Reflection

Choosing the book
Choosing the book for me was the easiest part of the module so far. When I saw Hansel and Gretel on the list I thought about what I could do with it immediately. I still analysed 3 other books just so I knew I had made the right choice but in the end  I still chose to do Hansel and Gretel.

Research
I carried out a lot of research when I started to think about illustrating the book and this mostly included looking at the fashion style of when the story was written. I decided to go along with the 19th century style because it fitted with the story well. I also looked at the different ways of creating illustrations and the layouts in which I could assemble them in a book. When I was making my first illustration I researched a game called Limbo which gave me a lot of inspiration for the style of my images.

Illustrative Spikes
I read through the story multiple times and picked out parts where I thought an illustration would fit well. At first I highlighted the key parts of the story and then whittled them down to specific scenes which would be good to illustrate but would also still tell the story. The parts I decided to illustrate were as follows:

1- Hansel and Gretel alone in the woods in front of a camp fire
2- Hansel and Gretel trying to find their way home and they spot their Father's house in the distance
3- The birds of the forest eating the bread crumbs which Hansel dropped
4- The beautiful white bird which guides Hansel and Gretel to the witches house
5- Gretel sat on the floor eating parts of the candy house
6- The witch invited Hansel and Gretel into her home
7- Hansel is locked in a cage in the home of the witch
8- The witch burning in the oven after Gretel pushes her in
9- The large duck which transports Hansel and Gretel across the river to their Father's house
10- Hansel and Gretel return home to their Father and hand him the jewels and gems in which they took from the witches house
11- The mouse which is mentioned at the end of the story

I believe that these spikes are a good range of images to create as I feel they still tell the story even with no text.

Life Drawing
Life drawing in this module has helped me a lot with character development. As well as the figure drawing during time tabled time I did my own kind of life drawing for my other characters. I used some of the positions during time tabled life drawing for my adult characters and I drew my Niece and Nephew whilst they were playing and doing every day things to get positions for my Hansel and Gretel characters. I think life drawing really helped me get started because at the beginning of the module I was finding it difficult to start my character development but this pushed me and got me started. 

End Papers
I was finding it difficult to start this module because I wasn't so sure on how to start my images so I decided to create some end papers instead. I really enjoyed making these and I think the end product is really effective and I had a lot of fun making them. I sketched out some small things which are associated with the story such as candy etc. and made a repeat pattern out of them. I also inverted the colours on Photoshop which I think looked really cool and at first I was not sure on which I thought worked better but I have decided to go along with the inverted image as it looks darker and more interesting. 

Character Development 
I went about my character development in a very different way. At the start of my character development I had a totally different idea of how I wanted to create my illustrations so I started to draw features of the witch in a very detailed way because that was how I wanted to do my images. But after I changed my mind I started to do small quick sketches onto tracing paper using pencil/permanent pen for every individual illustration and then picking which of those positions worked best. I enjoyed doing it this way because I felt like I was being more organised with my drawings and I think that is very important along with time management which I believe I have done much better with this time around, unlike in module one where I felt I rushed a lot of different things. 

Storyboard
I created multiple storyboards throughout the course of the development part of the project because it took me a while to figure out which parts of the story I wanted to illustrate and how I would lay them out. When I finally figured out how I wanted to create them I think I succeeded in following my final storyboard.

Page Layouts
After I finished the storyboards I thought about page layouts and what type of illustrations I wanted to create. These were my decisions:

1- Vignette 
2- Vignette 
3- Full page 
4- Vignette
5- Double page 
6- Vignette
7- Full page
8- Vignette
9- Vignette 
10- Full page
11- Vignette

To make the decision on these choices I thought about what I wanted the image to look like and then figured out which style of illustration would work best for that particular image. 

Process of the images
I found that the process I went through to create my illustrations was very organised and simple to follow. I will talk about each part of the process individually in detail but I will now briefly explain my process. I started by developing my characters on tracing paper, then I would chose the pose I thought worked best and redrew it, I would then dry point etch the image and print it using black ink on watercolour paper, next I would scan the images into Photoshop and clean up the background and edges and make the image black and white and then also in Photoshop I would assemble all of the different elements of the images to create the final illustration. Also in Photoshop I made each image/canvas 155mmx239mm which is the size of the original book plus a 5mm bleed around the outside. I think I made a good decision by doing each part all at once, for example I drew all of the tracing paper figures, then I printed them all and then put them all into Photoshop together and I think this was good way of working because it helped me not to miss anything out and I think I will work this way in the future because I feel it is beneficial to be organised whilst completing a brief like this.

Tracing Paper
This was the first part of my illustration process. I used tracing paper in three different stages. The first stage was drawing out some character development poses onto one sheet. The next was to pick which pose worked best for the image I was creating and redraw it bigger and then to draw it again but this time adding the correct clothing to it. I really liked working on tracing paper because I found it very simple to duplicate the image which made it so much easier to manage my time.

Etching
After I had an idea change at the beginning of the module I decided I wanted to create my images by dry point etching instead of drawing them traditionally. To etch the images I got the final image which I drew on tracing paper and transferred it onto the etching paper and used the cutting tool to etch the image. I really enjoyed this process because after a few etches I really got the hang of the technique and became pretty fast at doing it which again was beneficial for my time management. Because I enjoyed it so much I have decided that in the future I will definitely use this technique again.

Printing
For me the actual printing of the etches was the most time consuming part of the process. I think this was the case because the process of printing took a while because there were many steps to take. Firstly I had to soak watercolour paper in water so that the ink transferred properly and dry it once it had been in the water for around 5 minutes. I also had to apply the ink to the etch making sure I covered every part well and then remove the excess ink using rags and paper which was a very hard job and is what I think took the most time. Plus, the cleaning of the ink was quite difficult as it is really thick but I am glad I did my prints in bulk so that I saved a little bit of time. I was really pleased with how all of my prints turned out and this secured my idea of using dry point in the future because I just found that I got a lot of nice textures and contrasts and I think it worked so well.

Scanning
The scanning process is pretty much self explanatory really. I scanned all of my prints into the computer ready for when I needed to put them into Photoshop. This took a very long time to do and got very annoying after a while. It was quite difficult as well because other people also needed to use the scanner in the computer room as well as me so that made it take much longer than it should of. I decided that I would just scan the A3 sheets of paper using the scanner provided and then I took the A4 sheets home and scanned them there just to save time which I found it did. 

Photoshop
The next part of the process was to put the images into Photoshop and edit them. I edited all the images at once so that they were all completed at the same time and I found the process of this really easy. I opened the images into Photoshop and used the levels and contrast tools to make the image less yellow off where the colour of the watercolour paper had scanned and if this didn't fully work I then changed the image to black and white but still kept the contrasting colours which I really liked. I then used the magic wand tool to select the areas I didn't was as part of the image such as the white background around the figures and also I used the rubber to get rid of any bits of stray ink or out of place lines etc. I then saved these as JPEG images and as Photoshop files.

Canvas/Image Size
Before I started to assemble the images to create my illustrations I figured out how big I needed the canvas to be. I measured the book I had originally bought at the start and one page measured 150mmx234mm. I used these measurements and added a 5mm bleed therefore making my canvas 155mmx239mm. When I came to creating the images I used the rulers on Photoshop to see where the 5mm bleed was all the way around the image. This made it so much easier for me to know where to put the illustration. 

Assembling
Once I had my canvas size correct and my ruler guidelines I started to assemble my images. I really enjoyed this part because it finally felt like everything was coming together. It didn't take as long as I thought to do this part but I went back over then a few times just to make sure I truly liked how they turned out.

Text
I am aware that this brief did not require text but I did look a different type faces in case I wanted to add text to my images or to the book cover. I looked at a range of different fonts/type faces but decided that I would pick a simple typewriter style font just to experiment with page layouts.

Front Cover
The front cover was a massive hurdle for me as I wasn't sure for a while about how I was going to go about making it. In the end, with a lot of inspiration from books in Waterstones, I decided to go for a very simple repeat pattern style cover using the bird image from one of my final illustrations. I really like how it turned out although I think it could have been done so much better but I wanted to keep it rather simple as I didn't want to give the story away by the cover.

Book Cover

These are the few stages I went through to create my book cover. After going to Waterstones and looking at the different types of book covers I realised that I was mostly visually attracted to the covers which were rather plain with a repeat pattern/design on the front. After looking at these books I thought about what I could do that was similar. I wanted to use images from within the book as a teaser so I decided to use the border which I used in a few of my images around the edges of the front and back of the cover which I really like and then I used the small image of the flying bird as a repeat pattern on the front and back. I created the cover in a wrap around style. I mirrored the front and back cover images because I really liked how it looked and then I added a simple title to the spine and I think the outcome has been really successful. The size of the cover is 244mmx320mm (with 5mm bleed).

Adding text to my Illustrations

I recently started to work in Photoshop and add the text to the images. This took me a very long time as it was quite difficult to get it right, especially the positioning of the images within the text. In the end I finally worked it out and I really like the outcome. I used size 12 font, in Traveling Typewriter with 24pt spacing and I think this worked really well with the whole style of the images. 2 of my final illustrations didn't make it into the final selection after I assembled everything together and they didn't fit right anywhere in the story. The images that haven't been used were not of any importance and the images still make sense without them.  Below you can see the general idea of how I personally would position the text and the images. I am aware that for this brief this was not mandatory but I thought that since I had completed my images I would go a bit further and test out page layouts.  

(The backgrounds on some of these are not meant to be grey, they should be white but blogger seems to be changing image colours lately, sorry about that.)

Book Cover

I have started to look at different book cover designs and layouts and I have gathered a few images up from the internet so get inspiration from.

After looking at these images I noticed that I really like the simplifies style book covers. I think the less you have on the cover the more someone is likely to pick it up and look at it. I find that when I go into book stores I tend to look at the books which look most interesting, for example books with box covers or books with something eye-catching on the spine. I think I am going to look further into book sleeves and book boxes and see what kind of exciting design I can come up with. 

Below are some example of book boxes which I think are really nice.

Colin West Final Illustration

This is my final illustration for the Colin West poem. The concept of this image was that the Moose had been used to make the coat and caps. I used Photoshop to create this image and I really like how this has turned out. I set the size of the image to fit the full size page of 19.5cm x 25.5cm which is the size of the book itself. I placed the mannequin in the middle with the antlers above it making it look like they are coming out of the head of the mannequin which I think works quite well. I then changed my idea of having the hats on a stand and drew them hanging off of the antlers instead which I think looks much better. Overall I am please with how this has turned out and I think the concept can be seen in my image. 

Colin West: Caps and Cap Stand

For the caps I looked at snap-backs and baseball caps and drew from those, I chose to only do four because I didn't want them to be a big focal point in the illustration. I coloured them with simple colours and small bits of shading, I didn't do them too perfectly but I like hwo they have turned out. The idea I had was to place the hats onto a hat stand as if they were on sale in a shop. As you can see in the last image on the page that is exactly what I done and I really don't like it. The positioning is too 'square' and precise and I don't think it works well at all. My plan now is to try a different position of the image. 

Colin west: Mannequin

My idea for the mannequin was to draw it displaying a fur coat to give the impression that the fur of the Moose had been used to make the fur coat. This is the part when my target audience becomes 18+. 

Below is the 6 different stages which I did on Photoshop to create the image.

(working from left to right)

Image 1: The is the mannequin shape which I chose to work with as I thought it would be the best position to use and it is rather simple.

Image 2: The next stage was to draw the shape of the coat over the mannequin. I didn't use any reference for this I just drew a simple coat shape over the top of the figure and I really like how it looks. 

Image 3: I used the magic wand tool on Photoshop to select the 4 different sections of the coat and filled then in with light brown and dark brown before adding texture.

Image 4: I had a lot of difficulty figuring out how to get the fur texture on the coat but I decided to download some different Photoshop brushes which helped a lot. I used the brush in brown and black to get a range of colours within the coat. I done the collar of the coat and I thought it worked really well so I done the same technique on the rest of it.

Image 5: I used the same technique as the previous image and I really like how it has turned out. I don't think it looks the best at the moment because it is a bit light but I will play around and see what I can change.

Image 6: I changed the levels of the coat and really like how it turned out. I think the colours of the texture work really well and it resembles fur more now that it is darker. 

Colin West: Moose

This is the Moose head which I choose to develop further using Photoshop. I chose this one because I like the shapes of the antlers and I think the head is in a nice position to use in an illustration.

When I put this into Photoshop I filled in the main areas with colour. (The antlers being a beige colour and the head being a reddish brown)

By adding a few different layer I bult up the colours in the antlers using browns and beige and by using the smudge tool I got a textured effect which I think works very well.

I had a lot of difficulty getting the head of the Moose right so I came up with a different idea which I will explain further in my next posts. 

Colin West Mannequin Development

The next part of the poem I wanted to create was the coat. My idea for this was to have it on a female mannequin as if it was in a shop. These are my mannequin developments which I sketched out in Photoshop, I will choose one of these to add a fur coat to.

Caps and Stand

The next stage I went through for the poem illustration was the caps. I decided I wanted the caps to look like they were on sale in a store so I sketched out a few hat designs which I will duplicate and place around the cap stand which I also sketched out on Photoshop.