Mojo

After a week of hating everything I have finally got my mojo back haha, well maybe. Researching work from other artist, trying to understand what I don't like about my work and getting some useful feedback in the peer reviews seems to have helped. I got an idea for how to draw trees for the first page of the book that seemed to trigger more and more ideas. I think this highlights how important it is to break from sketching when it isn't working and change focus to research and evaluation.

I wanted to make trees from a variety of contrasting shapes that still manage to capture the aesthetic of leaves. The idea for these was that I could create a landscape that floats in the centre of the page with the contrasting shapes creating an interesting silhouette like sky scrapers or mountains. I am still debating whether to add texture and extra colours to these but I like the simplicity and the focus on getting the shapes right with no texture or detail to hide behind.

I added ricks to give the composition more depth. I also wanted the rocks to make the trees seem grounded on the page. I added small details of flowers but didn't want to add too many and clutter up the design. I made a few more flower designs but they were more complex and got lost when scaled down. I decided to get rid of the stems for the flowers as all you notice from a distance is the bright bold flower itself. I am still going to experiment adding textures and shading to this composition to make sure I have tested all possibilities but I think the simplicity and bold shapes are the key features of this piece and don't want to do anything to lesser the effect of that. I am moving on now to character design, I have already sketched out a character I am happy with in a number of poses but need to make them into a shape based design, something I have struggled with over the last few weeks. I have some new ideas to try out and will test out multiple techniques to see which best suits this composition.