Samantha Landells

I decided at this stage that I wanted to focus on creating three entirely different character boxes in order to allow me to explore more in terms of each characters specialised features. I could reuse certain assets like the placement of the eyes, however everything else would need to be altered. Overall, I am very happy with the outcome of this creation as I feel it's style remains consistent with my chicken box.

Once I had completed my chicken noodle box design, I thought it would be interesting to explore different expressions and the impact  that would have over the rest of the design. I feel like the addition of little white glares looked rather appealing and so I am likely going to incorporate that within both my chicken box design and the other two faces in this series.

For this module, one of my concepts was to either have a chicken and three levels of spices conveyed through their colour scheme and expressions or three different animals entirely to represent the different meats used in each noodle box. I was very excited to create my first digital mock up of my chicken concept as I felt it shared a very fun and child like style which made it appealing to a very broad target audience. I have not used Illustrator for quite some time so it was good to get used to manipulating the software once again. Overall, the concept for my first noodle box is extremely simplistic but I feel very impactful as all of my fellow classmates who I asked to review my box were able to easily identify that it was aiming to represent chicken noodles! On the original design I had incorporated a Japanese translation of the contents for my box, however upon later review I felt it got in the way of the overall design so I chose to remove it.     ...

Considering I have decided to create my environments using completely traditional methods in order to challenge myself, I thought the most effective process would be to paint out my environments first in my sketchbook and then complete a critical analysis of my final painting in order to see which elements I like and which I feel need improving. This will enable me to obtain a full mock up of my environment prior to committing it to my wooden boards which, as I will be unable to make any drastic alterations to my final environments once I begin. I have completed the first mock up for my first environment and have formed my critical analysis to give me a clear plan of what I need to work on next before starting my next full environment painting. One of the targets I have set myself is to recreate one of my digital illustrations into traditional mediums in order to see how I can use various brush techniques to influence my designs without having to focus primarily on composition as...

For this characters design I wanted to go back to basics, I felt that perhaps I was starting to focus on the minor details of each character when in reality something incredibly simple could have just as big an effect on the audience. Due to this I created my bird using basics shapes and no shading, relying purely on the simplistic shapes to create a really cute character. Before uploading my creation though I decided to use a low opacity airbrush effect in order to create a pink hue on the front of my bird, similar to that of its environment to insinuate that the lighting is causing the colour to reflect.

Through my continuing research I found I was noticing a lot of food based characters, despite having already created a bunch of these style characters as an independent project I wanted to start from scratch to try and make something even cuter! I decided to use cell shading rather than the airbrushed style of my worm character as I felt it was much more suitable and coherent to artists who design cute objects in a similar way. I found I had to mess around with the proportions of this character a lot before finally coming to a result which I felt gave off the desired effect. For this creation I decided to use Illustrator to create the initial structures of my character then imported it into Photoshop to add all of the final details and background. I chose to use Illustrator as I felt it was a much better tool at being able to provide me with the crisp, accurate line work I was aiming for. Overall I am happy with how it has turned out.

My second character I wanted to try and incorporate some form of relevant object within the environment to add a little more interest to the background. To do this I came up with the concept of having a bait worm wrapping itself around a hook as if unsuspecting. I really like the way this illustration turned out, but following some exploration into some of the character entries on the Pictoplasma website into the illustrations I found very eye catching. I found they used a fake light source behind their characters in order to add another level of depth. I chose to create this character using brush tools in Photoshop as I wanted the worm itself to have imperfections in order to make it slightly more realistic. Perhaps I could explore this further in my next characters design.

After making the alterations outlined in my previous post I feel my design looks a lot better now but I am still unsure how to make the design have the same cute sensation I as the artist I was inspired by. Perhaps I need to complete further research before reattempting this design to help me clearly pinpoint the elements and features which create a successful cute style illustration. I reduced the opacity of the shadow underneath the character as I felt this was far too intense in my first attempt, I feel the less saturated shadow looks a lot better. I also made the shadow on the head a lot more prominent from the hat, perhaps if I were to redo this design in the future I could work on the shadow placement to improve this design further.

I really felt inspired by all of the illustrations I keep seeing of having a translucent vessel with liquid inside, my design was inspired by the artist @createdbyjz who's illustration I have included below alongside my final design to show which image I was using as my reference for this creation. I wanted to explore the use of a warmer background however I do not feel my attempt matched the cute style I was aiming for, for some reason? Perhaps if I were to make the colours of my character more saturated this may help? I may also alter the background to see how this affects the overall aesthetic of the design

Over the week we have off from university we have been assigned the task of creating character entries for the upcoming Pictoplasma challenge #2cute2fail. To begin with I decided to create a folder of various artists and creations of all the cute things which inspired me. This really helped influence my initial ideas, and following my targets from my last module I began doodling some little creature ideas of my own in order to work on my traditional skill set. I found that the common colour pallettes associated with cute designs generally consist of very pastel or very saturated themes, the majority of characters have either extra large or small facial features and in combination create the adorable effects seen below. The designs I have looked into appear to have minimal detailing and consist mainly of colour block shading which will be important to take into consideration during the development of my own characters.  

If I did not run out of time I would have liked to have completed a variety of experiments for my final environment however, by using a new medium I feel I did not have a true understanding of how long each painting would take me. If I were to use this medium in the future I would possibly focus on one illustration rather than 3 as I am happy with the level of experimentation I managed to create for my first and second environment. I decided to make minimal alterations digitally, and perhaps this will be the downfall to my creations however I wanted the focus to remain on the fact that they were originally painted traditionally considering this is not a medium I have used very often. Originally I had wanted to hand in my final illustration triptychs as paintings on wooden board, however due to time restraints and advice from my tutors I chose to manipulate and refine them digitally instead in order to save time. I really like how the first two environments turned out but I feel l...

Although I was incredibly worried at the start of this module due to my lack of traditional skills, I am happy with the progress I managed to make. Although I did not end by being able to replicate accurate proportions still, my latest work looked a lot more stylised and visually accurate compared to my first few attempts. I really enjoyed the different tasks we were set, such as having to draw multiple positions in 10 second intervals or using a length of stick to place the control in our arm movements rather than what we were comfortable with. I would love to have more classes focusing on traditional art techniques as I feel it could really help improve my overall ability as an illustrator. I find it difficult to improve without any direction so having more classes to focus on this would be very helpful.

Following the creation of the flyers and business cards I completed for Churchill Group Cleaning Services, I was asked to create an initial mock up of a character design which could be used to promote their businesses and services. They wanted this character to be extremely minimal with limited facial features. I decided to create this using Illustrator as it would create crisper line work and more easily editable elements. This was my first time trying to digitally design a human character and it is clear to see I may not have achieved this very well. Regardless, unfortunately the funding for this was dropped and they no longer required the completion of these characters. Due to this my final design is not completely refined and I was not 100% happy with it at this stage however the funding has been stopped and I have been asked to stop this project. The image below shows the first initial mock up I created and provided to the client before this happened. I was provided with an im...