Studio practice: Indigenous Tribes and Rainforest task

For this task, the class were given multiple subject matters to choose from, including american wrestling, classic horror, tree houses and others. The one i decided to use, as you can see from the title, was indigenous tribes and rainforests. I decided upon this subject matter as i adore the tribal attire, and rainforests will, without a doubt, prove to be a challenging subject to work with.

Kicking things off, i wanted to do a piece on the story of the indigenous tribe, without having contact with the outside world, seeing a helicopter for the first time. I experimented with angles, trying to find the most interesting composition that allowed the eye to see both the tribe, and the helicopter.

During this process i decided it would be interesting to illustrate the helicopter as the tribe would percieve it, probably as a big bird of some sort.

Upon starting research on how i wanted the tribe to look i found the chap in the above photo, and just had to use him as a subject matter for a piece of work. Iknew that his face would make for a great bottom and given te correct surrounding above it, would make for a great composition, showing the tribesman and his environment. For a little visual starting point, i decided to use a red biro for the face paint, drawing you to the face and allowing you to follow up from there.

Moving back to the original plan, and having a good idea of how i wanted the tribesmen to look, i decided to create a finalised version of the original draught .Things were going well, the line work looked great, in my opinion, and compositionally, the pointers seemed to be fulfilling their purpose. But, i wanted to work with felts, that kind of just destroyed the original linework, leaving it unclear to decifer. In an effort to help this i decided to go over the original line wih a brush pen, which helped, but is still difficult to properly decifer. As you see the work now, i decided to keep it unfinished, to show the diffeernt elements and stages, and clearly maintain the messages and lessons learnt from the outcome.