Cryptids and Climate Change! - Evaluative Blogs #6

So, as semester two started I received advice that I needed to organise myself better, and so I bought a diary (it's got rainbow pages, it's brilliant) and planned my semester. I wrote down all the deadlines for both university and competitions and worked my way backwards. The first thing that needed to be finished was my submission for the Batsford Prize on the 31st of March, next would be my submission for the International Comic/ Manga Schools Contest 2020 on the 27th of April which is also formative assessment - leaving Project Razor to fall into the background for the time being as the only deadline for that is the final show in May.

Now, onto the reason I'd hope you read these blogs - the art!

My time has exclusively been spent tending to the Batsford Prize, with the theme of 'our planet' it was time for my connections made through graphic facilitating to come to centre stage. The man whom I'd drawn for on that day was giving a talk on climate change, its implications, and solutions and so, even though my friend and I were very obviously not the engineering crowd, we went and soaked up all the information. This then gave me a springboard from which I dove into deeper research, more specific to my project - how mythical creatures and cryptids were going to not cope with climate change. I decided that the Loch Ness monster, Yeti, Mothman, and Jersey Devil would be a good selection and would allow me to address different aspects of climate change and pollution. From there I sketched out some ideas, scanned the best ones onto my laptop and sharpened them up.

Individually I thought they were all okay. I was pleased with the Jersey Devil and the concept behind Nessie (I thought I was real smart there). However, I wasn't sold on the Yeti, although it was a lot better than most of the sketches before that point, and I was sceptical about Mothman as I'd not spent too long drawing him - an idea thrown together in a matter of seconds.

Looking at them with S, we agreed that Nessie's composition - although more conceptual - didn't fit in with the others and so I went back to my sketchbook and brought out another composition where Nessie was instead dealing with drought. This worked much better as it had an element of background that would tie in with the others. With the Jersey Devil, I needed to play around with the positioning of the animals around him - if you don't know, the Jersey Devil feeds on the blood of livestock (kind of like an el chupacabra) - and S felt that the sheep in the foreground was perhaps too morbid and needed to be humoured up a bit, I played around with the body language even though I thought that it was plenty funny already (I have a strange sense of humour I know). It was unclear what the Yeti was doing, tiptoeing on the snowless ground wasn't going to cut it, and we agreed that I needed to incorporate an aspect of the Himalayas for it to make more sense and again tie in with the others better. Mothman was oddly S's favourite, she liked the symmetrical nature of the composition and although she liked the pose, Mothman himself was too small and didn't look 'caught in the headlights' enough. Moving forward, I hoped to resolve all of these issues and provided a couple of options (with the exception of Mothman) for S to review a few days later.

The Yeti was now starting to pose a problem, it still wasn't clear what he was scared of - the trees? the height? I was going to have to go back to the drawing board. I wasn't pleased with him in the slightest and was beginning to get frustrated as I'd wanted to get these finished quickly to allow more time for the other projects. The first Nessie was better as she was towards the 'audience' and her face was easier to see, however, her worried expression wasn't coming across. S prefered the Devil facing outwards, however, I wasn't so sure and the animals still needed tweaking, and Mothman was now too big!

I got these corrections done quite quickly and decided to start looking at colour to prevent myself from becoming demotivated. I was now much happier with the yeti, he now seemed to be part of his environment and it was clearer what he was doing. Mothman was a better size but I wasn't sure if I was happy with his arms yet. I'd tried to adjust the animals with the Devil to make the different levels more obvious, although looking at it now, the foreground sheep's belly shouldn't be touching the cow at the bottom of the pile, and Nessie still felt like she was lacking something but I couldn't put my finger on it. Anywho, the first attempt at colour roughs:

I decided to tackle Nessie first as I knew she was the weakest overall and thought that colour could add something to it - but really if your drawings can't stand by themselves colour certainly isn't going to save them, which it didn't. I was trying to add a sense of environment with the choppy edges of the ground, I can't say that it worked too well and I didn't particularly like any of the results that I'd produced. Let's just brush that under the carpet and move on.

I decided to turn to my Colour Index books for inspiration and found a couple that I wanted to try here. At the time I thought the last one was the bee's knees, but I'd become too caught up on focussing on where the light was going to hit that it was squandering any progress, the colours - although they go together - weren't correct for this project.

And so we come to the tried and tested blue and orange colour scheme. I absolutely adore this colour combination - I'd tried my best to stay away - but if it's not broken don't fix it I guess. I learned here that you should only use the Colour Index books as a starting point as demonstrated in the first outcome, I began to tailor the scheme to the composition and I'd landed on something that I wasn't horrified with. And so I took it forward.

None of them are awful or wonderful, I favoured the middle one, the colours seemed slightly more balanced than the other ones. Although, in the first one, the focus does go to the devil straight away as blue sends things backwards. I think in the last one, the colours became too varied and muddled the focus too much. All good points to keep in mind once the roughs were discussed with a tutor once again. This time I spoke to Y, as a fresh set of eyes, she was able to suggest things that S and I hadn't seen. Like me, she prefered the devil facing inward, and she also prefered the original sheep - she actually laughed out loud, hooray! She agreed that Nessie was the weakest and suggested that I add an essence of the Loch's scenery, simple I know but when you've been staring at the same pictures for weeks you miss the most basic of things - and to make her neck wind around the foreground a little more. For Mothman, Y suggested that I go back to my research and inform the composition more, I knew that cities were the centre of light pollution so why hadn't I drawn that? She loved the Yeti, however, he was FAR too small compared to the others - time to scale up.

At the moment, I think that the negative space in the Jersey Devil is interesting, and the picking of teeth perhaps works better than him belching - it may need some exaggerating in the final roughs but it's almost there. I know what I said about drawings standing on their own earlier, but my plan for Mothman is to have an orange/yellow dome of colour to symbolise the reach of the light pollution. The yeti is perhaps too big now, but that is easily sorted, and Nessie is looking stronger. The addition of the Loch's scenery in the background helps immensely - although I won't be using that particular brush in clip studio for lining again, but it's good to test these things out while you can.

And so this is currently where I stand. Hopefully, I'm nearing the end of this project. I've loved it, don't get me wrong, there are simply other projects for which the deadline is beginning to loom, and I'd like to do my best with everything.

Thanks for reading this far!

See you next time,

Mort