Illustration

Illustration

Designing the Backgrounds

29/03/15

After realising that I had hit a wall within the designing stages of this project, I realised that I then had to go about it in a different way. The backgrounds I had been creating had all revolved around the same scene, and so, within each cell, the same scene or background would be depicted, which I felt didn't show my full potential, nor did it make the story more engaging, I looked at the original backgrounds I had created and started drawing them out again, experimenting with media and perspective, this then allowed me to decipher the final style of the comic, and also allowed me to get passed the wall and to start creating more backgrounds, and so extending the direction that my story could take, and would also show off my potential and make the story more engaging.

This is one of the original backgrounds. Within it I have used a very scratchy drawing style which will express the distress and darkness of the story, but also gives the drawing an element of messiness, which adds depth. This is also one of the first images that I scanned and explored with colour. My initial idea was to use very pale and dull colours in the background, so that when the characters were later added, they would stand out, however, with thought, I decided I would much rather use black and white, or no colour at all.

In this image, I had drawn it out originally using a fine liner and graphics markers, so that I may see the effects in photoshop when I later coloured it up. The end results I didn't find pleasing.

For this background, I took one of the first background images I created and sketched it up using a graphics tablet. The varying line thickness's and opacity I found very pleasing, and I tried to incorporate the scratchy and distressed style when using the airbrush tool. I liked the over all effect, although I feel that some of the distressed nature has been diminished by the softness of the airbrush tool.

I tried to achieve the same effect when taking the window drawing but from a different perspective. The end effect, however, was to neat, and had none of the distressed nature the original images held that I so much liked.

The testing on the graphics tablet has pushed my end decision towards using the fine liners to create some drawings which will then be scanned and edited in Photoshop. I will experiment with colouring the images up using block shading, using only greys.

As shown, the images I created, as well as some that I photographed were then placed into a storyboard structure. It was this structure that persuaded me not to use colour.