Samantha Landells

Over the weekend I had a trip away to Edinburgh where we attended the Camera Obscura and World of Illusions. During my time here I found a few pieces of art which were rather intriguing and I would like to consider incorporating in my current and future projects. For example the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 'Water' depicts an individual made entirely out of fish and his 'Summer' painting which uses vegetables. This is excellent inspiration for my noodle box designs considering one of my concept ideas was to create the facial structure using vegetables which would be inside flavouring the noodles. I really love this style of illusionist work to form a paredolia effect, forming strutcures which are so easily recognisable as human by manipulating various other elements and objects. The work of Arcimboldo is very traditional though so perhaps I could modernise it to fit better with the purpose of my 3D visualisation project. 

During my trip to Durham I decided to explore the exhibitions on at the University Library and found that the current artist on exhibit was Norman Cornish. There were a lot of sketches on show within this exhibition and I found them extremely interesting to be able to identify and understand how they are able to manipulate the human form in such a rough way whilst creating such beautiful profiles. I wish I had seen this exhibit when I was studying my life drawing module as the technique they have used of rather erratic line work is a technique I would love to explore in future development projects. However, I also love their oil paintings as they use such muted colouring in certain ones yet the attention to detail truly makes you feel completely encapsulated in the forgotten times of the Spennymoor miners. He manages to incorporate so much emotion in each and every brush stroke and it is truly inspiring. I would love to explore Cornish's work further in another module where I...

I faced a lot of difficulties when creating the design for this crustacean themed box, I originally designed a curved edge which ended up not lining up and creating unrealistic anatomy. I then experimented with the creation of a flat edged crab which still did not look quite right.  In order to resolve this issue I then explored the creation of a wavy upper shell which worked much better! It not only maintained the appropriate anatomy of the chosen creature, but also helped create a level of flare and interest to the design. However, despite this style appearing much more effective I still needed to do a lot of altering and printed mock ups in order to ensure each edge lined up perfectly. I managed to achieve this in the end and I am much happier with the final design for this character box.  My SMART target for this box is to explore how well the design works on a fully acetate box as I feel having it in a see through container would really boost the visuals of th...

Following the completion of my first two concepts, whilst taking a break from artist research, I wanted to experiment with an entirely different creature. The new theme I have chosen to explore is that of molluscs and crustaceans. The first creature I have decided to create was the crab flavoured noodles. I really like how I have extended the design of this creature to have a more visible body as I feel it makes for a highly interesting design having all of the claws in view. I made sure to use reference material of both real life and cartoon style crabs to help inspire my design and help me form the correct anatomy for my crab. I really like how this design extends to the entire dimension of the box. However, once I managed to print out my design in order to check its functionality I found that due to the curved features the sides did not match up correctly and caused the design to be rather displeasing. Due to this I will explore the creation of this character in a square for...

Whilst considering how to form the facial expression for my hottest spiced box it was important to consider how the expression could be translated into a style which would remain consistent with the other two boxes in this series. To do this I would have to ensure it remained in the chibi styling like my others. Although I have not altered the base eye shape for the first two designs, I feel the slight extension on my third design has a lot more impact.

When creating my medium heat chicken box I experimented with a few different expression styles before I was happy. In the end I decided not to alter the base shape of the eyes in order to ensure they remained consistent with the rest of my designs and I felt this would be better represented by focusing on manipulating the shine elements rather than altering the eyes entirely. Overall I am very pleased with the final results as I feel it is different enough to maintain interest whilst conveying the facial expression I was aiming for. Now I just need to explore how I will create the facial expression for my hot box. I really like the simplicity of this box, although it's design is minimal its message is clear which I feel is essential whilst creating a commercial product.

Following the completion of all three of my animal noodle boxes, I decided to return to my chicken noodle box in order to also create the three heat level concepts as I felt this would now enable me to focus more on expression development. As I returned to this though I found I wanted to alter the beak of my original animal trio chicken to a more rounded style as I felt it would be more consistent with the style and features throughout my all of my designs rather than the sharp edged beak I had originally created. Once these alterations were made I began the process of creating my medium and hot chicken noodle boxes. To begin with I altered the basic features such as the wings and beak to follow each new colour scheme. I was then able to begin exploring various facial expressions to hopefully portray what I was aiming for. To help me with this I searched for cute facial expressions on Google to use as reference.

When I began creating the design for my cow or beef flavoured noodle packaging, I wanted to obtain some visual reference material to refer back to, to ensure my design followed the correct simplified anatomy of a cow. I began by creating a mood board of cute cow drawings, as this would help influence the most vital features as well as the overall style of my character whilst taking into account the consistency of my other two noodle box designs. Following this research I found that they had a similar mouth style to that of my pig noodle box and so I decided to reuse this asset as I liked the way it looked for both animals. However, I may change the colouring slighlty to ensure there is also a level of new interest. Following the completion of my characters basic features I decided to create the cows udders, originally I created these from my memory however I was unsure they were correct. Due to this I decided to gather some more reference imagery focused purely on the cows udde...