Day: March 9, 2016

On this page I was unsure about the illustrations so I continued to have a go at different things to see if I could rescue it. On the image above I have developed the landscape, as I thought that this was the element that wasn’t working, and gone for the more traditional seaweed using the dark blue shades and gradients to contrast it against the background. I liked this better than the previous design but there was still something about the page that I didn’t like. I knew that having this design would be a risk and would possible not work in this context, but I am still glad that I am challenging myself and trying to learn from it.

Because I previously designed a landscape around Nessie that was solely a solid black I thought that maybe by taking this approach it could work better than the juxtaposition of blues. This is my favourite design for this page by far because of how this now works with the existing ‘wolf monsters’. I still think that it needs refinement and slight changes, but it is looking better. Obviously, I have yet to choose an appropriate typography for the narrative and this white arial isn’t working with the illustration style.

Continuing on the same page with a sight refinement, I combined both of the dark blue gradient sea weed and the black so that the illustrations would look less flat, as well as adding more detail onto the monsters. In hindsight, this page is quite nice and isn’t a bad illustration, but I have realised that is just isn’t working for my book so I am going to scrap it and try something else.

Despite my decision not to use this and start again with the illustrations I am not worried about the time left to complete the visuals or completing a full book to a professional standard. I know that I can figure out these minor problems by practicing and working on my illustration skills, and with a strong main character (whose illustration I am extremely happy with) it will, hopefully, develop and refine as I work on the project; as well as continuing to do research on the way so that it looks as professional as possible.

For this page of the narrative I wasn’t sure what I wanted the visuals or illustrations to look like so I decided to experiment with a couple of ideas that I thought could work. I thought that subtly foreshadowing the main monster at the end could work quite nicely, without making it too large and important, so this is my process and ideas which I came up with. I knew that I wanted Nessie in colour for this page because it is about her, and she is largely different to the other sea creatures and monsters which I am going to illustrate too. On top of this, I thought that making the sea a slightly darker tone nearer the monsters might separate the components better.

I continued to develop it with my idea but I don’t think it was working. The monster looked too much like a wolf, especially with the second one beside it, and I didn’t like how this looked because it was supposed to represent an underwater scene. On top of this, just to see if I could salvage some part of the visuals that I had already created, I began to add further detail into the wolf in the same style of the previous monster just in case this was the issue. As I thought, it still didn’t work. I know that the surroundings and landscape completely contrasted against this because it was plain and I hadn’t created any components for it, but it still wasn’t working and it didn’t stay in line with the aesthetic that I had already started to develop across the previous pages which I have already created.

As a development process I do like this page because it helped me understand how to create different creatures and elements of the illustration that I initially didn’t understand to start with. I think that with a few tweaks and refinement it could still work for the book, although I think a better approach might be  to start the page off from scratch because of the different in aesthetics and style; plus I’m sure that I could come up with something that links the narrative while being appropriate for the audience and continuing to be visually interesting.