EVALUATION FOR TALES THROUGH OTHERS EYES - PART OF WBL

EVALUATION - TALES THROUGH OTHERS EYES (WORK BASED LEARNING)

This project is called Work Based Learning and within this project the brief requires a number of individual projects to be completed and finals to be produced for both live briefs and for competitions to then be entered in. One of the competitions is the 2017 Cheltenham Illustration Awards that requires producing an illustration or series based on the theme ‘Tales Through Others’ Eyes’.

My chosen theme for this competition was to create a comic strip based on the infection and fungus known as Cordyceps. This idea came from a series of mind-maps that were made to branch out to try and find my theme, the mind-map lead me to the term infection, where my tutor told me about the Cordyceps fungi, which brought me to my idea to humanise this disease and apply this theme to a comic strip. The illustration is inspired by the 2000AD Judge Dredd comics, specifically a character within this series called Mayor Jim Grubb. The art style itself is inspired by Frank Miller’s Sin City series that uses a mixture of black and white illustrations with individual coloured elements, to make that specific design stand out. In this case the whole comic will be black and white whereas the infected elements will have colour.

To create the illustrations I sketched each individual design within Illustrator then refined then with layers, adding detail and refining the shapes each time before I apply the final layer of the linework then adding colour within Illustrator as well. Once the individual illustration was complete I placed them together in Photoshop and arranged them in the position I wanted.

I really enjoyed this project and it was by far my favourite due to the art style and theme of the project, I stayed away from comic art for a while as I wanted to learn new styles and techniques throughout the previous projects so I as happy to be using my preferred art style again. The positives were the production methods and appearance of each individual illustration and the success of digital creating these designs within Illustrator and Photoshop. The negatives would be to not to focus on one illustration as much, try to organise my time management a little better and effectively divide my time spent on each design efficiently. Several improvements to the overall final pieces would to create a second comic strip therefore it would become a double page spread, this would only happen if I had more time to spend on this project. Another way would be to simplify the designs and art style so it is more cartoon-like comic art allowing me to have more time to create more illustrations due to the timing on creating each design would be less.

Throughout this project there was several flaws and obstacles that I encountered, the main one being time management; to prevent this in future projects I will create constant and up to date timetables to stay on track and organise the amount of time spent on each illustration or time spent on research. If I solved this issue then I shouldn't come across any problems throughout the future projects and it would allow me to not becomes stressed or worried with illustrations not being finished or having to be rushed when the deadline approaches. Overall I really enjoyed this project and creating this comic strip.