Final Major Project
For my final major project I started out with a pretty strong idea of what I wanted to achieve. Throughout my early sketches of potential childrens’ book characters I created an unusual imaginary creature called an Oggy Noggy with the body of a brontosaurus-type dinosaur and the head of a horse with shrek-like ears and spots. Firstly I dabbled with wanting to make a number book using the character, then my mother decided to write the story of this creature as she was keen to write a short story for children, suitable for a picture book. I thought her story complimented my character ideas well so I continued to create versions of the Oggy Noggy to fit into the story. ‘The Hairy Tale of the Oggy Noggy’ would be a childrens picture book about the character of the Oggy Noggy who has very messy, unruly hair whilst the others have stylish hair and therefore make fun of him. In the end it ends well with the Oggy’s hair becoming useful and saving the little ones from harm. I went so far with this project as to create a first rough draft of a dummy book, half of it with colour, and this was when I decided that I would transfer the idea to another project as I felt I did not have much more to add to fill out the project for the next year.
I thought about what I most enjoyed drawing (which is mainly animals) and what I enjoyed in my spare time (which includes listening to music and watching films). I wanted to combine the two to create a music culture book for children. I started off with the idea that it would be for children ages 5 and up so that they would have a fun and educational introduction to popular music figures. I planned to create a simple, colourful picture book that included ten famous musicians alongside information about them and their famous album covers alongside. I began the new project by starting with a lot of observational drawings, either at home or at the zoo or museums, to get my animal drawings up to scratch. I then went on to draw the musical characters, mainly using cats and dogs to portray them. I picked a range to concentrate on and ones I felt that I was most comfortable with drawing. I also studied the album covers I was hoping to spoof and just replaced the people with dogs or cats. I had to eventually change my technique as I came to understand that there would be complications with copyright laws if I just ended up drawing straight from the original pieces, even if the human element was changed. Since the first characters of the musicians were too close to the original photos, I decided to go for a different way of working which ended up helping me in producing my final piece. I went back to my observational drawings, made them slightly more cartoony with expression, and decided to just include the most recognisable parts of the musicians, which are usually the costumes they wear and their hairstyles. I chose to do this so that readers would hopefully not get confused as to who the animals were meant to be portraying. I chose ten of the best, and tried experimenting with watercolours and acrylics, although found that the watercolours didn’t come out bold enough and it didn’t feel finished, and the acrylics seemed to have a better outcome but after a much longer experimentation process. I wanted the work to look more clean and finished so I scanned in my images and put them through photoshop to make the colours stand out more and the lines more clean. The final problem I had was the text, as it took me a while to decide what information to include, how much and what the font should look like. I started off with putting the basic information about the musicians, their background and famous tracks, etc with the artwork, though I still coudn’t decide on the font and how it would sit with the images. I eventually abandoned this idea when I wanted to change my audience from children to older readers, as I felt that the images and the idea behind the book would benefit more from becoming a novelty book instead of a children’s picture book. This was party due to the fact that children would not know of the musicians beforehand and therefore would not recognise them in their animal counterparts. I decided to make it slightly humourous by taking the chosen musicians’ famous tracks and twisting them to fit the animal that was portraying them, eg. Tiny Daschund in place of Tiny Dancer for Elton John. The final images are just simple potraits of the ten chosen musicians as cats or dogs, with the song names above them as titles, while the front page combines the pawprint and the treble cleff, and the back page has my contact details.
Overall I feel that what I chose for this project was hard to determine in terms of the audience I was aiming it at and the layout of the pages. But I feel that I would like to continue with this book using better materials and layout to make it look more professional.
