Illustration Friday Week 10 - Childhood

This week's theme is Childhood.

Initial Ideas

Memories, family, first steps, friendships, birthdays, innocence, naïvety, feeling small, toys, characters, mischief, trouble, fun, learning, school, letters, numbers, food, 90s, 00s.

I liked the idea of exploring foods that were popular in the 90s and 00s because this was from my childhood. At first I thought of ideas of general food but then I narrowed it down to follow the school disco and birthday party theme. 

Roughs

I want this image to not take a formal composition, I want the different elements to be floating around the page as I think this will appear more fun and relevant to the idea of hyperactive children. I thought about making this into a pattern but I think for the purpose of making one single image, I will leave this just as a potential idea for further development. 

Inspiration and Reference

I found images online of some of the products on my lists. I am planning to draw these individually in my sketchbook, select the best ones and then scan them into photoshop to form a composition. 

Drawing Styles

I tried out a few different ways of drawing a push pop. I have chosen to work with pencil crayon because this is a typically childish medium to use and I also haven't worked with it yet for any of my Illustration Friday images. I don't think the more accurate drawing styles are very appropriate because they seem too formal and strict. On the other hand, the extreme naïve drawing style is not to my taste, even though it is relevant to children and the craziness of a disco or party. I think to find the balance between craft and appropriateness I am going to combine the two styles. I will produce the line drawings to make them look like a child might have drawn them and then use pencil crayons to colour them in a more representational style. This way, I will get the playfulness across but the products will still be able to be recognisable. The colour scheme will be bright and colourful because I will stay true to the actual colours of the packaging designs.

Selection of Images

I scanned in my images and initially thought that I would make a composition from my pencil drawings. However, I discovered that I could use the hue/saturation adjustment on Photoshop to make the drawings seem different colours. This meant I could make collections of certain sweets. I have to admit this distracted me from the task and I ended up playing around with this rather than building a final image. However, this did change the direction I decided to take this image. Instead of including all the sweets in the same image, I came up with a few options based around different sweets. I like the simplicity of the lollipops as a trio but my favourite has to be the party rings. I made a group of four which work really well in my opinion. 

Pattern

I used the define pattern tool on Photoshop to turn this into a pattern, I also did the same for a cluster of images of jelly snakes and lollipops. I don't think the colours on the latter were strong enough to stand out against a white background so I experimented with colours but eventually resorted back to the party rings pattern as it just seems to work. I cropped it down to a select block and submitted this as my design for this week. 

Evaluation

I feel the path of this has changed a lot from my initial intentions of making a composition from a number of different pencil drawings. I had also planned to have an element of naïve drawing within this to ass a childish element but I got a bit carried away at the drawing stage and this didn't come through. I find it hard to draw in that style especially with a medium that it is so easy to become really involved in and add realistic detail. The circles aren't perfect though and the drawings aren't hyper-realistic so there is still some playfulness present, this is also reflected in the colours. I feel this final outcome is successful and to me, it does link strongly to the theme of 'childhood'.