ILLUS6040: Shoot From the hip R&D

This brief felt very freeing after the last one with the amount of research and development I had put into the final outcome, it felt nice to just be able to draw and not think too deeply about it, thinking more about having fun with a concept and running with it. I think over time I have come to realise I am a person who runs on instinct, especially when it comes to illustration. I always think back to my first year of university where we did life drawing. For whatever reason, I was better at doing the fast 30 second impressions of the life model than I was doing the long form drawings. Perhaps because I would have to go off instinct, rather than having time for self doubt and self loathing. 

So, all in all, I enjoyed this project a lot. 

Task One - Earth's World Portraits

The concept behind the first task I chose was to create a series of portraits based off the Instagram page Earth's World. On the first day when we received this brief I spent the rest of the afternoon browsing the page, it was such an interesting Instagram page, to see all these people from all walks of life and yet with each one you felt like you knew exactly what kind of person they were like just from looking at them. Well, superficially at least.

At some point in my browsing I started conversing with my friends about whether one person would be racist or not. This is how I came to decide my format and series of portraits. It was based in the realms of racial profiling, a very stupid concept that already exists and is used in the police force to ascertain whether a suspect is likely or not to be the perpetuator based off the colour of their skin. This concept shouldn't really exist and yet it would be hypocritical of me to say that I don't superficially perceive people upon a moments glance and assume everything about them. It's just human nature to be judgemental and cruel and tribalistic, still, it made a good funny series of portraits for me. 

Task Two - Kickstarter Page

This series of drawings I did for a conceptual kickstarter page ended up being a lot more meaningful for me than I initially expected it to be. Allow me to introduce all of you to Acts 1:9, the comic I have been writing with my best friend Liv for the past 3 years. 

I spent three days working on this for the first part of the kickstarter task. A good part of a kickstarter page is a punchy trailer of sorts. I have experience doing videos and editing them however I was new to frame by frame animation so you can, very much so tell I had never done it before and I had barely any idea what I was doing but I am still very happy with the results. 

So what would you be supporting if you decided to pledge?
My idea would be to fund a physical comic book, perhaps with a pledge you'd get a copy of its release once it'd be finished. The comic itself with what we've written is planned to be something a lot longer than just a singular books worth, so instead I'm opting to put it out there as a webcomic to read online. However, I'm still a person who will possibly need money to live in this hypothetical scenario so having something like a book, merchandise, possibly fan spaces (imagine being popular enough for that wow) and the goal is to be able to produce a physical book. 

I know the concept of the book itself would look like a Bible (thematically fitting), this is something I'm planning to explore more with our final project for university. This task was just a good way to start thinking about how I want to go about doing things and what exactly I want to achieve. 

Part of the appeal to me when looking at other people's content is the characters, of course in a comic a character and the main character can mean a lot to people, so I also decided to make a series of fullbodies showing 4 characters. All of them are main characters of the story, showing its a pretty hefty story to have multiple main characters each with their own arcs and backstories. 

I also decided at this point, it's probably important to show potentially what the comic itself could look like. This is still a rough draft for me, I'm not sure I like how it came out, it also took a lot longer than I wanted to to finish it (did not help I got covid halfway through working on it.) I chose a scene that would ask a lot of questions, create questions and put some action, saucy sauce and some mystery to it. Who are these characters? How did they get in a fight? Why is the last panel implying a lot about what is about to happen and is it okay for this to happen? Who's the grey haired chick and the strawberry blonde anime hair lookin' guy? I'm sure no one's actually thinking these things but it's what I wanted to create with it. 

I think I will be changing how I want to do certain aspects of the comic, it was told to me that this scene felt a little stiff with the action to action panels not being fluid and the flow seemed off too. I think I still need to figure out how exactly I want to do formatting to go on into the future but I do have more of an idea of what I want to do now that I have done this first rough draft. 

Task Three - Rules of the Trade

I kind of went back to my comfort with this one and did my usual thing, not sure if I'm particularly happy with how these came out but by the time this week was rolling through I was very ill with covid 19 and I was struggling. However that's not to say I hate these and all of them are true about me and drawing digitally. Even though they are internal rules I never do any of them because I'm a sucker for self sabotage. May my back and eyes be in pain and broken forevermore. Amen.