Project - The Secret Thoughts of...

This brief has asked us to illustrate what we cant see - thoughts. My secret thoughts had to be those of a puppeteer. I did lots and lots of research into puppeteering, and much of its history is very deep and psychological, so I decided to go down that route. After a few very rough sketches of ideas, I pinned it down to a choice of two.
We had a group crit' and both my lecturers and the group chose this one as the strongest. My aim was to try illustrate the split personality and sometimes confusion of a puppeteer, his thoughts wanting to cut the strings...

 

The sketch above is the one that my group chose, after further input and advice from my lecturers like making the character more fluid and floppy, and to add more interest such as the Victorian suit with tails and Victorian curve blade ornamental scissors, I redrew and messed about with it using layout paper and trusty lightbox. The final image ended up like this...

 

"The Secret Thoughts of a Puppeteer"

 

Close up of the head...

 

And the bottom half.

A dull starting point - Final

Well, here is my final piece for the project where our brief was a till receipt from Waitrose. After much messing around and some excellent advice and input from the lecturers, I finally pinned down my layout as shown in my previous post. During the initial feedback sessions one piece of advice really stuck with me and that was to "try and make a really good sandwich with just a few ingredients, instead of a big pot of stew with lots of ingredients where I'd be forever adding bits of this that and the other to get it right." (A strange analogy but being a big food lover it really worked for me, ha!).

On the back of that my visual completely changed and simplified, and I needed to move away from it looking so much like a logo. So instead of using the symmetry and 'altering' Darwin's tree of life to look like cracks in the egg, I used his sketchbook page complete with his scribbly handwriting, not changing anything at all. Making the page almost translucent I laid this over the the egg. A clear portrait of a 'thoughtful' Darwin and sardines swimming over the image is all it needed. I dropped the idea of using the Quantum Leap statue completely.

The deadline and feedback was yesterday, and it got a very positive response and I am overall very happy with my illustration - its amazing what can come from a simple till receipt...

 'A Dull Starting Point'