405 Visual Narratives Book

More testing

It was good to come in on Saturday for a couple of hours to get some painting done. The use of black with red in my sketchbook is striking but as my story has developed I needed to find a pale pink more suited to the Cherry Blossom tree which is central to the story.

Pink and black main colours for book

Pink needs to be close to Cherry Blossom petals

Cherry Blossom trees' bloom lasts barely a week and represents the fleeting, delicate nature of life so this needs to come through in the tone of the book.

Festival celebration

The Hanami festival is a time of celebration and joy so the pages of Hanami need to have more pink than black and maybe more focused on crowds of people who can communicate this well.

I feel like these painted text and textures could be used as back drops for some of the more detailed illustrations. I can layer in photoshop as I want use mixed media for the book.

I want to push my drawing more and make it more interesting. The figure drawings have so far been Frankenstein monsters and I like them because they are more unique to me and will reflect more personality. I feel I'm moving forwards drawing wise and allowing myself to be less worried about how 'nice' they look or what other people may judge them to be. I think improving technically at drawing doesn't mean how good you are at copying reality on to paper but it's about taking risks and trying new things.

Portrait

One problem is getting the right composition for portrait format. The trees and images that come to me are all landscape as that's the natural way to think of trees so it will take some thinking and arranging. Photoshop will let me move my trees and people around to make sense of it.

Maybe be a good idea is to draw the people/crowds and then the back drop separately?

All images should be done on the same paper to allow me to use multiply, opacity without too much difference in the paper colouring/levels.

Make mistakes and take risks

I'm not a confident painter and need to try using other media like paint to accompany my more controlled drawings. Combining paint with biro for example I really like because painting can achieve things drawing can't like the Cherry Blossom above, the paint is also softer and more suitable for the delicate petals.