A good point to start to think about your critical review for part six, What subjects are you interested in learning and what questions are you interested in asking?
Submit a draft proposal of around 200 words, which should contain books and any other research material that has helped inform your ideas.
Process:-
I really enjoyed the second section and writing down my comfort zones and non comfort zones, I found this really interesting personally, and could see what I would like to work on more, and learn more about. Exercises 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5 was thinking of extra words and adding pictures to those words for the creative process of mind mapping, I have done this before but not on this scale and to this extent, so it was interesting to see how much further you could push the process.
Exercise 2.7 composing pictures was my favourite, and I found I really enjoyed this process of making up background and scenes and also characters for the brief. This is something I would take forward and have been thinking more about, and how to use this process to help me with my children’s illustrations.
From the above processes I have found that I have been able to think of and draw whole scenes for characters and push the process on further, to also think about backgrounds, textures and colours that I wouldn’t ordinarily choose or pick.
I would like to continue this process of making backgrounds, developing characters, and character design, and to think more with my imagination, for fantasy scenes.
I want to develop more about textures and colours and come out of my comfort zones, and pick dark, moody, and odd places, as well as unusual, and scary characters that would be suitable for younger children.
Although I want to come out of my comfort zone, I think it will still be important to keep my comfort zone in with the process, as this would balance my style, and still keep the illustrations my own.
So from this I will be looking at picture book illustrators:-
Beatrice Blue
Beatrice Allemagna
Kristiana Dorosconoka
Beatrix Potter
Oliver Jeffers
Victoria Semykina
Resource and reference books:-
Children’s Picturebooks The Art of Visual Storytelling by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles
Cartoon academy Cartoon faces How to draw heads, features and expressions by Christopher Hart
Book design by Andrew Haslam
Wonder by Beatrice Blue
The Marvellous Fluffy, Squishy, Itty, Bitty by Beatrice Alemagna
How to catch a star by Oliver Jeffers
Duck, Duck, Dad by Lorna Scobie.
Mind Mapping:-
Thoughts
I was able to fill this mind map out easily without any extra process help, I found it really interesting what questions came out of this.
Questions:-
Do illustrators have to have a story to work with?
Why do illustrators start with the story?
Can you illustrate the pictures first?
This is unusual but I have a lot of ideas for pictures/ illustrations, groups of ideas but no story yet, why do you have to start with the story or an author, why can’t you start with the illustrations and let the story flow from that?
Obviously I am aware that this is the correct process to follow, but why, why do it that why, who said this is the way it must be?
I have started to research if there are any illustrators that work process is to start with the pictures first, or any authors that look at illustrations for inspiration first, it would be interesting to see the outcome and thoughts and conclusion, although I’m not sure what the exact question will be yet!?
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