ILLUSTRATION FRIDAY:
W E T
These weekly tasks are supposedly meant to be speeding up my production turn around times, and although the openess of the IF briefs should be a help, but I'm finding that you can have too many options, and as a man with crippling decision making problems and self doubt I'm finding it hard to settle on a particular design, and also when to call it a day and say "its bloody finished, leave it!"
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| Quick brainstorm of things associated with WET |
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| Rough scamps. I had a minimal colour,graphical, 'cut-out' design in my mind. |
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| More developed scamps. Wanted some sort of 'looking down' viewpoint. |
Final pencil drawing before scan and vector up.
Wanted to keep it as shape driven has possible.
No concept as such,mainly trying to make some simple
shapes look more interesting
Further developments below: tweaking, endless tweaking at the Illustrator stage. Soon felt the initial design idea wasnt coming together as i'd envisaged, so things naturally veered back towards chunky linework based characters. The addition of textures to make things look less flat came once in Photoshop, using my bank of scanned textures that I've been making as i go along, which was the most fun, and straight forward bit about this whole brief.No pics of that stage as PS decided not to save the unflattened version and is now gone forever.
Final submitted version, and i hate the little green sod.
POSITIVE points
+ You can pretty much do whatever you want, as long as it has some vague connection to the given word of the week.
+ week deadline should speed up my production time, and cut down the amount of gaffing with the final product.
+ Found the scamping of ideas came quite freely for a change.Was getting lots down, even though ultimately i didn't use any of them.
+ It's more about having fun with these,(in theory) something that I'm not getting from making my pictures at the moment,mainly because I'm overthinking things so much.
+ It gives you an opportunity to perhaps experiment more, produce something in a way you wouldn't usually. The final outcome shouldn't matter so much.
+ Started and FINISHED a final piece of work within a week (on & off) which is a minor miracle looking at my track record. Feels good to have over a day left before the deadline, I should they it more often! (the deadline time clearly isn't GMT as when i looked half six on friday night they'd already had people submitting a new topic. pheeyew)
NEGATIVE points
- I'm used to such loose briefs, so you can literally knock out anything as long as you can find connection to the chosen subject an your image.Too much choice, for me anyway.
- The final piece is so far removed from what i'd initially planned i don't know if this was down to me not having enough skill to see out my original ideas, or if this is just how all my work is going to look..?
- Final image not as dynamic as i'd set out to make. Original concepts had a more interesting angle/viewpoint.
- Found myself coming up with further ideas whilst on screen.Weather this is negative thing or not I'm not too sure. It got the brief completed and was quicker than if i'd tried drawing then scanning then tracing my scans. But i do realise that designing on screen can lead to instant but infinite alterations. I think its the instantness of illustrator that keeps me going back to it for my final pieces.Also, no fear of commitment, you can always go back. (story of my life!)
- After probably spending way too long farting about with this, and not being that pleased with the end result, and then having a scroll through my instagram feed and seeing work by james jean (below) it made me think, "look at this amazing work he's doing - and i'm here, looking at this idiot cartoon cactus that i've just eeked out". What am i doing?"
I guess maybe this is exactly the sort of work, in exactly the style that I'm supposed to be making, and i should get used to it..?Do i want to be successful making work I'm not fussed about or respected by peers & fellow practitioners for the quality of my craft?
James Jean 'sketch'
PS: apparently there IS a 'WINNER' every week?! This changes everything.
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