Influences on Current Practice 3: E-portfolio

This post is an e-portfolio a presentation for my college course in Art and Design that can be done on either my blog or as a PowerPoint presentation.


Here we have some early charcoal work which I created when I started experimenting with narrative story telling.

It was a shot 3 page story of a woman getting mugged/attacked. I got two of my friends to pose in a few positions which I then photographed.

I then put the photographs into Photoshop and played around with the brightness and contrast. This is also when I started experimenting with dark shading and light in an almost Noir style which was partially influenced by the movie Eraserhead 

by the American film maker David Lynch.

I then printed them onto acetate, projected them onto some A1 paper and began sketching them in charcoal. It was from using charcoal that I developed my erratic and scribbly style of drawing and shading.

This was the next step up from the previous project. This time I decided to go for a longer 8 page story.

 After that I then decided to experiment with the addition of colour and emotion. I had been playing around the the idea of adding colour but it was the work of the artist Zak Smith 

that first showed me what adding colour might look like. I added a different colour to each page to see what kind of emotions each one invoked.

The story itself was about a man at wits end, after see dozens of horrid and grotesque monstrosities he has been driven mad and has come to the conclusion that the only way to escape these horrors is to end his own life.

I came up with the concept for the story after researching the work of the 1920s horror and sci-fi author H.P. Lovecraft 

as his work often deals with cosmic monsters driving men to the edge of sanity.

I also began experimenting with text to help convey emotion as well. The text I used was a quote from a video game based on the book A Shadow over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft. I used it because I thought it adequately expressed the feelings and mindset that I wanted to show.

I created these in the same way I did with the previous project. I used paint for the colour although I left the 8th page white.

After that I did some research into two artists that interested me Mike Mignola creator of the comic book Hellboy and B.P.R.D 

as well as Mustashrik who has done various things one of which was the illustration for an English language Manga called "Manga Shakespeare: Julius Caesar". 

It was their inky styles which made me decided to start experimenting with ink instead of the charcoal that I had previously been using.

I used this ink style to produce my Final Major Project. It started out as an illustration for the sentence "He who lives forever knows the true meaning of hell" which I had come up with myself  but it was my tutor that gave me the idea of making a short story out of it.

The story follows a man who by unknown means has made himself immortal and in the process doomed him self to watch the whole of humanity to its very end and then he must walk the earth alone until the end of time.

I sketched and inked each one then put them into Photoshop where I played with the brightness and contrast, I then added the blue as a mid tone and to help add to the sadness and anguish of the story. I then printed them off to add the text which this time was entirely of my own creation. finally I scanned them back in and re printed them in A3.

Finally down below is an example of my further experimentation with colour.

Well that's all I have for you I have a few ideas on how I want to further develop my work that I'm currently playing around with which involve the way I use light and colour, are there any questions?