Character

I folded one of the sheets of blind drawing into a book. The outcome was very interesting because of the accidental compositions on some of the pages. My favourite page is the one bellow because of the positioning of the 'main character' in the bottom right. I decided to work on and develop this character further in my sketchbook as I think it is very effective and quite horror like.

I started with using my favourite mediums- fine liner pens. I love cross hatching as a shading technique, and I think both of the images I created are very bold and effective, especially the one with shading as it gives the character dimension. I started to really take inspiration from Junji Ito, who is a horror manga artist. Although these are very simple drawings I think they are very emotive, and I think just using black and white adds to the dark, sad emotion. This matches the actual figure because it is a very powerful image of a starving person in poverty.

Then I experimented further with cross hatching, then moved onto using paint. This led me to creating less refined drawings because I chose to use a larger brush. I think the expressive brush strokes again add to the emotion. I think painting the figure on top of an image I cut from a different section of the magazine created an interesting texture, making the image less flat. I think this does perhaps take away from the image itself though, but if I was to create a book full of the character I think painting on top of collage, and overlapping the character, would make it more interesting. I want to try painting the character on top of natural disasters and explosions which are images from other parts of the magazine. This would be effective commentary on the horrors of this world, but the tone would be very dark. I also need to be careful with this subject matter as it is a very sensitive topic.

 I then went back to using colour with pencil and markers. I tried out some negative space drawing (as I had made a note of previously) and I don't think this went well. I want to try it with paint on a non white background, as this has worked well in previous projects of mine.

I tried overlapping the lines of the figure more, and I think this makes a nice pattern. Again, it can make the character stand out less, but the message is more symbolic of a collective or widespread suffering, which goes with the message of starvation and poverty being a huge problem. I think I want to make this a topic in my book, to spread awareness or to serve as a reminder. With such a delicate subject I feel that I need to address the topic, rather than just creating and using a character out of it.

Going forward I want to revisit some of the other blind drawings, to see if there are any other characters I could pick out of them. I'm very focused on the character above, but I don't want to narrow down my project just yet as I could miss out on something.