On Monday evening before tomorrows session of script to screen I set to work on a Style frame for my Storytelling project The Dancer & The Shoe Maker. I felt that since this was a 19th century based story it required an old age style of art and so I did the style frame in Watercolour paints on textured paper. This decision was inspired by the work of one of my favorite illustrators Mark Crilley, as I recently learned that he creates his pieces using mixed media watercolours in the background then enhanced by the use of Photoshop/Clip Studio and introducing the character into the frame much like old age multi plane animation.
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| Example of Mark Crilley's work. |
I was rather amazed by this discovery and it related to some work I did back in College so it seemed appropriate for the story's theme to use a similar method. The size of the paper was A5 and using my research pages I sketched out a shoe makers work space and from the floor plan that I did of the shop. However sketching out the perspective was hard as I wanted to show a good view of the room. Thankfully I remembered what we were taught about perspective in Life Drawing and sketched from a long rectangle in the room. I felt I was making progress until I wasn't feeling sure about what goes into the shoe maker space. To help I looked at illustrations and images of 19th Century shoe maker shops to get inspiration and it helped considerably.
Once sketched I began to add colour. Looking back at my research it showed rooms such as this were stone rooms or plastered brown and so I used a light shade of brown water colour on the walls and added shades of black and grey as I painted. The furniture was then painted in colours of oak brown and some red on the cushioned chairs in the space for the shoe maker to measure the customers feet. Using white water colours it added highlights and textures to the piece giving it that 19th Century look. However the difficult area was the ceiling which was consisted of beams and floorboards and needed some darker tones of colour but at the same time defined the lines in the boards above.
The watercolour piece was finished and scanned into my computer and saved to my pen drive for later alteration in the morning. I was satisfied with the completed illustration.
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| Style frame original. |
10/4/18
Before the start of the Intro to the Making of session this morning, I experimented with the style frame in Photoshop using the different colours shown at different times of day morning, evening and night. These were done separately and to begin I played around with the curves in the original piece to try and define the colours better in the illustration. Then it was a matter of altering the brightness and contrast to make the piece look like it was in the early morning which was a bright colour but still a bit toned.
I added lighting and shadowing to the piece using the screen, overlay and colour dodge layer formats, but realised it was too much on the light glow in the illustration. To compensate for this I lowered the opacity on the lighting frames and it seemed to create an interesting blurred glow.
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| Style frame daytime. |
The matter of the evening and night style frames was using the colour balance tool to create an orange yellow like environment to represent the setting sun and a blue cyan environment for a night time scene whilst still maintaining the glow element from the moon or sun. In the night there would be a candle lit in the space so I created a gold circle and using the Gaussian blur tool in filters I created a glow from the candle set on the screen layer mode.
After glow effects were added to the wall using the screen layer and a orange yellow colour blend. the two seemed to work together very well creating a very interesting night time setting.
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| Style frame evening. |
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| Style Frame night. |
I was very pleased with the way these style frames turned out using my own experience and newly found techniques I may consider building upon this and place one of my characters into the frame to test it out. Looking back on this experience there are somethings that went very well and areas that I could improve upon. One area of improvement would be the perspective sketching at the start perhaps by doing a rough sketch before hand to see what position would be best for the scene. The piece is very well presented in terms of the medium used and it relates to the old age of the 19th century. I would think that using the inspiration of Mark Crilley's work was a good avenue to pursue since inspiration is key to projects such as this and helps me to further develop my own style.
In hindsight I would possibly have looked at other styles of art or do a test piece in digital lineless art to see how it would differ from the use of hand drawn mediums to get a better idea on alternate routes. In conclusion I would think the piece is adequate for use as a style frame and I may build upon this with a style frame of the opera stage to use as a potential cover for the production bible. In future I shall try and make time to place in one of my characters to see how their presence would look on the piece and how to make it look like a real movie scene.
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