Animal collective nouns. A workshop for a Uni Module.

Hi Guys, Sorry about the absence of recent posts over the summer, but I now have quite a back log of work to go up. These first collection of Images come from an animal related workshop from my 3rd year Illustration BA course. The Idea was that we chose a collective animal noun, In this case 'A congregation of Alligators' and produce some initial images, eventually progressing on to illustrate the animal in a form which represented them as a group (like the noun). I initially wanted to draw a cartoon of a group of alligators as a church congregation but the brief stipulated that it should be in more of a pattern type layout.

 (Above) Digital sketch using brush, airbrush and pencil tools. I chose not to render the entire image as I think it looks better incomplete.

These are a series of Alligator illustrations, also all digital, drawn, coloured and rendered using a Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet. I tried to render the styles a little as well as the colour pallet, though as is often the case most of them are drawn to a rather realistic standard. Before developing any of the images any further I thought I might make a couple of mock-up pattern designs using some of the abouve imagery.

I made a few patterns fro the earlier digital drawings but this one was the best of them. I also played with the background colour and tone, levels, ect, but It looks best when kept simple. I think this pattern would be popular as present wrapping paper, wall paper or sketch/writing pad cover paper for any young boy or girl. Really simple and equally easy to produce.

 This Design was one of the less successful ones, although If cleaned up and developed further could potentially be another good design for wrapping paper. I decided to focus on developing a similar image but in more detail.

This Digital painting was the result of nearly 10 hours work in Photoshop. I have only had my graphics tablet for a few months now so I am, and will be focusing heavily on the digital side of my work over the final 7 months of my degree. This way I can make the improvement imperative to bring my graphics skills up to higher level. I have a lot of layers and screen shots for this one but don't want to clog my blog up with dozens of repetitive images. In all honesty there were time when this piece wasn't coming together and I had regrets even starting it, but I went back a few times, persevered and In the end the result is something that I am really stoked with. There is always room for improvement but that's what the journey is for right? The basic steps for this painting went like this: I made outlines for eyeball, iris, eyelid, skin cracks and shadow. Then added a base color and darken/erased line work where necessary. After that I added another layer of over colour, darkening areas of shadow and low light (creases crack ect). after colour was complete I added all the detail/rendering in the eyeball, the brown spots on the lower eye lid   and finally final tone, shadow and played with the hue, saturation, levels, colour until I was happy with the final result. Although slightly painstaking I really enjoyed using this piece to get to grips with some of the more simple photoshop tools such as airbrush, customised brushes and just the ordering and grouping of layers. The next step after this was to make some sort of patter from the image.

 This was one of the final pattern designs I maje from the reptile eye image. The above version seemed too big and loses something from the original I think. This smaller version works better but I still think The original digital painting works better as a single image. This design seems to generated and not customised. I think If I were to cut of the eye itself (like the earlier collage) then It might work much better as a whole pattern.