Illustration Friday Week 5 - Moon

Initial Ideas
Man in/on the moon, moonlight, sleep, night time, cheese, sun and moon, day and night, lunar eclipse, werewolves, nocturnal animals, crescent moon, full moon. 

Roughs
My initial roughs were very limited but I had a feeling I wanted to continue with theme of nocturnal animals and use badgers in my image with the moon in the sky. After making this decision I did some roughs, I like the landscape one where the two badgers are in the bottom left and the moon is in the top right. 

Inspiration and Reference
I took inspiration from some drawings in a sketchbook from summer 2015. I found that these might translate well into linocut or paper cut because they were purely black and white. I looked at numerous photos of badgers from online to help produce some composition roughs. I have included the three reference photographs that I have used for the final image. 

Drawing and Paper-cutting
I re-drew my best rough and while doing so, the frame became longer in height and therefore more square. I think I prefer this though, I have also added an extra badger which I think works better. I think groups of odd numbers are more satisfying to look at and easier to balance. I traced this drawing in felt tip pen to get just the black and white, I then traced this using pencil to transfer onto black card, from which I cut out the white areas leaving me with a black paper cut. I was going to make this piece entirely by hand but I wanted to be efficient with time so I scanned the paper cut into photoshop along with a mrnoprinted texture I produced for my OUIL504 module.

Photoshop
I edited the levels of the texture to make the whole thing darker like the night sky and changed the layer style of the paper cut to multiply so the white parts were transparent. I made a shape behind the paper cut which I made slightly transparent so that the white patches on the badgers were lighter than all of the sky. I ended up altering my composition again at this stage by moving the moon. A mix up with my layers meant that this wasn't as simple as I had hoped, I moved it and then had to fill in the blank space it left behind with at the clone stamp tool. 

Colour and Cropping 
From the start, I wanted this image to be greyscale because I think it represents the night time well and badgers are distinctly black and white. I briefly experimented with dark purples and blues as a screen layer but didn't think it showed the darkness as well. The image has been cropped a lot since the beginning as the composition has evolved. One thing I would change if I did this again was to not have the moon tucked away so tightly in the corner, I think it would look better a bit more free within the space. 

Final Adjustment 

After fattening my image ready for submission I realised I didn't like something about the moon, there was very little sense of light coming from it. I used the blur tool to blur the edges of the moon so there was no definite line between white and black. I think this subtle change has made a bit of a difference but I probably could have done more and spent more time on this to make it look like it was glowing more. 

Evaluation

Overall I am happy with this image. Part of me thinks that it was a waste of time cutting the badgers out of card because you can't really recognise that process very clearly in the end product. I guess this is one of those things that happens when my idea isn't absolutely concrete before I start making. In hindsight, I would have chosen paper instead of card to cut out off because it would need less pressure to cut through, lines would be smoother and edges more clean cut. I think the composition is strong, especially the line of sight indicated by the badger looking directly at the moon.