front page inital concepts

A couple of basic front cover designs. Essentially I drew up the elements by hand, stuck them on some coloured stock and photocopied them. Primitive would be the word....The printed copies actually looked almost okay, but no where near satisfactory. I figured the hand drawn feel would help to make it appear graphic-novelly and comic style. Turns out this would require investing a great amount of time in hand rendering type designs and stuff like that, so I guess I'll get involved with a bit of Illustrator and see what I can come up with. 

 

 

In fact, these are total crap, I almost feel as if I have to apologise. All part of the process though.

that was then this is now

watched this extract of the film on youtube, and it's exactly the way I imagined it when I read the book. Definitely going to get hold of a copy and watch the whole thing......I really like this style of film.......sometimes...you know, old school American flicks, slightly dark and whatnot.

WH4T 1S 4 L1N3 - plan of action

ESSENTIALLY going on my chosen definition of 'Line' - 'A Connected series of events, actions or developments' - I have near enough decided and created a brief for this project.

Basically when I was younger I read this book called 'That was then, This is now' by S.E. Hinton. Here it is:



Wonderful book. Well sort of anyway. It was alright. Entertained me quite a bit, I've read it three times, which is more than any other book I've read, and it's fairly short and to the point. It's also fairly dark in places as well, it's about two best friends who grow apart in some fairly tragic ways. Anyway, it's got all the credentials to make a wicked comic strip, in my opinion. So this is what I'm going to do.

As usual, I've left things pretty late, and I now have ten days to complete this project. So in this ten days I will do the following:

- develop a drawing style to suit the storyline and characters, a style that can yield rapid results
- condense the chapters into short scripts to allow the story to be told in a fairly short space with the help of images
- attempt to have some kind of finished comic strip-type-thing ready for the deadline.

It's a lot.

I've heard they've made a film out of it too now. I haven't seen it but I might go out of my way to watch it just to make my life a tiny bit easier.

Further mind-mapping.

investigating a bit further into sequential art. Turns out the term 'sequential art' more so relates to stuff like comic strips and story boards as opposed to moving image and animation. I'll probably look further into creating some sort of comic strip-style artwork. Interestingly it was also pointed out to me that whilst the term was only coined in 1985-ish, the idea has been around since BC times, what with Egyptian Hieroglyphs and stuff like that, picture manuscripts telling stories and conveying information through image. Also tapestry is a fairly well-known medium that regularly employs sequential images.

What is a Line...themes.

A few randomly selected themes to get my mind working a bit. I'll spend some time researching and investigating various pieces of sequential artwork on my design context blog, to get some ideas for production techniques whilst I decide on some kind of theme. 

What is a Line...preferred definition

I quite like the idea of Sequential art, stuff that employs time as a concept, I feel that this can be much more expressive than static images. I came up with a few broad and vague ideas underneath, types of work that would contain a series of events between and starting and finishing point. A to B. or A to Z via C, F, M and the next. Or B to A, or Z to A, whatever. Backwards forwards sideways downwards etc, you name it. 

Direction and Magnitude and all that jazz.

Obviously I'm going to have to form a refined brief to give me some sort of clear direction of where to go and where not to go.

What is a Line - Brief.

There it is. The brief for the next Visual Language project. Looks like one to really get stuck in to. Dig my teeth in and whatnot. Bite off as much as I can chew. and more.