Getting home, it was time to find my direction within my work, how would i convey my personal findings. I really liked the idea of using the house itself, placing my memories growing up there, so i decided to illustrate a specific prominent memory, my gran would feed foxes in her back garden, so if you waited in the dining room you would be able to see them in the garden. If she was late they would come up to the window to see what was going on.
I illustrated the scene and scenario and just wasn't happy with it, going to far as to brand the work as 'boring'
Shaping up
This informed me that i wanted the book to be more than just scenes on every page, i wanted to take a different approach, and had to take a break to think. We were given a little interim task to make a hot dog book that acted as a bit of a draught for our final book, obviously consisting of less pages than the final outcome. For one of these i toyed with the idea of having a book that would have pages consisting of individual things to look at, but would unfold to create one large image.
I thought using the layout of the home was a perfect method of panelling the individual elements and would really bring the location to the work. This meant that had to brush up on my three point perspective skills, to which i was quite rusty (my first attempt accidentally being two point perspective, rookie error).
This blueprint layout is the conclusion i came to, and really liked it, it was well received in a crit with my peers, with the note that it would be interesting to use the layout in a different way, i.e. having the house shown as a dollhouse.
Memorising Memories
With a format decided i had to choose some memories to use within the book, noting their significance alongside the drawings-
At this point with a good range of ideas to use i experimented a little with how the memories would look in the different settings, i.e. a real world setting, within blueprint, and a dollhouse.
Getting to grips with it
Having the setting and memories decided upon i started thumb nailing by combining the two, everything was going great, my idea was to have one page show each scenario through my imagination, in extremes if that makes sense. The opposing page would then show the real world environment, and here is where i hit a problem, a big problem, how on earth do you portray say a kid hiding from a small spider within a realistic fixed angle blueprint image... fuck, panic stations, did this mean i had to completely scrap my layout idea?
Nope, i was being a silly bugger, of course there was a way around it.
Inspiration struck during a briefing when someone asked if the book could take the format of a comic book through the use of paneling, that was it i would use panels that close in upon the scenarios to ensure the right detail is shown! Upon looking up an illustrator raised during the briefing i found exactly how i would present the panels.
Nick White
Nick white is an illustrator that works from 'imagery found in flea markets, car boots and charity shops with an injection of sophisticated marks from a pen which he owns'
Image and humorous quote from doodlersanonymous.com, which as a personal note, is a fantastic site i shall be visiting many times in the near future.
What stuck me was how he shows his portfolio on his website, through little mock stamps in a scrap book, being completely thematically consistent with the method of which he creates his work, nic nacs found out in the wild and collated together within a book. I thought i would just take a little inspiration in this and maybe completely steal the concept.
My original intention of placing panels over an adjacent real world layout were a no go anyway, with one of my tutors noting that "I shouldn't be afraid to have just a simple layout for the images, the temptation would be to have overlaid the images over the blueprint, which could be a bit tacky." And in hindsight he was totally right.
To shake it up, i thought to keep the scrapbook idea, but rather than use postal stamps, i would use polaroid images, being snapshots of the memories, and also being thematically consistent with my idea, good stuff.
With that settled, it was time to get those polaroid images down with a bit of further thumb nailing.
Here im trying out a bit of a new medium, having purchased some Copic Ciao markers to play with.
Unlike my indifference with my gouache test during the memories segment, i actually really like the resulting imagery with these little beauties. This being said, i didn't feel they were quite right for my current work, so they will most definitely be seeing a return in a future project. One thing that did advance the current project though was my consideration of line work during this experimentation, starting with my standard brush pen and moving on to a white paint pen, i decided that i quite liked the look of the white with the colour, interesting to keep in mind.
Poster time?
We were given another interim task to create a poster for our book. I wont lie, i have no idea why we did this, it felt like a bit of a wasted day, but in saying that i did come to a conclusion on what the book would be called thanks to it. Holiday Home.
Back to work
Getting back to the central project, i decided i should neaten the house net, and fix some of the inaccuracies within the layout, circa rooms being in the wrong place.
And from thereon some neater thumbnails of the contents, having a now entirely accurate layout and need to progress.
Making it
I was getting there, it was finally time to start making the final outcome, opting to use photoshop to create the final outcome. It seemed to be a natural choice for myself, allowing me to really get in to detail with more finicky smaller elements of the blueprint imagination scenes, the blueprints themselves simply needed to be scanned in and worked atop of. This choice would also make the printing setup and process a million times easier, simply having to transfer the files onto in design.
Creating a cover
I was excited about generating the cover, having decided during the thumbnail process that i would have the cover be the exterior of the home, shown in a simplified blueprint style, keeping it in theme with the rest of the book. This meant whipping out the perspective skills again, thankfully being better at it now and having photoshop just make it a doddle. I did realise that i had been an absolute tool, and forgotten to get a picture of the front of the house like a daft bugger... So google maps?
Whelp, i guess i'm only human, yeah, that'll do for an excuse, regardless, a super simplified rendition of the house was made and all was good.
Now came a tricky part for myself, deciding how to display my title. I knew that i absolutely had to use a handwritten typeface, most likely in white, it only felt right with the hand drawn blueprint aesthetic, the issue came with positioning and placement.
As you can see, i went through a lot of iterations, none feeling right. The issue lay with a bit of arrogance though, as i wanted the title to span across the front and reverse of the book, and this just wouldn't have worked in the final outcome. I knew this but just lied to myself that the look was strong enough to work for me, but having this layout and closing the book would make the title seem as though it was just home. Whilst this would still work, it would be inaccurate, so i decided to bring the full title to the front page and thicken/ neaten the text. I did somewhat get my way though, now having the ability to put my creators notation on the now vacant side of the house , giving me the dimension that i wanted the text to achieve.
Smashing!
Creation of the polaroids and tech issues
So, let me get this off my chest, photoshop and blogger are absolute wank! Finishing up my polaroid images and photoshop decides it would like to destroy my work in front of my very own eyes, taking chunks out in odd places, forcing me to save the layouts as png's and have to re draw the gaps, utter tosh. Here are the resulting broken images.
Then as Im writing up this blog post, blogger decided to just delete everything on it, vamanos mother fucker, i guess i didn't need that work either. This means that about half of what you have read has been written twice. Love this website.
With all that, i at least managed to save the pages by filling gaps, but being forced to save the images as png's, they were all flattened, leaving two or three unfinished, or at least in my eyes, peer feedback told me that the images were fine from an outsiders eye.
Regardless here are my finished layouts
I still had two pages to fill, and was going to create two portraits of myself at differing ages, to show how i have aged through the time in the home, it was at this a peer suggested i create simple silhouettes, a stoke of genius, as this felt like it completely fit with the drawn blueprint aesthetic, god bless that man.
And with that, the project was completed with just the printing process to go through.
