Exhibition complete.

It took one painful week of cutting, mounting, pinning and stressing but my Monster Quest exhibition is now up and finished, ready for the degree show.

I am very pleased with the result, as is my mentor Julia. There have been many positive comments from people already and I think it will push people to think of their own exhibition ideas for the display cabinet next year. Plus it has filled the dark empty void of what it was before.

It has been a very tough but enjoyable project and I will keep going with it, since there are many things I could do with the idea. Please do pop up to the animation floor and see it if you can!

Speeding up the process.

As I've been producing more and more of these monster pictures I have been learning new ways to make them look good but also make the process faster. I started off with the usual proceedings of drawing a monster on the photo digitally, then drawing it out properly on paper to be scanned back in and painted over. However I found that even though it looked nice, traditional style painting in photoshop was very time consuming and it was taking me ages to get a texture that I was pleased with.
Here is one of my monsters with painted texture:

I decided to see if there was another way I could get a nice texture without it taking so long. I started to play around with painted colours on watercolour paper and then scan them into photoshop:

I then brought a texture square into a picture I was working on in photoshop and overlaid it on top of a layer that contained the shape of my monster, cut it out to fit the shape using the magic wand tool and then I just lowered the opacity so that it blended with the colour of the shape underneath:

I could then still add shadow and highlights on top and the monsters started to look a lot rougher and monster like. The final result ended up looking a lot like this:

I will continue to experiment with different textures, using anything I can find and rubbing it on paper and playing with it in photoshop. I think the way to go with this is to just be rougher and quicker with these pictures, sticking to bold shapes and simple staging.

More inspiration.

Dave Cooper is a little gem of an artist that I found out about recently when I picked up his book 'Bent' in a comic store.
His work is a amalgamation of everything I love in illustration. He utilises the "rubber hose" and cute wide-eyed style of early animation, and stretches it, pokes it, puts it through a black hole and throws it back onto paper and is left with wickedly surreal worlds and characters. Its like looking at Betty Boop while on some psychedelic trip!

I have also always admired the work of artist and designer Gary Baseman, who also uses a cute, big-eyed character style reminiscent of early animation and cartoons but makes them rather evil and scary at the same time. His experimentation with shape and colour is phenomenally eye-catching and his work is instantly recognisable! I need to start incorporating more of this energy into my creatures and illustrations.

The process.

I'm currently trying to find a workflow that is best for me. I usually tend to draw better on paper or in my sketchbook first which is what I have been doing with these monster creatures, then scan them in. I then take the drawing and paint it digitally in Photoshop, maybe changing a few features of the design, then try and place my design into one of my photos.


Here is a rough example of the first two steps of this process:

 


However this process seems to prove a bit difficult as when I come to trying to place the monster into a photo I have to then edit it to make it fit in. I think I may have to end up extending the process so that I first get a photo up in photoshop, roughly draw a sketchy monster into it in a position I want it to be in. Then print that out and draw over it in pencil on paper so that the drawing is a lot nicer, then scan that back in to be painted and placed in a photo. It is a hell of a lot lengthier but I think that will ensure the work looks its best.

The Cabin in the Woods!

I went to see 'The Cabin in the Woods' yesterday and even though it didn't live up to the hype surrounding it, it was one of the best horror films that has come out in a while considering that, in my opinion the horror genre has become so unoriginal and stale as the years have gone on.

It related really well to the project I am working on at the moment, not just because it was a horror movie but because it referenced horror and played with it. Now this has been done before, with such films as 'Scream' and 'Scary Movie' but where I think this film showed more originality was in the moments where it played with the idea of all the different monsters/mythical creatures that are in horror. The victims were being played like puppets from a control room and you found out that in this control room they have a large amount of different monsters such as zombies, werewolves, merman and many others, they even went as far as a killer unicorn! In one really memorable scene all of these monsters were accidentally let out of their cells into the control centre and started killing everyone in their own unique ways. There were zombies eating people, a clown stabbing, killer robots sawing and a small girl in a ballet costume with a face full of teeth!

The costume and design of these creatures was great and you could tell they had fun with it. This was some great inspiration!

Rainy Adventure: Gathering materials.

I have decided that regardless of whether it is pouring down, I will get my photos. I ventured out into the downpour to get some great shots in the city, whipping the camera out every time the rain decided to hold off for a few minutes. The result was some lovely moody photos in a few nice little spots that would be great to put monsters into.


I have made a little test/mock-up of what one image may look like. A troll under one of Bristol's bridges!

It will be a lot more detailed however when I map it out properly and design the characters in more detail.

On my travels I also found a great new art shop in the town centre. It was called Crafts and More and it had three floors of great supplies! I founds lots on materials that I could use to make my 3D objects with! For example I found polystyrene shapes that I could paint and turn into a monster skull, or eyeball or maybe a glowing monster tooth! I will also be painting monsters onto this small map of Bristol that I bought as if its my adventurer's map with the locations of all the monsters/objects on it!

Narrowing it down.

I have begun to narrow down the theme ideas for the exhibiton:

'They Only Come Out At Night' This was the idea that I went out in the city and surrounding residential/park areas and took photos at night. I would then place disgusting and creepy creatures within the photos with real people/models running away from them. However this could be a difficult one to work with as photography at night can be hard to do without blurriness or a drop in quality.

'Into the Woods' Was one of my first ideas for this project. It would involve going into the woodland area surrounding Bower Ashton and take photos and then place monsters/creatures amongst the trees. Maybe incorporate cardboard masks and have the creatures' heads made out of cardboard and displayed next to the photos as if they have been killed and then taken inside as a trophy. However I do feel that this does limit me a bit as the whole set of work will look too similar and just seeing lots of trees might become a bit stale after a while.

'QUEST' I have always been a huge fan of role-playing and the mythology behind monsters has a lot to do with adventure and quests. I had this idea of expanding the idea of monster hunting in the woods and making it a city wide hunt, maybe based on a map of Bristol with different locations that I had to adventure to and slay a monster. This opens up a lot more possibilities as I could make the exhibition look like a cabinet of findings from my quest and, as well as monsters heads, actually make small objects/prizes that I retrieved from each small expedition. For example, travel to one of the city's bridges, defeat the troll and bring back its skull! Then document it in photos and make a cardboard skull to display next to it in the cabinet.

These are my ideas and I'm most excited about the 'Quest' idea. I will be going out and starting to make some imagery. Time is becoming a bit tight however since the weather hasn't really been on my side with the constant rain making it impossible to go out and take pictures for long periods, let alone taking cardboard pieces out into the location which would get ruined very quickly!

Deciding on a theme.

I have been trying to come up with ideas for a theme for my project.
I made a small brainstorm and found that a lot of things I wanted to have in the project actually all link up quite well.

I wanted to use the idea of putting stylistic monsters into real photography but make it part of a bigger picture. I started brainstorming and found that there is a large sense of adventure related to monster fiction and I started to link my ideas to possible overall themes/titles.

Went to Lisbon

Hello,


Sorry that there hasn't been a post in a while. I went to Lisbon for an animation festival! It was MONSTRA 2012 and I saw some really great films and many really bad films. Saw some great animated teasers for the festival involving monsters, which was great for my personal project theme!


I have some sketchbook pages from lisbon to show:

Then visual culture happened... which was good in a way because I got to read up about zombies and watch zombie films for a whole week while writing about them in a lot of depth. It all works as inspiration to this project I guess.

The Nickelodeon project didn't materialise since the people I wanted to work with were both too busy and it wasn't going to get done before the deadline. But it was a nice little exercise to sketch out designs and ideas anyway.

Now that is out the way I have had time to concentrate on my project again. It has been good to get away from it so I now have a fresh pair of eyes to go back over it!

The Story...

I have been pondering over different ideas for the narrative of my book and after thinking of countless movie like ideas and different scenes etc. I decided that trying to recreate a film within a book isn't very readable or simple.


So I have decided to go with something ultra simple that flows across the pages quite well, here are some rough sketches to show the start of the story:

Page 1 - POV shot of boy tuning in to his "MONSTER MOVIE HOUR" show on TV.

The T.V starts to bug out and malfunction causing radioactive waves to shoot out towards the boy and suck him into the movie inside the T.V.

From here on out you see the warped boy floating across the pages through various horror movie scenes, narrowly escaping death.

I haven't thought of the specifics or an ending yet but its a start!

Horror Fonts & Poster Designs

These are some horror style font designs and poster designs I made earlier on in the project. I enjoyed experimenting with my own font designs for made up horror films but also trying to recreate design work for films that already exist. However I felt as though they lacked purpose.