FMP Blog 5: Taking Shape
I’ve developed characters for a previous project when I had a strong sense of who they were from the get-go, and how that story would start. With this story I’m a lot more conscious of the visual language, and I’m seeing if that will help guide me instead this time. My supervisor also suggested drawing multiple pages of dogs and trying to nail the presentation of the main character, so that’s what I did.
First, though, I attended an interesting workshop — free — hosted by the Good Ship Illustration, which turned out to be quite fun and very eye-opening. The brief was to have a childhood toy at hand, and use that as the character for the rest of the exercises. Each exercise was timed, and we were given prompts of first emotions and then actions to quickly and instinctively figure out what our character would look like in response.
The next step on this vein is to do the same for the characters in my original story. And my stumbling block then became, what do they look like? I went back to my supervisor’s advice to do pages of ideas for the dog character and was about to get to work when a couple of commissions came in.
The owner of a street dog who has followed my page for at least a year or two on Instagram reached out and requested an illustrated Christmas portrait of her and her dog. I leapt at the chance to a) complete exactly the kind of commission I adore and b) explore a digital visual language and palette for an owner and their rescue dog.
The next commission that came in was also a chance to explore digital methods for Sri Lankan street dog characters: a 2024 calendar for Little Black Book, an agency I do some copywriting for. They wanted me to provide them with 12 illustrations on a theme of my choice, so when I suggested ‘Little Black Dog’ they agreed without hesitation. I decided to go monochrome this time as it fitted the company’s identity and also gave me a chance to build on that strength that I had discovered during the Dog Friends map and Folktale Week.
I decided to use bold shapes and inject a touch of red to add interest to each illustration. The focal point of the dog itself took some problem solving because I was not sure if a smooth, fuzzy or rough solid shape would complement the backgrounds best. Eventually I chose a rough ink brush (The Rusty Nib from True Grit Texture Supply) and it worked well with the pencil textures and chalk smudges of the surrounding elements. Almost all of the illustrations were based on experiences with my own rescue dogs, and I have actual photographic evidence of a few of them.
I was very pleased with the results and thought it fit the stylised nature of the brand well without losing any of my own characteristic illustration style. The best part was we put it up for sale and ended up making a small profit, so we donated half of it to an animal rescue in need (Tails of Freedom). This was a very time consuming job and it was only after it was completed that I could get back to the pages of character development my supervisor had recommended.
Through these explorations I’m realising that depicting injury without it being too traumatising will be the next challenge. My supervisor also advised that perhaps a combination of naïve style drawing and perfect lines could lend an interesting contrast to the visual language. The last panel also features reds and blues, as I am trying to figure out a relationship between these colours in relation to Josef Albers’ observations on how colours intersect and the different impacts changing different variables can have such as tone, mark making tool, method of application, etc. (Albers 1963). For example, the story is set in Sri Lanka, so I would hope that the palette emits a sense of warmth as well as the way foliage invades the urban landscape.
References
ALBERS, Josef. 1963. Interaction of Color. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
