Collaboration continued

Nancy and I started creating some drawings in response to our ideas on what makes a good narrative on Friday 11th on some A5 pieces of black and white card, such as our answers to questions we asked each other and playing around with illustrating certain elements of story writing. On Friday afternoon we had a group critique session on our ideas so far but I went home as I felt ill, so Nancy stood in for us both and filled me in on what was said this morning:

• Think more about how to present our ideas and dialogue for a more finished and considered final
• Consider typography and how it sits with the imagery more
• They liked my bear character- develop that more?

We discussed how to incorporate and improve these ideas in our work and I suggested we used tracing paper and acetate layers with our imagery combined with Letraset transfer type overlay to allow us to build and consider our images, also allowing the Letraset transfer to add a more finished feel to our work. Nancy suggested we develop the bear character by making him move throughout our drawings to give the sense of a journey, perhaps moving closer to the viewer/ larger in scale. We have decided to develop our format from postcards to a book but still using the A5 card format and documenting our discussion on these cards. The book format will allow us to better portray a sense of journey and the techniques used in a book while literally demonstrating the popular narrative format. 

Collaboration, thekidsareintrouble.com 

We are drawing on the cards as we discuss our theme to let the order and content naturally develop, and then adding the necessary text and extra drawing over the top to highlight and portray the ideas we discuss. Nancy also suggested we involve ourselves more in the narrative theme by being less literal with setting the scene in the studio, and through discussions of developing my bear character we decided a forest with a campfire would be a good and coherent setting.

To keep our work collaborative we will demonstrate what we say individually in speech bubbles but also illustrate each others ideas, sometimes singularly, other times working collaboratively on the same image/ layering. This means our book will blend both of our illustrative styles and ideas to appear harmonious and show how our ideas have bounced off each other and progressed together.

We will continue drawing our discussion tomorrow and hopefully plan to bind the final book and have time to reflect and finalise on Friday.