Illustration in Response to the Written Word Conceptual Illustration

Project One

Week 1 and 2

The Brief:

• 1 illustration, 90x140mm (CMYK) 
• 1 animated GIF based on the illustration (RGB)

Based on the article below. 

CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE

The main gist I got from the article is that the writer is pretty heartbroken about Debenhams closing down and this meaning the demise of the high street in a "nation of shopkeepers". A prevalent theme was blaming online shopping on killing the high street which I won't disagree with I just don't see it as such a horrible world changing issue as the article makes it out to be. But this idea of ONLINE SHOPPING IS KILLING THE HIGH STREET is what I'm deciding to focus in on because after doing some quick initial thumbnails just getting my ideas onto paper I think I've come up with a really good way to illustrate this and I think the gif will be really effective. 

Thumbnails and Ideas

Above was just my very initial ideas and notes just to get everything out of my head and onto paper so that I could start to make sense of it. Next thing to do is some bigger, properly scaled colour thumbnails :)

So my idea is to have Debenhams be deleted with a mouse cursor to bring the online aspect into it and to treat the illustration with the same dramatic conclusion as the article did. I can picture the kind of style and colours I want to use but I cant quite get it out yet so a lot of my research and inspiration will be looking for that. 
Right now I think my plan is to make two paintings, one with the background and Debenhams and the second with just the background and I'll paint the mouse cursor and delete cross separately and add it all together in photoshop, ill add the little "poof" marks onto the painting of just the background after it has been scanned in because it seems like a waste of time to do a third illustration for it. For the stand alone illustration I'm thinking of using a frame from the animation where the mouse is hovering over the cross but I could add an error message that has popped up on the screen saying something like "are you sure you want to delete the high street?".... Ill work on it. 

So. After a while of sketching and trying to figure out what point I'm trying to make and how I want to do it, I've come up with a new idea. I'm thinking of having a cursor hand reaching into the image and plucking the Debenhams out and putting it into the desktop trash can -  going back to the quote in the article saying the loss of department stores leaves a hole in the heart but this way it leaves a hole in the picture. How ill do it now is ill paint the whole background with the desktop and window and the image inside of it and ill paint the Debenhams building separately so that it can be easier in photoshop for me to place it down on the image and move it around.  
I had a go with my Posca pens for these images but I forgot how often posca's leak so I probably wont be using them for my finished piece. 

I tried to figure out some colours as well as making the perspective make sense, I'm not happy with these colours but at least I know exactly what I don't want to do. I'm tempted to digitally colour this piece since I'll find it easier to get the exact colours that I want but I don't want it to be too digital heavy, I want it to have the hand made charm since I really like that look. I'll probably scan the sketch in and if I'm not happy with my colours by the end of it then I have a backup to do digitally.

Research and Inspiration 

I really like the colours and painting technique in the first post, the second is just a picture of a room but again the colours really inspire me. I like the style of the third one but I don't think that's the direction I'm going in now. The picture to the left has the "tech" vibe I'm looking for. 

Angela Pan

I really like these illustrations by Angela Pan, they have the soft and pleasing colours I'm looking for and I really like the interesting view points. I have been following her account for a while now and I know she works using Posca pens a lot and I do have a collection of Posca's so I definitely want to try this way of working, I'm not certain if my finished outcome will be produced this way though as I think I want to try alcohol markers and maybe gouache too and see which gives me the results I'm looking for. 

Process

I wanted to try something I've never done before so I attempted to make this piece on photoshop in pixel art, I followed a really good tutorial to set up the canvas and grid and I enjoyed trying it out but I'm just really unsure about how it looks. Its quite cute but its not exactly what I imagined. I think I would need more practice at doing pixel art before trying something this ambitious. 

Outcomes

The Illustration

What I wrote above? Yeah ignore that. I went for the pixel art anyway and I think it looks great! I did a few versions that are all slightly different, I think 2 and 5 are my favourites, to me they are the most effective of the bunch and I suppose its the preference of whether the pop-up boxes are there or not.

1 - as I imagined it would look

2 - only slightly different but the bin is also highlighted to make it more clear

3 - I wanted to try using the pop-up box idea that I had thumbnailed right at the beginning

4 - more pop-ups make it look more urgent and also more annoying

5 - more dramatic, boxes popping up everywhere

The Animation

Who knew making gifs was so fun? This is the first time I've made an animation of any kind other than maybe a few stop motions when I was young so there was a bit of a learning curve... and by a bit I mean I spent an entire day watching videos, reading articles and tutorials and trying to do it myself. Long story short I struggled for a long time until it suddenly clicked and I made the first animation in about 30 minutes. 
The first animation is exactly what I thumbnailed and I love it, I think its really cute and it does exactly what I want it to. The second gif is just because I was getting carried away with the pop-up idea on the illustration and I thought it could be fun to try it out as an animation. I really like this one too but it wouldn't be suitable for the brief because without the rest of the context it doesn't really make sense.

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