I started this exercise by writing down all the important thing to do with character that I could think of such as emotions they may be feeling, the scene, clothes worn, colours that remind me of this passage etc to help me really narrow down what I want to do for this illustration.
Using spider diagrams I picked apart my chosen word of bleak and thing that I associate with it and this was helping me to understand my word better and also got me to start thinking of ways to translate this in my artwork, at this point I felt that colour would be very important in the representation of the word ‘bleak’.
I made some mood boards relating to my word, having the imagery infant of me was inspiring me for my artwork and having textures and colours that I could use all in one pace was useful to refer back to. I also made a moodboard relating to the era the piece of writing was set in as I only have images to go by of what that time in history was like, I also included some images that for me came to mind when I was reading the passage as I think having some visual aids there help with the planning.
In my sketchbook I set about drawing up character, inspired by images I had found and old movie style police man I started creating my character.
Using the moodboard as inspiration, I created a background using materials and techniques I had tried and came up with this black white and grey messy paint background, as I mentioned before I felt colour was very important in setting the ‘bleak’ tone of the piece so sticking to a limited colour palette helped me with that. The expression on my characters face I think also translates the bleak idea and how he must be feeling at that point, It’s a very sombre look on his face I think. The black ink pen outline is one of my favourite aspects of the piece I really like the loose feeling of it and its simple lines that still make up a fake thats easy to read.
I’m very happy with how this one turned out, I’m a big fan of portrait drawing so when this exercise came up I was really looking forward to it. I liked the whole idea of coming up with my own character and depicting him how I think from how I personally interpreted the text. I had fun experimenting with ideas on my moodboard and different paint methods that i later used in the final design. I think what works in my design is how I have portrayed the moodiness and solemness that I think is demonstrated in the piece of text. My colour choice also adds to that bleak feeling of the text and ‘bleak’ is the word I focused on and made a moodboard for, the limited colours enhance the bleak feeling and having them all marbled together creates different shades and makes for an interesting background to sit the character on. If I could do anything differently I may have picked a different word to work with although bleak gave me some good ideas, I also may have spent more time on the drawing of the face and boldening the lines and adding some highlights. I also could have done a few more drawings of the face prior to doing the final one and practicing drawing facial expressions. Overall I’m happy with how this turned out and would do this again in the future using a different text and words to be inspired by.
images from-
flickr.com
key.fm
goodreads.com
Jade Prictoe 
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