The Exhibition

The days leading up to the exhibition, everyone appeared very stressed and rushed with preparing work to put up/ finishing book etc. But once it was up, the work was really impressive and felt proud to be on Viscom. However, I was not happy with my work and wished I had submitted a piece that I felt represented my full potential better.

In the day time I helped hang one of the walls with pieces, which I think was good practice if I ever have the chance to help curate or put up a show of my own in the future.

Foxy Lady Animation

Here is my animation that I prepared for the show reel. I made it in Quicktime, but then had to export it using Final Cut because Youtube and Blogspot could not recognise the Quicktime file. It works now though.

Funny times..

Was browsing Google for some interesting flip books and amazon showed me this beauty:

InDesign

I have been to a couple of Indesign tutorials before, but never have I had the chance to use it for my work before now. All my knowledge of the program had completely gone and Paul Price helped me out massively. Although I had all of my images prepared in Photoshop, they weren't on the page sized I wanted and so decided to make a master page on InDesign of the correct size and place each individual image in to a box on the pages. This turned out to be very simple to do and much quicker than if I had tried to do it on Photoshop. It was also really handy to have the crop marks on each page so i knew where to cut and crop.

Drawing and Drawing and Drawing...

Finally have all of the images done. There's 99 of them. And not once do I want to draw the fox/lady one more time. I think I will still put these together as a real short animation to put on the show reel, but will look much better as a flip book when i have the chance to bind it. Having a light box is really super useful as it's easy to constantly manipulate the images and crate the movement. Here are some more individual images from the flip book.

Making my images black and white

Because I hand drew my illustrations they weren't pure black and white when I scanned them in. Therefore, I had to change the levels of each one. I started off using the white paint bucket to fill in each image, but fortunately realised a few of images in, that this was a very unnecessarily long way to do so. In a couple of the images it is still very slightly noticeable that areas are off-white, but in amongst the many flip book pages they hopefully go unnoticed.

Pig

Taxidermy being used to show tattoo design.

Simple, Cool Flip Books...

The first flip book I found below is a pretty sick idea. Real simple, but probably took a while being so precise with the cutting out. The one beneath that is just done really well. The movement has been drawn really gradually and brings the image out of the page.

Saving as Pdf/Jpeg

After scanning in 99 images, and saving them all as Photo shop files, I realised that this was a bad idea. I did this because I vaguely recall one of the computer room technicians telling me to do so, but they took up so much room on my computer and I wasn't able to save them to my memory stick.

Next time, I would just save as jpeg as I don't see any real benefit in saving them as anything else for what I'm doing.

Unfolding Storyline...

As I said before, I prefer not to plan a lot of my hand drawn illustration as it tend to take a more interesting path if I don't. However, I've felt slightly stunted whilst doing this one. I knew what I wanted to begin with (a half-woman/half-fox) and end with (a stuffed and repositioned half-woman/half-fox) but the process of getting between the two was fairly difficult. It was handy using line drawing though, because I could play about with the lines of the fox face to create scissors, which then cut off the ears of the fox-lady and so on.....

Light Box

So, whilst I've been a slave to my fine liner and a light box, repetitively banging out pretty much the same image over and over again, I realised I would really benefit from an A3 one. The one I have is only slightly bigger than A4 and makes it difficult to draw certain angles perfectly as the wooden sides get in the way. I also wish now I had taken more care over each illustration, as there's a clear deterioration in the standard and clarity of image. It's jut real hard when repeating the same thing so many times to remain careful over each one.

Oh well, at least I know for next time to be more patient with the whole process. I also was using pages from an empty ring-bound sketch book I have, which meant that each page has whole punctured at the top, making it harder to line up each piece (which makes it easier when scanning and re-sizing).

foxy lady

When I make an animation, I prefer not to story board. I find it turns out more interestingly if I just let myself create the movement as I go along and see where it goes. I obviously begin with a rough idea of what I want, and I knew I wanted to start with a lady with a fox's head. Here is a simple line drawn still from the series of images.



I think I will have her tortured/in pain some how, and end up being stitched up in some way.

Cropping

After using the pen tool and recreating my image on Illustrator, I didn't like the way it sat in on the page. I played around with cropping and liked the way it turned out. The image is very simple so think it just shows a little more detail when I cropped and enlarged it.

Playing Around

Originally I had an idea to create lots of tiny oil painted creatures for the exhibition, but decided against it in the end. I didn't really fully think through the idea of this miniature piece first, but wanted to incorporate animal and human in a different way to the common idea by a few artists at the moment, which is to take various parts from different animals and fix/draw them together.

This was just a trial and it didn't turn out how I had hoped. I didn't want to give her a face because i wasn't satisfied with it, and therefore should remain without an identity. It was nice to play around with oil paints again though, even if it was only very simply.

Flip Book

Again, change of mind about what I want my 'book' to take form as. I now want to turn my illustration stills in to a flip book. Firstly, because I think the simplistic, hand drawn style of my images would suit something more personable and interactive like a flip book, and secondly because it will require less images than an animation would and means I won't have to rush as much to get it finished for the exhibition.

I haven't yet finished drawing all the images, but went in to uni today and scanned in the ones I did have to check with the computer room guys that I was going about it in the right way. First of all I scanned all my images in using 'easy mode' on the scanner, which was a bad idea because even though I had aligned my images to sit in the same place on each page, the scanner picked them up in all different positions and I then had to re scan them all in 'professional mode' so I can choose the scanned area and crop it so they were all the same.

Illustration for Wall Piece

I wanted to stick with the theme of taxidermy for my wall piece, but didn't want to use the same style as that used in my flip book/animation. I used a similar style of illustration to the one I used on my printed t-shirts last year, hopefully becoming slightly recognizable? I drew a naked lady with fish hooks through her nipples and stuffing coming out of her mouth, ears and insides. I wanted to put a human in a vunerable state and stuffed, just like an animal, while also being made to look 'sexy'. Obviously with the taxidermied animals they are posed in a way that is appealing to the eye and makes them appear life-like.

Massive creativity block......

Ok, so after having some time off at Christmas and letting my mind drift far away from the idea of producing some work, I have had a period of stressing out about the amount of time left before the deadline and how much there is to do. I also began doubting my chosen theme of taxidermy.....attempting to come up with a content for a book around the idea became very difficult, and thus proved that maybe it wasn't the best idea for me to produce a book.

I chose to stick with taxidermy but take a different approach. I am going to began drawing the stills for an illustrated animation. I feel this leaves so much more room for creativity and playing about with different things and is something I feel I will enjoy much much more than binding a book....

we'll see how it goes.