Specialisation Week 1.5 : Helpful Strangers

Hi there,

I had good news for this week. I got a mentor for my project this Monday. His name is Fredrick Avén from Helpful Strangers. Yes, very helpful!

This week was quite intense. Several things had happened and my plan and schedule had been changed. One kind of good thing was that I don’t have to find a place for work-shadowing anymore, because I applied to the workshop with General Mills at school next week. It will take 3 full days from 8.30 until evening! Let’s see what is gonna happen.

About my project, I had been struggling pretty much about my drawing style since I got the feedback from my mentor, which were “find my own style”, “make it easy”, “add more messages for communication”, “don’t have to show everything” and “start researching the topic for infographic before it’s too late”. I think that it is…

I then tried to redesign all characters again to emphasise the sin of that character more and more. I also turned back to draw in my own scratchy line that I used to do when I was in university. I haven’t drawn with this style for years. It took some time to settle down but still not enough time. Moreover, I had to ditch all ideas that I’m gonna use “Art Nouveau” and “Psychedelic” as an inspiration for the background, or maybe I have to find the way to combine these styles with my dark-scratchy line together.

Anyway, in the first blog I didn’t mention the resource and reference that I used for this project. I got the idea of using animals from this website: http://www.deadlysins.com. I actually tried to research more about why those animals relate to the sins but I got none. Maybe it’s in the books but I don’t have much time. So, I tried to add the message in those animals to represent those sins instead.

According to my old plan and old sketches, my characters were supposed to look like this:

(Cow-Lust, Pig-Gluttony, Frog-Greed, Goat-Sloth, Bear-Wrath, Dog-Envy, and Horse-Pride)

After the mentor session last Tuesday, here are new sketches:

I still use the same pose in some characters but change the perspective a bit.

This is when I apply an ink in the sketches:

Not yet, this hasn’t done yet. There will be next steps in the computer for finalising these characters in the illustrations. I had to postpone my schedule further more because this task were harder than I think and, surely, I need to work on the weekend as well.

Let’s keep in touch.

See you so soon,
Best