Week Four: Set, Series, Sequence. (OUAN404) Visual Language

This brief so far has been a lot of fun. I randomly selected the word "hammer" and have spent the last few days doing a bunch of drawings based around that word. At first, I found it difficult to draw much inspiration from the word, but then I began to think of what kind of people use hammers and what hammers represent. Once I began looking at these things, new avenues opened themselves up to me. Then, I chose the drawing I believed had the most potential and extrapolated on that in further drawings.

Here are a some of my initial drawings

This one has some copic pen in it.

I enjoyed dissecting the word and seeing what spins I could put on it.

I figured I'd get in trouble unless I did a couple of actual drawings

Some watercolour. I guess these guys are fighting over a contract or something.

It was a good way to exercise my brain, because I had to look at the word from different perspectives and be creative in order to meet the twenty four drawing requirement. Mostly, I hope that my drawings are funny. I tried to use a sort of variety of techniques, although I could've tried harder. I used copic pen, fineliners, watercolour and marker pens.

Above is the drawing I chose to explore further. I liked the idea of the hammer being the focus of a scene where primordial man and ape race to be the first species to become advanced. I then laid out a bit of a narrative which I'd like to storyboard.

Here are a few of those drawings.

The pattern on the floor was "inspired" (ripped off) from one of my favourite illustrators, David Shrigley.

Here it is seen in Shrigley's animation, "New Friends"

I kept the art style of the original drawing. I think the characters look nicely stylised. Were I to develop the drawings further I would make the background more detailed.

I've kept the hammer as the central object of the whole piece, but now that I'm building on that concept I'm keen to make it character based because it's more interesting. While I'm still sticking to the brief, I really want the focus to be on the competition between the neanderthal and the ape.