Saturday Scribbles

Saturday Scribbles (& a little update)

Saturday Scribbles

Saturday Scribbles

Saturday Scribbles

Saturday Scribbles

saturday scribbles: mallory goes to new york

ok so if i'm being honest, since my final presentation on monday i've done very little that doesn't involve eating delicious food or drinking alcohol (a gal's allowed to indulge in a celebratory fashion, right?), so as you can imagine i've done very little creatively. i worked briefly on wednesday on some additional illustrations for my collaborative nhs project, but other than that i've done absolutely nada, and for that reason i thought i'd use today to share some extra spreads from my picture book, mallory goes to new york, and talk a little about the project. 

saturday scribbles

saturday scribbles

just a quick post this morning as i completely forgot to blog yesterday! i thought i'd quickly share a few screen grabs of what i've been up to this week regarding self promo, and now i've got my characters designed i'm onto drawing them up into a bigger scene together but it's taking a bit longer than i originally planned so i'll have to save that for another week...

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saturday scribbles

saturday scribbles

saturday scribbles

saturday scribbles

sunday synopsis & saturday scribbles

saturday scribbles

saturday scribbles

this week i've focussed on creating the beginnings of my picture book, and in all honesty it's been a bit of a struggle. i have a tendency to overwork illustrations for fear of them not looking enough as they are, and in turn i've put together a bunch of spreads that i'm not entirely happy with, so i thought today i'd share with you some instagram snaps that show some of the less overworked components of the illustrations instead. 

tomorrow i plan to tackle what i've already got in a much more fresh way that feels relaxed and natural and will hopefully look better overall, but time will tell. i think i'm going to stay away from digitally creating illustrations and simply use photoshop for arranging and making slight tweaks to bits that need it in the hope that my work will start looking and feeling like i want it to, and i'm hoping it'll fall into place pretty quickly because time's ticking and my picture book certainly isn't going to illustrate itself! 

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saturday scribbles

this week i'm sharing another few pages from my sketchbook in regards to my picture book. on monday i received feedback and my story was generally well received, however it was a mutual agreement between myself and my tutors that to use another sloth within my story wasn't really doing me many favours in terms of diversifying my portfolio, so i've spent a couple of days this week rethinking my protagonist and making some slight changes to my story – nothing too drastic, but enough to give me a chance to explore another creature!

in the end i settled on a tamandua, a type of anteater, simply because i loved how they move around (mostly on all fours, but they often stand on their hind legs) so clumsily and spend a lot of time tree dwelling as a sloth would, so altogether they made a pretty good (and super cute!) substitute. i always pictured mallory as a lost, confused sloth on the streets of new york, however the more i watch tamandua videos and doodle myself familiar with their anatomy, the more they're capturing my heart, and the more i can see mallory as one of them. 

this week me and my coursemate also pitched our nhs work to the staff members that we've been liaising with since september, who then went onto pitch it to some people higher up the chain, and luckily they all loved it! we've also decided that we're going to enter the project into the creative conscience awards, so in preparation for its deadline in late march we've worked on a couple of smaller alterations before we perhaps have to pick it apart a little more and do a fair bit more work. i never really knew where i thought this project was going because it was sort of put on a back burner for a while until we really got to grips with our strategy, so it's exciting to think that it could potentially go ahead and be rolled out within the nhs nationally! here's to the next few months until graduation (gulp!), it'll be a lot of hard work, but it'll hopefully be worth it.

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saturday scribbles

yeah, i know, i've got some explaining to do seeing as i haven't posted a saturday scribbles post (or sunday synopsis post, for that matter) for the last two weeks. last weekend i kind of had a legitimate excuse because i was away for the weekend visiting a friend for her 21st birthday, but i'd be lying to you if i said i hadn't just generally been feeling uninspired with my work and blog as of late.

since handing my dissertation in i've been focussing on my self promotion work and starting to think about my final project, and for the most part i've been feeling a bit uninspired and bummed out, by my self promotion work in particular. i'm still a bit unsure of where i want the content or aesthetics of my self promotion work to go, but i do know that i don't want to waste the opportunity to create another good piece of work for my portfolio, so it's something i really need to try and figure out, and pretty quickly, really. 

on the flip side, i've been writing another picture book for my final project to enter into the macmillan prize again, and above you can see some of the rough page spreads that make up my dummy book that i'll be taking in for feedback on monday. i've no idea how the session will go, but i do know that it's the happiest, most motivated and most inspired i've felt with a piece of work throughout the entirety of third year, so that has to count for something. i love the freedom of working on my own texts because i have complete control over everything and the permission to add or take things away where i see necessary, which i felt held me back a little throughout my alice in wonderland work because it never felt quite as natural and effortless as i'd have liked it to, but i suppose i'm learning that i thrive creatively when i can completely become the author of my own work. 

for now i hope you enjoy the little snippets into a story that was inspired almost a year ago now when i visited new york, and i hope to get the ball rolling again properly from now on and have lots to share every week regarding my progress while illustrating the book. 

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alice in wonderland: from first ideas to finals

as this week has been committed to giving presentations and chilling the fuck out after completing my first module of third year, i thought now would be a good chance to talk about the development and process behind creating my final three alice in wonderland illustrations because i haven't really done all that much else creatively this week, but hey, sometimes you've just got to give yourself some time off, and i've done that in generous amounts this last week as the week coming will be spent refining my dissertation for its final hand in this coming friday. so, without further ado, i'll talk through my process as briefly as possible and let the images do the talking. 

character design

for me, character design seemed to be the obvious place to start after choosing which scenes i was going to illustrate. alice in wonderland is such an iconic, well loved story, and as such has been reinterpreted countless times, so i really had to think about what these characters said to me personally, and how i then wanted to interpret them. alice is undoubtedly the centrepiece of the entire story and as such i focused a lot of energy into her, and in the end i wanted her to have a bit more of an edge and an attitude than the alices i've so often seen in films, because in the story i found that she became really quite head strong and confident as it progressed.

composition development

as part of the brief, a portrait format was set for each illustration and i initially found it pretty hard to work around, particularly for the mad hatter's tea party scene, where there's just so much going on. after countless thumbnails and reconsiderations of the scenes, i think i ended up with compositions that helped to show off the personalities i'd developed for the characters rather than masking them in an attempt to fit the brief's specifications, and while i think that perhaps i may have strayed away from the initial brief a little, i think it helped to add the life and vibrancy to them that my work so very much needed.

first drafts to finals

when the drafting is over, that's when the work really begins (or at least for me it is, anyway.) i very much feel at home in my sketchbook and never feel more relaxed or confident than when it's just me and my pencil, so when the time comes to start adding colours, textures and really considering how each element is gonna slot together, i begin to panic a little, which i think is really apparent in some of the earlier drafts of the illustrations. while drafting and redrafting is something of a frustrating process, especially when you have tight deadlines to meet, i can completely see why so much drafting is required to get to the final piece, because you can really look at all the good and bad within your work and work towards making it the best it possibly can be when the final draft eventually rolls around.

i hope you've enjoyed this little peek into my sketchbook and my working process, showing such initial stages of my work really is something of a daunting task for me, but i know from experience that it's nice to see the inner workings and bare bones of other creatives' projects, so i thought it'd be nice to open up for once and lay my creative process down entirely barely for others to have a peek into. i hope you've enjoyed it!

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saturday scribbles

well it was three months of tackling seven different briefs of differing calibres as well as writing a dissertation, but i've made it to the end of my live projects & competitions module and i can thankfully say that i've at least gotten one portfolio piece out of it that i'm pleased with. my alice work was a bit of a bittersweet journey, with lots of character development that ended up being a little futile after realising just how constrictive the required formats were, and then lots of rethinking of the compositions i'd chosen to fit within the formats, but i've made it to the end and now as i look at all three pieces together, i think collectively they've almost made the last three months of toils all worth it for me. as with my picture book in second year, i think i've managed to create three pieces that look like they're mine. it's perhaps something of an odd thing to say, but i think that they're different enough to a lot of illustration i look at for them to become recognisable as my own, as opposed to a regurgitation of someone else's work. whether they work or not is then an entirely different story, but hey, at least i think they have 'robyn' written all over them. i was quick to pop all these three images onto my online portfolio, and if i'm being honest, i'm liking how it's starting to shape up. hopefully the rest of my time at uni will provide me with another three (hopefully successful!) projects to add to it which will then make up my graduate portfolio – eep!

another project from the module which has received surprisingly good feedback is my work for the nhs live project which i've been working on with a coursemate, where in which i've dealt with character design and the illustrative visuals, and he's created a functioning app and some relevant motion work. for assessment, me and ashley simply had to have some rough visuals and a motion piece to propose our idea as somebody from our local hospital is going to pitch the idea to some funders to see if the project will be picked up and brought into reality, so for now it's staying as it is in its somewhat primitive stage. i'm not too sure when the pitch will be made, but after that we'll know if the project will be carried on or not and whether i'll be developing the visuals and characters more. fingers crossed that it does get picked up though, because however much it'll mean having on my plate for the last few months of uni, it would be pretty cool to see my work brought to life for a client as big as the nhs!

so, there we have it, the last three months of my creative life in a nutshell. it's been a little bit more negative than i'd have hoped, but i think i'm finishing on a positive. obviously it's a happy ending, but i do wish i could cut out the self loathing that occurs while working through briefs for my own good and the good of those around me. perhaps that comes with time though? let's hope. 

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