The original meeting between Nust the Dust and Doom the Broom but this time in colours!

Yesterday evening was the tenth and very last session of the course. We had the chance to expose the work we achieved during a showcase where friends and family were invited.I don’t feel like I want to write a lot about this right now – it’s late, I should sleep – but I’m glad to have completed my first ever course in illustration. Just the fact that, for the first time, I had proper hours to draw, has been a sort of revelation really. Last time I used to sketch a lot was when I was student… but during study hours, of course :) 

On top of that I’ve also rediscovered the pleasure of traditional drawing, playing with paper textures and various tools. Full digital illustration seems a bit flat now and I don’t even think about my poor Nintendo DS… Still needs Photoshop thought :)

This post is deconstructed but… Anyway it’s 3.30am and it’s all mine!!!

So, during this showcase we had to stick all our work on a huge black sheet of paper. The main piece of work was the final brief of the workshop. Several options were proposed, I choosed to work on opposites: Over/Under. As this was the last project, Dee asked the students to do it as polished as possible. I mean with colours and text, as a finished artwork really. I used the set of Caran d’Ache Supracolor my beloved offered me for my recent Birthday. I love these pencils. There are very very bold and the colours looks fantastic with a large range of hardness (Hope it means something, I’m still French sorry :)) Once the illustrations finished I’ve scanned them, adjusted tone and contrast, added the text in Photoshop and finally printed them on a nice paper. As my printer is A4 I had to shrinked down the drawings by 80% but it even looks better and crisper after that. I’ve been actually very impressed by the printed version. It really helped to make the colours pop out and, well, here they are:

I’ve also cleaned up, retouched and printed some of my previous illustrations:

For me this course as been a very good experience where I learned how to develop characters and ideas and use materials in a proper way. I’d like to thanks Dee Shulman for the great advices and feedback she gave to me and she’s been  truly brilliant as animating the classes in a cool and relaxed atmosphear. I really appreciated that especially on Friday evenings! She will do other workshops this summer and next December and yes, I highly recomment them!

For now I’m gonna try to carry on in producing illustration. Maybe not for childrens but I need to keep the productivity up and I want to, so this blog will be my witness.

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”: