Online bullying monster

In this post I'd like to share an advertising campaign I've been working on for design class. Above you can see the campaign art and message, along with two mock billboard applications.

We were required to design a campaign around a (thankfully) hypothetical Facebook "dislike button". A fairly abstract brief, but I was determined to have some fun with it. I decided to focus on the button's potential use in online-bullying, also its potential effect on the mental health of children.

The concept was to have a memorable blue monster that would grow larger and larger as children were nasty to each other online. Anyone familiar with Studio Ghibli's films will surely notice the influence in the design of this monster - its body shape heavily inspired by the grotesque 'No Face' in Spirited Away.

Below are a couple of the visual development sketches.

I hope you enjoyed seeing some of my illustration and design process. If you'd like to see more of this type of thing, please do let me know in the comments below!

The Very Cross Bun ...continued

Above: Using dark cool colours and shapes that look similar to clutching fingers I hope to have conveyed a sense of danger for the bun, (who wants to keep dry naturally).

Below: Children tumble out of school at the end of a day. Bun meets natural predator, school children.

More from The Very Cross Bun. I'm about half way through the final art for this book. I don't think there's a single illustration without a few things I wouldn't change if I could go back and revise. But for those few imperfections, I think there are just as many happy accidents. I have tried to maintain a sense of play in their making, which I hope comes out in the art. Approaching each piece at the outset as an experiment rather than a finished piece seems to have tricked my perfectionism into finishing illustrations that in the end I hope are spontaneous and enjoyable to look at.

More from LITOL series

Here are some of my favourite illustrations from Legends in their own Lunchbox. I did a total of more than 128 illustrations I think, so this is only a tiny fraction. I can gratefully say I took a lot of lessons from this project. One of the biggest was how to simplify. Simplify characters, props, backgrounds, compositions etc. That's a never ending journey, but I do feel I made some progress in this department, and I think this lesson is going to affect my future work.

The Dog Tags

 Friend Paul C. Newman wrote a short story called The Dog Tags. After reading it I thought it would make a good story to illustrate. At this stage I'm only doing one or two concept illustrations to see what it might look like. I put a lot of time into the colours for this one but I'm not sure how well I chose them. With digital painting I find it a real challenge to limit the number of colours and to keep them all singing together in harmony.

Sketchbook

Just some snippets from my sketchbook. A mix of mall sketches and a caricature from memory. You could say 'compost' for future character designs.

Kids Pursuit

Still with the fox project, here are some concept sketches for the children in the story.

Cake boy

My break is over.. I am posting! Here's another Hunchback of Notre Dame inspired character.

Illustration - Wolf Child

 

As many of my visitors are no doubt aware, there have over the ages been numerous stories and myths about children raised in the wild by animals. I thought it would be an interesting theme to explore. It raises all kinds of questions about things like nature vs nurture, our 'humanness' and so on. In this image I wanted to depict a really wild child - one in which many of the traits we consider to be marks humanity are absent. I was going to include wolves in the image, however the extra elements were more than I wanted to take on for now. In this image I have the androgynous child perched on top of a mossy rock in what could be a drinking hole.

Concept sketch - wolf child

Another update on an in-progress illustration. Still brain-storming on the character designs and composition. Here's another two concepts.

Preview sketch

It's time I started on a new illustration... Here's a preliminary sketch for an idea I've had. For the sake of suspense I can't say what it's about yet! Hope this sparks your interest.

Boy colour sketch

 Experimenting with watercolour..

Swarm

This was meant to be my Illustration Friday entry but it's about two weeks late. The theme was 'swarm', though I think this would probably go better with the word 'spore' since the children kind of look more like floating spores. The bottom image was a value study. The final watercolour has had quite a lot of colour correction as the finished piece turned out very insipid.

Illustration Friday entry - preview

Only one day to go, here's a preview of my Illustration Friday entry for this week.

watercolour illustration

This is about my 3rd attempt - maybe 10th if I count all the paintings of separate sections I did to try and decide the colours. I knew this one was going to be a challenge for me - being a learner of watercolour still. It's far from perfect, but time to move on. I'm happy enough with this one.

(P.S. It's a mulberry tree if you missed the previous post)

Illustration roughs - "Attacking the Mulberries"

Here are some preparation sketches for a new piece. I'm planning to try watercolour for this one. Hopefully I can improve upon my woeful earlier attempts at using this medium. For the idea here, I borrowed an old theme from Illustration Friday which was simply the word 'savour'. In this piece I'm also drawing on childhood experience, climbing on top of the shed to attack the mulberries.