Self Evaluation

This module has been a series of learning curves for me - it is the first time in which I have had to take my drawing skills and apply them in a more professional setting - it is definitely the first time I have had to consider file size, colour formats and bleed lines upon submitting a piece. It has been a challenging module that has offered me plenty of opportunities to ensure I am at least paying attention - but for as stressful as it was, I can in the least walk away from it knowing I have learned a fair amount from it. I have learned that time management is imperative; even in the beginning when it seems like the deadline is years away. I have personally took it upon myself in the past month or so to really focus on time management - to ensure that not only am I working to the final deadline but also mini deadlines and goals I have set myself.

Although I have been very put off by the amount of independence expected during this module, I cannot say I haven't benefited from it, and have spent much of the module discussing it with my peers in terms of which direction I should take, which specifications need to be met and how to meet them - it has taught me at least how to use the network around me that I have to my advantage, and has easily offered me a better understanding of digital media.

I feel where I fell flat was ultimately closer to the end - some of my final pieces I felt worked much better than others but I simply did not have the time to correct that and still meet the deadline. This module has taught me much, and though I found the subject matter interesting at the start, it has definitely taught me that boredom should not be an excuse to let my standards slip.

COLOUR: RGB and CYMK

RGB (red, green, blue) and CYMK (cyan, yellow, magenta, black) are both colour formats in which your illustrations can be placed into digitally. They both effect how your work looks, so it is important to understand the differences.

The first (and most basic) thing to understand is in which context you should use either format - RGB applies much better to digital formats such as websites, whereas CYMK is made for printing usage such as posters and brochures.

RGB is an 'additive' model in which the three colours are added together to create the array of colours you see - if magnified, they will ultimately either be red, green or blue. CYMK is a subtractive format which works through the process of applying tiny dots bunched close together or far apart depending on what colour it is that we want.

Even if you do not have a thorough understanding of how it works, it is important to keep to-be-printed works in CYMK, as printers will often have only those colours and work only in that format, so RGB would not show up right.

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NARRATIVE ILLUSTRATION; What is it?

Narrative illustration briefs present illustrators with the challenge of interpreting text and presenting it in a way that almost tells the story itself - it is more than just decoration, it is there to aid both the understanding and the appreciation of whom so ever is reading the text. The narrative illustrator often puts a great deal of time and effort into planning out the images, thoroughly developing the characters to open up a whole new world to readers.

Concepts and ideas are wholly important to any artist - it is imperative that the narrative illustrator retain strong concepts behind their pieces that keep their illustrations top quality. It is important to remember that the illustrator is providing an experience, not just a selling point, and that their images must reinforce whichever text passage it is that they are attempting to illustrate.

Each story has moments which are begging to be illustrated and moments in which it would be a poor choice - often, action scenes are an ideal place to illustrate, but at what point in time will the image have frozen to create the illustration? What is everything in the image doing at the time when the illustration was made - each detail must be considered and reasoned.

Not only that, but atmosphere is extremely important in images - with this, you need to consider the context of your passage and also the market at which it is aimed. It would be no good, for example, creating grotesque and macabre themed images for a childrens' book.

Angles, lighting, and scenes are also something to take into consideration - narrative illustrators often depict scenes, and a stationary, bland scene is not about to boost the experience of any reader regardless of how strong your concept is. Each part of the illustration must be thought out carefully, and it must be understood how each image links up to be part of the story.

(Information Source)

Designing the Cover Pt 3

Not much (if anything) changed about the design of the spine and the back - it was always intended that the centre of attention would be the front cover. From this point, I combined all three images (front cover being on the right hand side of the spine and back cover on the left) and applied the same technique of margins and bleed lines guide to the cover before deciding that a spine was a little bit plain - referencing the use of beetles around corpses, I decided they would be subtle enough to place on the spine. It was now that I had a finished version of the cover. The quality had to be sacrificed a fair amount to ensure the image met the requirements of 5mb or less for submission, however I don't feel the damage was too bad.

Designing the Cover Pt 2

I already knew that I wanted the back cover to be simple with just the information displayed on the copy I owned - the majority of my time was spent experimenting with the composition of the front cover.

 The above cover felt a little unnatural and top heavy

 One of the covers I felt worked best above, with the important text directly by where eyes are drawn (straight underneath the most vibrant patch of colour)

 I really liked the above cover but felt the text was hard to pick out.

 Adding a boarder of negative space around the text seemed to help, but the text seemed to be too all over the place, too scattered - I didn't quite know where to put my eyes.

 At this point, I felt the text was taking over too much of the artwork.

 Another instance of not quite knowing where to look - two bodies of large sized font in two different places didn't make a good mix.

This was my personal favourite - I felt it was bold and stood out quite well, however there was a problem - it simply did not contain all of the necessary information, as there are two copies of the necronomicon (both different books) by H.P. Lovecraft (whose name itself is an important selling point). I was a little disappointed that this did not work, but was still very satisfied with making image #2 my choice.

Designing the Cover Pt 1

I wanted a different feel for the cover than I did for the inside illustrations - the intention of the illustrations inside are to set off a deep unease however the cover needs to grab eyes and draw people to at least pick up the book that they are projecting. I did still want to look at how to convey a sense of unease, so I decided early on any illustrations on the cover would have loose linework to present lack of control - maybe even mystery.

I wanted to use one of the more well known characters from the necronomicon - Cthulhu; anyone vaguely interested in mythology and the occult should know about Cthulhu, and if they do not already own a copy it may spur them to but one. First, I needed to establish what I wanted to draw - this itself was easy, I wanted to hint at Cthulhu without outright placing an image of it on the cover, so using tentacles was my best bet. I made sure that I was able to draw them before proceeding further.

I tested the colours as well - red, an eye catching colour but one that also signifies danger. The black stood out very well against it. I felt that the other colours clashed too much, and that the blue was more calming than eye catching. I tried different markers - plain staedtler markers and pro markers. I preferred the staedtlers to create the scratchy effect. I mocked up four thumbnails - it was at this point I decided to create each aspect individually and piece it together on photoshop; this way, mistakes were easily fixed and experimentation was much easier to conduct especially in terms of composition.

My first choice was originally the one shown above, however I felt it was too chaotic and dragged the viewers' eye to the skull rather than the title - which was the most important aspect of the book cover. I decided to fall upon a much simpler design - a singular tentacle with the skull.

I chose the typography to match the style of the background - very clearly handwritten and mildly chaotic. I went on to design the spine in the same fashion, adding black lines to the spine to give the impression of old iron book binding. It was at this point that I moved onto photoshop to put the pieces together.

Development Pt 12

Editing the Finals

There were no major changes made to the final pieces - resizing, turning up the vibrancy, and turning the saturation down granted the muted colours I was looking for without having to sacrifice any of the lighting tones I had worked so hard on. I then moved on to create page mockups while taking bleed lines and margins into consideration - this was very difficult for me as it is really the first time I've had to think about any of this, and it took a fair amount of time for me to get the lines right - but I eventually worked out what went where. I was able to use the actual text from the stories in my mockups as copyright no longer protects H.P. Lovecraft's work - his death in 1937 puts him past the 70 year limit. (I would still like to claim that only the images are my property.)

(Shown here are examples of my work with margins and parameters taken into consideration, with the blue line marking the actual page size)

All that remained from this point was to removed the guidelines and ensure that the images were below 5mb each to meet the submission requirements, and I was left with my final images ready to submit (example below).

Development Pt 11

Drawing the Finals

As seen, most changes were applied in terms of context - the vignettes no longer look like they are floating in the middle of nowhere, and the use of circles were to more imply a fisheye lens effect, something else that feels a little unsettling. I also used this opportunity to increase tonal ranges and look at how lighting worked - something I hadn't applied to the drafts and feel that it made the images 

feel much deeper. I did have to make smaller points in each image a little proportionally inaccurate, making them bigger so the detail wasn't completely lost upon editing (i.e. the hand in the wooded image is a little chunky but the occasion called for it). For the title pages, I added small L shaped borders in each corner to pull the whole page together - otherwise, the amount of negative space made it seem a little unfinished. There were aspects of these pieces I was unhappy with (mainly vibrancy I found an issue - some images didn't bear the muted colours I wanted) but these were easily fixed in photoshop. In their original sizes, some of the images may seem a little lacking in detail - however, the entire time I was aware that most of it would be lost upon shrinking, at one point even having to re-plan the layout of my images to ensure that they weren't shrunk to ridiculous amounts - only one image ended up becoming a full page illustration.

Development Pt 10

Cats of Ulthar

It was around this time I started to come closer to my deadline, so it was made evident to me that I didn't have enough time to illustrate all of the points in the story that I would have liked to, so I chose two points to illustrate. I had intended to draw Menes' chant into the sky, but one of my classmates had already illustrated this point and there are not many different ways to depict this scene - I wanted to keep as far from what my classmates were doing so I illustrated two of the final points in the story. The first point I drew was in which the cats take place in their ritual outside the old cottage - the sky is again very important in this shot, the vast array of colours with the brightest on the horizon drawing to the house as the focal point. Earlier in the story, Menes summoned people with animal heads into the clouds - one of my clouds is the silhouette of a man with a ram's head. I wanted the cat most in focus (in the very foreground) to be a black cat, symbolically representing bad luck or ill omens. I had looked into making the cats different breeds, odd species, to ensure the feeling of unease - however I found it more effective with everyday run-of-the-mill cats as it makes it more applicable to real life. This was originally intended to be a draft however, I was very satisfied with the outcome, and so decided to make any of the very small changes that it needed on photoshop rather than creating a whole separate illustration to fix minuscule issues.

First images in my mind for this piece were to actually illustrate a full skeleton - however, noting by this point just how much I would have to scale the images down, I realised that most of the detail will have disappeared by then and it would have been a waste of time so I settled for drawing a few bones picked clean by beetles. Another intention was to actually include Menes' kitten somewhere in this image, but the same point of losing detail stood for this as proportionally, the kitten would have had to have been much smaller. The skull on the wall is what I left in place of the kitten however, marking the brand on the wall of the skull of a cat, leaving clues on the furniture as well. The beetles from this part of the story have also made their feature (very subtly) in one of my Night Gaunts illustrations, as I really wanted to show that these two stories take place in the same world. Again, any changes I wanted to make were very small, so I stuck to retouching it in photoshop and keeping this image as my final piece.

Development Pt 7

Cats of Ulthar

I resorted to discussing with my classmates how I could possibly illustrate the cats and what was suggested to me is looking at the style of Egyptian Hieroglyphics as Lovecraft did mention Egyptian culture in terms of cats at the very start of the story. I didn't want to exactly replicate hieroglyphic style in my illustrations so i took the imagery and made it my own, using this opportunity to develop Menes' kitten.

Immediately after, I decided the development of Menes' character seemed most appropriate - for this I had to study the faces of children as I had not often attempted to draw younger people. Also, to avoid being culturally insensitive, I looked at the clothes of existing American wandering cultures. I preferred the dreadlocked look, and felt that the colours on the final outfit were too varied; however, I had settled on the clothing style and facial features.

The leader of the wanderers was the second most important character in the wanderers - the rest were not mentioned individually, so I felt once I developed the clothing style I'd be able to just generate them in the images. I also practiced profile views of people as it's something I'm not good at, alongside the drawing of houses for the village.

Development Pt 9

Night Gaunts

 The first image illustrates "Out of what crypt they crawl I cannot tell" with the gaunt emerging from a crypt - however, I felt there was a lack of context and surrounding landscape in the image so I later created the surrounding area. Originally the idea was to fade the vignettes out however it seemed too much like they were floating in nowhere, so on the page layout designs I decided on making a circle border.

 I created the thumbnails for each individual piece separately before creating the actual drafts themselves - here are thumbnails for the second draft and page layout ideas.

Pictured here are the drafts for the second and third piece - for the second, I felt that the colour scheme was a little too natural and flat. I tried dark brown with a more mahogany colour however it gave the effect of sunset rather than night, the dark brown coupled with moss green created a much more appropriate effect. I wanted to depict the burning sun setting somewhere off in the distance, out of view, so an orange colour almost bordering the sky was decided upon in the colour experimentation beside it. Most of the third image lies on the grey filter I placed over it in coloured pencil - I felt I'd also dull the vibrancy down in photoshop, however the teal sky was something of which I really liked the strange and unnerving effect, so it was one I decided to delve into, including elements of green in the sky to throw viewers off. For the subject, I based the monster on bugs - particularly maggots, as they are associated with rot, death, and are very easy to create grotesque imagery with.

I tried to create thumbnails for the next illustration alongside creating quick pencil sketches of mountain silhouettes - another first for me that I was more unsure with when it came to drawing. I struggled finding the right imagery for this illustration, so moved onto the next one rather than waste time.

The development of a monster known as a 'shoggoth'. This monster is described elsewhere in the book to have more of a blob form however I'd seen the same kind of monster reappear again and again when looking up the character - I decided to translate this into the 'mane' that I gave it, using the seaweed together to form an unsure structure whilst the rest of its body is very well defined. I came up with the idea for this character in earlier development.

I wanted to include the 'jagged peaks of Thok' in this image, I wanted to almost seclude it into an entirely different world (the journey's destination) but also make it known that the rest of the world is just out of reach - I did this by again colouring the sky a strange colour, with the blue peeking through beyond the mountains as a promise of the world the protagonist has just been dragged to. I also looked at different colours I could use for the water but found a murky green was best.

For the final illustration, I wanted the Night Gaunt's face (or facelessness rather) on full display - I wanted to hide the facelessness until the very end, as it isn't mentioned until the last line of the poem. I really wanted to convey the whole "nightmare" element of the tale, ending it where it had most likely began - a bedroom, and a bed. After a look at several different colours I could use (blue for isolation, red as a colour of danger), I settled with a more green theme - a dark but pale green to suggest unwellness. 

Following this, I looked back at the other illustration I had previously skipped and took a liking to one of my thumbnails after all. The biggest change I made was to, again, distort the colours of the sky - as a recurring theme in this (one which links up to the Cats of Ulthar illustration too) to pursue the feeling of unease, but overall I was happy and created the template circle for tracing to ensure all finals were roughly the same size (this made for easier resizing).