white, red, blue and yellow, which I had mixed to form other colours to enable me to create a good looking image.

Essay Thoughts

For my essay I was originally thinking of some sort of comparison between animation and illustration as I am interested in both areas and would like to keep my options open for both. The question I have now composed is;

'How do Illustrators bring a Character and its World to life and how does this differ with Animation'

This question allows me to perform research in all the areas in which I am interested in illustration, and leaves me open to do many things to support it in my major project.