The last two classes have been mainly dedicated to develop a character. I’ve ended up with dust…

In order to expand a character of our choice Dee gave us few small briefs: “something scary come into the page”, “Something your character created has been destructed; how does he react?”, “Your character win over the sadness so he’s happy” and finally “Your character is confronted to a friend, a foe, or a family member”. Of course, the briefs were initially much more well written, anyway… 

So, basically, it’s been about adding expressions – scared, happy, … – and developping related second characters. I decided to carry on with the yellow thing I created during the previous “collage” session.

The “yellow thing” became friend with the plant but he just realised that someone’s gonna kill his new friend:

Too late, the plant is dead, nothing will never be the same:

Then, on the “something great finally happened” part, I tried, following Dee’s idea, to do something like: Finally the plant is not dead, she’s got legs now and became independant so the thing is happy… boring. I’ve been also quickly bored of the graphic style of the thing and even the plant, so I take on the last brief with a new version of the “thing” (he might gonna need a proper name at some point…)

Initial idea: the thing meets a friend. Here you go:

I found from the first sketches that the “thing” – who’s supposed to be a monster – isn’t that scary, so I worked out making his face looking bad by focusing on his big mouth with terrible teeths and his stupid look. Then I tried to make it much more furry and I got the graphical inspiration from a Splat the Cat an very nice book from Rob Scotton I saw the other day in a book store.

But I actually started this sketch with the “thing” friend: a broom. I don’t why I choose to characterize a broom, but it finally brings a meaning and helps me knowing a lot more about my main character (yes, the “THING”!!!!). Here is the final blurb of this sketch then: 

“Doom the Broom just meets Nust the Dust and gets frightened as he knows that he will never be able to handle Nust very large size. Dusts are usually much more smaller (see Doom hairs…)”

Here you go the “thing” is actually a ball of dust!!!! It works for me and he’s even got a name: Nust the Dust!

I never really liked keeping on with drawing the same character over and over again but, even if it hasn’t been easy, I enjoyed this process as I started from a “thing” and ended up with something more consistent with a kind of real story behind. 

I finally did another sketch where I emphasis on the mini dusts trying to imitate “Nust scary features”:

Following last week first session coverage, here’s what I’ve got from my third illustration classe. Tonight we had the opportunity to give a try at collage. It’s been messy but monsterly fun.After the pets (first session) and the childrens last week, Dee brought on the table another children’s favorite: Monsters. Using collage for monsters really make sense as monsters  are allowed to non-realistic shape and the bright paper’s colors helps these creatures to pop out of the sheet (Dee’s been scared several time tonight…).

I think I’ve done my last collage attempt when I was around 10 yo so I haven’t got to deal with too many habits and jump into it as a virgin if I can say! Really love it. I started with a round shape of what will be the main character and then started adding details to it. After a little while it was sort of ok but I was struggling to find a way to add fun to the composition.

I then realized that one of the few guy (mainly womens in the course) was hijacking elements of a newspaper in order to create his beast based on Gordon Ramsay. F***ing good idea! So I decided to add “realistic” elements to my monsters. I then retraced the shape of the characters with a fat black line to make everything more lively.

It was very interesting to see other people technics of collage. On the second part Dee did a critic’s round of everybody’s work. It was a bit exhausting physically but inspiring because of diversity of styles and Dee’s comments.

As a good pupil I’ve done my homework last week and continued the moods exploration. Here’s a quick montage of what I’ve ended up with:

2009 is starting “sur les chapeaux de roues” (warning, this is a French expression, litterally: on the tyres’ hats) professionnaly-wise as I’ve just spend 3 weeks 90% focused on deadlines and… deadlines! But fortunately my recently reanimated hobbies help me to refresh my brains when it gets too hot.

Since a couple of weeks I’ve started my first ever illustration course at City Lit in London. Each Friday, during 3 hours, the illustrator, Dee Shulman, is bringing a small group of people to understand and practice everything about children’s books illustration. After two sessions – and one missed, thanks to deadlines :) – I have to say: I love it!

As my new beginning in illustration is one of the reasons why I started this blog, it wouldn’t be fair not to post the work I’m doing during this course. So here is what I’ve done tonight during my second lesson:

The first half was about choosing one of the childrens pictures available on the table and getting inspired in order to sketch something related. I’ve been quite attracted by the expression on the face of a “no-happy little girl” and so I’ve ended up with this:

Second half was dedicated to how to express different moods. We got time to work on “happy”, “sad” and “surprised” and few others moods have been ordered as homework (yes, homework’s back!):

And in details:

Happy

Sad

Surprised (but looks frightened)

I’ll try to post about this course after each session until the end in March, so, even if I don’t get much time to post anything else, I’ll have a good excuse to do it once a week!

Oh, yes, paper is back…