Revised Project Proposal

Carrying on from May, my project is still very much focused on creating a series of short narratives that explore the innovation vs superstition in Victorian Culture and to explore my objective of transferring the research I find out about the period and providing gentle engagement for my audience, encouraging self study and research into topics which spark their interest.
The series will also lend itself to a teaching implement which could be possibly useful for museums, exhibitions and information booklets. I want my project to be a fun and interesting way for the audience to connect to a bygone era through my characters and narrative.

This is an updated proposal of my work so far, along with research and my plans on how to successfully achieve my goals.

As I said before, I want my final major project to be  a series of short narratives that lend themselves to a graphic novel/web comic format. It will pay homage to genre fiction as well as the Victorian era along with the steampunk movement. It will explore the subject of innovation vs supernatural associated with that era to understand how the two conflicting topics  work well when placed alongside each other.

The  Victorian period is known for its innovation and development, but there was a different side to Victorian Culture with its myths, legends and speculative fiction as well an unhealthy obsession with the occult which dates back to ancient times .It was a time of ghosts, ghouls and monsters, mostly fiction, but I began to think of how different this period would have been if they were real or a grain of truth were present.  
 I want my project to open peoples eyes to information that they might have known about or misunderstood about this era and make it more accessible for people to learn about.


The narrative will follow a small group of paranormal investigators who go on many strange adventures in the pursuit to find out the truth about the strange, the scary and mysterious side to Victorian Britain.
My finished project will have a collection of 5 short stories the explore the back stories to the characters, providing  their reasons for joining the group and to shed some light on their lives before as at least three of them are loosely based on reformed figures of Spring Heeled Jack, Sweeney Todd and Jack The Ripper. 
I have went into more detail considering the context and characters featured in my narrative here.

The stories will be in order of events taking place. So it will begin with Nicky and Jack's meeting, followed by Lucian and Violet's introduction to the team, which then leads into the Ripper case where Dante will be introduced, followed lastly by Edmund. Once I have introduced each character I will make the stories more team based and will feature the Team as a Collective. Each back story will be roughly about 5-10 pages long, summarising how each member came to be part of the group as well as letting the readers get to know  each character.

I have been developing 2 short stories based on two well known cases of ghostly activity and sensational murder from the period. looking at "no. 50 Berkeley Square", a notoriously haunted townhouse and "The Barne's  Mystery", a sensational murder case which took place in the 1870's. These two short stories being around 10-20.


My series will be in a web comic format, which I will update regularly with new stories and adventures so that after a period of time I can accumulate enough stories to print the series into a collective graphic novel format which I can then sell. 
Due to the subject matter of this project, I feel that it would be suited for a teen/adult audience, generally focused towards people who want to learn more about the period and genre fiction and who want to be drawn into the universe I have created and who enjoy reading in comic format.The majority of the work will be presented online but I plan to print these stories into two separate books for the time being - this is open to change as the project develops.
I would like to keep the introductory stories all together as a collective, making it easy for the audience to access this, on the other hand I would like to have the introductions and a few short cases together, making a nice introduction to the series. It will on depend on how this would work out in terms of cost and printing, an element which I will have to research into further to get a rough idea. 

Because one half of the subject matter is based on fiction and speculation, I want to take the vast amount of context and research I have accumulated and create an alternate version of the Victorian Era where these supernatural entities are very real and live alongside the world of science and innovation. By creating characters based on stereotypes of the period or based on well known figures of the period and placing them into this setting, taking facts about the period and weaving it all into the narrative, it will spark the audience's interest to look into the subject more and drawing their own conclusions and opinions about the period. 
I will be providing facts and then tweaking them slightly to engage the audience to look into the real information more with it being so easy to access via the internet and books.
I'm hoping that my work will be the starting point for my target audience that projects them to their own research. 

Starting to work on final layouts and pages

I wanted to start working on some of my pages in full scale so I decided to try and draw out the first page for one of my Short Stories "The Barnes Mystery" .

This image is only a mock up of how one of my pages might look, I want to work into the images more to generate more texture and a stonework effect.

             I also want to look at text and need to keep working on my figurative drawing.

For this particular story I plan to research into the location more, I can do this by traveling to Barne's Cemetery to get a feel for the location, draw extensively at the location and take reference pictures for further research.

Story Boarding, Practise pages and planning covers

When planning my comic pages, I tend to work with small thumbnails with very rough work, this is an example of one of my thumbnail pages:

I also wanted to try out a few practice pages to experiment with Line Art and playing around with Characters and Layout:

 Working on ideas for a Cover 

Some examples of possible cover layouts, I was pretty sure I wanted to feature the Entire Team so starting with this, I made a few rough sketches:

I decided to go with Image number 2 and started to plan how to layout the cover, starting with figuring out how to place each member.

So far I have only been able to draw this out roughly:

Experimenting With Colour

Taking the line art I created, I decided to experiment with colour to discover possible outcomes for colouring my final images: 

This was the Original Line Art

                               

                                   I then did a rough colour block in grey scale on photoshop:

I then added a little colour on photoshop , practising my digital painting while exploring whether colour would work well for my final images.

Perspective , Mark Making and Character

Working further into the project, I began to explore perspective and how to develop my mark making skills while getting used to the character designs.

This image in particular is one I plan to work on, the amount of detail I put into Jack's coat has worked very well, generating quite a fair amount of texture.

Some examples of perspective work from my sketchbook:

Designing Characters

As I began to progress in my research work, I decided to start developing characters and making preliminary sketches and roughs from the Character Bios I created and can be seen here.


Nicholas 

Jack

Lucian

 

Dante

Edmund 

Violet

Starting the Drawing Process - Reference and Research

When starting off my project, I wanted to gather a lot of research as well as develop my drawing skills. I made a list of things that I would need to improve on, this included figure drawing, location, perspective and lighting.

To start with, I looked into the fashion of the period, that way I could look at costume, hair styling as well as the human figure in general. 

Here are a few examples of my pencil sketches exploring hairstyles from the period:

I also gathered a lot of references of buildings from the period. Here are some examples:

As well as buildings I wanted to look at locations and because a good bit of the barnes story revolves around a cemetery I decided to do some research sketches of cemetarys as well as some research on grave markers and angels , these are some of the best images from that experiment

Looking to television and films for inspiration and research, I made a lot of drawings based on characters from series' such as "Ripper Street", working on my pen skills and figure drawing.

These are some examples of work from my sketchbook showing several figure drawings and clothing references:

One of my characters is based on the figure of "Spring Heeled Jack ", who was allegedly able to leap to great heights. Thinking about how I could take this information and illustrating my own take on it, I began to think about how I could take something like Free Running and incorporate this into the character, giving the effect of him leaping great distances. It proved to be a good research process, particularly for mid air poses.

Artist Research -

I extended my research into relative artists by looking at how some artists have a particular style or personal practise that can fit very well into a particular setting or context .

Edward Gorey-

Edward Gorey's style is very recognisable . His pen and Ink drawings depicting morbid and unsettling scenes that hark back to the Victorian and Edwardian Era, and it surprises people that Gorey worked and published his books and artwork from around the 1950s until the late 90's. 

Gorey's specialist technique of mark making made his work look like it belonged to a much older period of Victorian lithographs and prints,   his line work  was so consistent and precise , showing extreme control and passion for his work and producing  incredible texture and backgrounds for his subjects to interact with,  making his pieces look like something from a newspaper of the time , victorian etchings and the arts and crafts movement of the late 19th century .

An Image from Gorey's  book " The Doubtful Guest”  [1]

Gorey is a big influence in my own practise for his use of texture and the way he has  managed to create his own setting that houses his subjects very well and compliments his style, giving it an older feeling to his work than you may originally think.

A page from one of Gorey's most famous book, "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" which was an illustrated alphabet book that depicted Children Dying in various strange and gruesome  ways . [2]

Brett Helquist-

Helquist is an American Illustrator who is probably most famous for his work that features in  the "Series of Unfortunate Events " book series written by Lemony Snicket.

One of the Illustrations  from Helquist's Website showing an image of one the main characters Violet Baudelaire from the book "A series of Unfortunate Events : The Ersatz Elevator ".
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Helquist's  Illustrations are so distinctive in style and decorative nature, his work often having extensive amounts of shading and texture , giving the desired effect of depth and tonal quality but also making the images pleasing to look at as you get lost in the patterns of the mark making, giving the image not just a narrative quality , but also a feeling of it being quite an intricate and important piece of illustration as you see the lengths Helquist has went into to create the detail we see in the images.
His work seems to fit well in collaboration to Snickets "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" because both have a very surreal and fantastical  element to their work. The images work well with the text to create a world that seems real but also has its own distinctive mix of period elements and surreal imagery that make it hard to pin point an actual setting for the narrative, it stands between multiple periods in terms of fashion, technology and general atmosphere , there are many different periods which can personally see the books paying homage to , from Late Victorian/ Edwardian, Pre War , 50's/60's as well as some elements which bring it into the present day.

Image From "A Series Of Unfortunate Events : The Wide Window" illustrating now the world which the narrative is set in is very much a mix of multiple periods from the past.
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Another important aspect of Helquist's Illustrations is their composition and the way they are framed.
often creating full page images that are framed in a very decorative nature with the same amount of detail and tonal quality , making them part of the images and framing the illustration beautifully .

Image from "A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Reptile Room":
a prime example of Brett Helquist's beautifully decorative style of line work and texture. [5]

By looking at these two artists I began to consider how I would achieve a sense of period setting through my own personal practise . Both artists have influenced me in their mark making and line work  but also through their execution of narrative . My own work is very linear based and mark making features prominently in it , which is why I will be looking into ways to further develop this skill.

Defining my Work

what defines my work?


- my work in pencil
- my work in pen
- my line work
- my use of texture
- figures
- the content and context

When looking at my work and trying to examine it in a little more detail i came across this:

my work in pencil- 

I tend to be very sketchy with my pencil work and its this that gives my work movement . I’m usually very tentative and a little uneasy when inking my work and colouring it so it is due to my lack of courage on my part that I tend to like my pencil work a lot better . I prefer to work in a less permanent matter which gives me room to make mistakes as i usually do make quite a few in the first stages of my drawings.
I add quite some bits of texture to my pencil roughs to give me a sense of how it would look when inked but more than enough times I have regretted even inking my work as the pencil work seems more effective .

 my pen work- 

My work in pen has gotten considerably better in the past year , the amount of texture i use in my pencil work is coming through with the pen work and often enhancing my work. My work tends to look very well in black and white or greyscale which makes me think if this might be the right way to go about my project. Often I find that once I colour my images, they sometimes lose the effect that they had when they were just black and white.

My line work - I tend to use quite fine lines for my work , sometimes buffering and thickening the outline of my subjects to make them stand out more. This method has worked well for me as it develops a good contrast between my fine detailed work and my thick outline definition. 
my quality of line is very specific to my own style and is often how people can distinguish my work from others, this is due to my influences and my insistence for working in pencil.

my use of texture-

Texture is very important in my work and I usually achieve this through my line work, I enjoy making complicated and effective patterns in clothing , often opting to a very fine and detailed way of working. The same can be said for hair and backgrounds. my style is very recognizable by the amount of texture I place into hair and clothing in particular. I enjoy adding texture to my work even if it does take quite a bit of time to finish a piece at times.

My figures are also very distinctive, they are often very exaggerated , the limbs are often elongated and my favourite figures to draw are often lanky and thin which is probably due to my early influences of Tim Burton and Harry Clarke, whose figures often tend to have the same elongated qualities, making them look slightly distorted or fantasied .
In terms of facial features my drawings have been described as “elf like” or “cute” and last year I tried to stray away from this a bit , drawing alot more masculine characters and working of different ways of drawing body types and expanding my style, I also found that i have a knack for drawing beards and facial hair very well.

content and context-

I have said that most of my work tends to focus on figures and people and this is very true. I enjoy drawing people and i relish the challenge of creating characters for my own narratives.
My figures tend to hark back to another period of time, and this is probably due to my fascination with history and a highly romanticised view of the world. I tend to draw things as I wish they were and so my figures often don clothing and mannerisms that aren't necessarily modern or incredibly true to real life . 
My early illustrative influences of Edward Gorey , Tim Burton and Brett Helquist definitely play a part in why my style has settled on this.
I'm not very interested in drawing modern representations of things, I tend to stick to what I think the past might have been like or my own visualisation of what our world will be like in the future, therefore my subjects tend to be based in a highly fictionalised or stylised setting that I have envisioned.

Final Major Project Proposal

History is a great area of interest for me, and over the years I have accumulated quite a bit of information on specific Periods. One is the Victorian Era, and this is why for my Final Major Project I have decided to combine my interests of illustration and history, exploring aspects of Victorian Culture to develop this work into a series of short narratives. My objective is to communicate my passion for knowledge on this period and provide a gentle engagement to my audience and make the information more accessible for people.

I want to create my own narrative and characters for the project,  placing the characters into this world, taking facts about the period and weaving it all  into the narrative, this will spark the audiences interest to look into the subject more  and drawing their own conclusions and opinions about the period. 

The  Victorian period is  known for its innovation and development,  but there was a different side to Victorian Culture with its myths, legends and speculative fiction as well an unhealthy obsession with the occult .

This was a time of ghosts, ghouls and monsters, mostly fiction, but I began to think of how different this period would have been if they were real  or a grain of truth was present.  

For my project I will be setting the narrative in a kind of altered version of the  Victorian Empire where the entities within the fiction are real and the characters I introduce into the narrative will have to interact with them.

 I will be providing  facts and then will tweak them slightly to engage the audience to look into the real information more  with it being so easy to  access via the internet and books, . Im hoping that my work will be the starting point for my target audience that projects them to their own research. 

I began to look at examples of others work with similar objectives to myself or a visual language that is interesting to explore in order to develop my visual style and aspects of production for this project , I have given credit to images, videos and quotes via a link to my bibliography.

Sydney Padua

Sydney Padua is an English Animator, Storyboard Artist and Illustrator who is currently working on a webcomic called “2D Goggles or The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage” [1]
Padua has  created her own pocket universe that resembles 19th Century England and included extensive amounts of footnotes based on information covered in the narrative of the comic , giving it the summery of “ A highly irregular Webcomic, With Footnotes*” [2] . 
She provides us with in depth information on Figures , Theories and  information about the period via  links to Ebooks, articles and videos . Her characters are based on real people from the period but with her own quirky and eccentric flare. Her main characters are Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage , the developers of the Analytical Engine, , they only succeeded in developing this machine but in Padua’s narrative it has been  fully built and in working order.

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Padua’s drawing style seems to hark back to victorian etchings and early comics, creating a kind of period feel to the look of the series . She uses  mixed media , often collage and photoshop to combine her images with Etchings from the period.

Padua doesn't use a lot  of colour in her work and  its printed in black and white, but if she does feature colour , it enhances the look of her work greatly .

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Her Comic works well because not only is it very humorous  but because Padua has footnotes included so the reader is intrigued, looks through the notes and by doing so will learn all about what she has just explored in her comic . Its a way of subtly engaging the audience to learn , by taking figures from the period and giving them over the top personalities , she helps the reader engage , sparks their curiosity  and  ushers them  to research into it more which is what I’m keen to explore.

Nico Marlet

Nico Martlet is a French- American Animator and character designer, His best known work is from Dreamworks animations such as ‘How to Tame Your Dragon’ . 

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His character designs with their rough sketchy quality fills the character with movement and charm , his textures and line work work well with his drawing technique and he has a knack for diverse character designs, His character sheets are filled with character design development and a host of diverse characters , each with their own specific characteristic which makes him a great artist to look at for when it comes to me researching things like character design and begin developing characters as it will be important to accent their individuality .

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Mike Mignola

Mike Mignola Is an American Comic Book Artist whose unique style lends itself to various media.

He is Known for his comic book series such as “Hellboy” and “B. P. R.D” ,  and for working on many projects and films for example and bringing his Hellboy series to life via Live Action films.

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Hellboy characters are brought to life by Mignola and Director Guillermo Del Toro , both work together to create a fantastical landscape and an array of strange creatures that live side by side with the modern World. The lighting and mis en scene of the films match Mignolas artwork to bring the world that we see on the page to life onscreen.

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His work has an expressive look which generates mood into his images through bold shadows which seems to pay homage to the German Expressionist movement .  His imagery is dark but this is the perfect setting for a lot of his narratives .
His use of  atmospheric shadow, tone , his peculiar colouring and drawing style set the mood of the narrative very well.

 I found this interview which gives a personal look to his influences and process which I found really helpful. [10] He speaks about how his process of researching certain periods and creating “a character who functioned in that world.” [11] and how he’s “creating characters in order to see these places—these times, these settings.” [12].

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Films and Television 

Film is a form of escapism for people, we suspend disbelief and by doing so we can be transported anywhere, giving us personal views of events unfolding and a particular view to characters and narrative. I explored some to get a sense of period and ambiance. I find it interesting to see how different periods  depict an Era, Films from the 1920’s will give a different impression of Victorian Britain than say a modern television series.

Early films are quite interesting to look at and one period that I found really visual and interesting was the “Expressionist Cinema” Era in Germany from around 1918- 33. 
Films like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Nosferatu” are great examples from this period, the sets for these films were artistic and planned , even going as far to paint strips of light onto walls to give the effect of dramatic lighting and often giving the films an unique atmosphere but also generating a specific ambiance. Over stylised sets with abstract shapes and shadows along with distorted buildings and beams of light help project the audience into a surreal landscape.

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German Expressionist has influenced many areas of film and art and some modern Film directors choose to pay homage to it in their films, for example Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands  shows scenes that have been  influenced by the style of Caligari through lighting, set and character design, generating a similar surreal mood to the film through distorted light and buildings as well as over stylised costume and makeup.

When you compare two stills from both films you see a similarity to the lighting and the main figure as seen here in a garden scene from both films.

Burton seems to have based the character of Edward on Ceasar from Caligari,  as both sport black tight fitting clothing, a slender body shape and similar make up.

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Television Programs such as ‘Ripper Street’ and ‘Whitechapel’ are also useful to look at in terms of Mis en Scene and character development. Both base their plots on similar locations and context such as Crimes in the Whitechapel District of London but they differ greatly because of the time period in which they are set, Ripper street is set in Victorian london whereas Whitechapel takes place in modern London. Its interesting to see how they differ in terms of policing and character. I analysed these two series in more detail  here

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Literature 

Many books focus on informing readers about the past in an engaging way and can be very diverse with audience and period.
I looked at literature from the period I have chosen to see what impact they have on modern audiences, if any.
Authors such as Poe, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Wilde, Wells and Verne are  associated with this period but another form of popular serial fiction was introduced to the lower class,  this was fiction publications and story papers such as “Penny Dreadfuls”.
Not many of these have survived and due to their cheap nature as they were made to be an accessible way for the lower class to read  speculative fiction and surreal narratives.It’s  interesting that some of these characters from these publications like Sweeney Todd have stood the test of time and carried on being recognised in popular culture due to their memorable persona.

Penny dreadfuls are still remembered for their imagery , decorative in nature, featuring distorted caricatures. Its compositions are  simple forms of comic strip or illustrative narratives that we are all familiar with.

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Not only is the illustrations and layout memorable,  but the content itself, some of the stories were based off well known legends of the time or iconic figures from legend  such as Dick  Turpin, others more peculiar, such as "Spring Heeled Jack" , a entity of English Folklore and an unexplained phenomena.

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Looking at the compositions of some of the images within the publications such as the image shown above, you get a sense of what the illustrator wanted to audience to see, the way the image is framed with the bottom figures placed  at the bottom section being towered over by the main figure of Spring Heeled Jack who seems to be swooping in to attack. The artist wants the reader to focus on Jack and so has placed him near the titles to show he is the central figure of the narrative and also to create shock for the reader as the other figures are clearly frightened by his presence and by giving Jack quite a fearsome appearance.

By looking at the fiction from the period , I found a fantastic platform to research into the myths, legends and figures from the period to explore in my own narrative , looking into these will provide me with context and ideas to place into my own narrative and allow me to experiment with getting a similar ambiance  and charm of the period which these publications clearly have lots of .

Going back to popular fiction from the period , I looked at how some authors and narratives have had a cultural impact on our society.

Science Fiction was not recognised in this period, but its fascinating to see how Victorian writers such as H.G Wells and Jules Verne are considered founders of early Science Fiction which in turn has developed into many different Sub genres, one genre in particular has gone  full circle and merged modern and futuristic technology into a period setting . ‘Steampunk’  has been desribed as being “ Inspired by nineteenth- century science fiction and fantasy, it explores the speculative possibilities of technology in an imagined past” [21] , it’s a diverse and creative form of science fiction that entertains the possibility that Victorians could have harnessed some of the technology from Wells and Vernes novels as well as variations of modern inventions so that the Victorian society could have been a very different place . The steampunk movement has made its way into popular culture with music, film and art all taking influence from it and creating a form of alternate history for us to explore thanks to early Science fiction novellas . 

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In terms of design, this movement could provide another way of looking at the project in terms of creativity and style , by taking a period of history  that seems familiar to us and changing something within alters it and transports us to an alternate echo of the past.

For my research project, I would like to explore a few elements such as looking into archetypes and character , how to weave information into narrative or the various ways I can play around with the narrative and how to generate the right atmosphere though my visual style.  I  also like the idea of looking into the steampunk visual language  more also so this is another possibility. I am not too sure as the the true outcome of this research project but I want to explore different outcomes, for example a short animation, a children's book or a short comic and from there start to develop and prepare for my Final Major Project.