FOLKLORE STORIES
This was a personal project for me where I focused on trying out new techniques and learning and practicing skills rather than actually producing an amazing final product. So what was my project? Illustrations about the subject: Folklore.
STARTING OUT
I had time on my hands, and I wanted to learn, so I decided to start a personal project. I had a hard time actually deciding what it should be and so I settled on something that I love to do and could always improve at; illustrating. I tried to illustrate stories before, school assignments and at home in my free time, but it never quite resulted in a job well done in my opinion. So, I decided I'd try to improve that skill and try my hardest to make something that I could be proud of.
So now I knew what I wanted to make, I needed a subject or a story for which I could make illustrations. After some thinking I decided on Folklore. This was because I have always loved the aspect of fiction and fantasy and history and Folklore, as well as mythology, has both those aspects. It's an interesting subject that I actually wanted to learn more about. So that helped a great deal with motivation and just enjoying myself with this project.
I asked myself some questions that helped specify what I wanted to achieve with my project, how the finished product would look, what things and skills I needed to actually achieve these expectations.
RESEARCH
Now, I had a subject, I needed to research it. Like I noted earlier, I love these kind of stories, facts and so I just dove into it. Looking at the different countries, stories, categories etc. that the subject of Folklore held. Now, I decided to go with creatures of legend from England. Since there were just so many interesting creatures that I could learn about, research and then draw. And since there were so many, I surely was able to find enough stories to use. Because I found out pretty quickly that there weren't many actual (fictional) stories left on the internet, in books, etc. about Folklore. I collected these stories in a Adobe Indesign file, together with my research questions, so I could look it all up in one single file and it would be easy to find.
The stories I collected were about Black Annis, Bluecap, the Brag, the Bugbear, Changelings, Grindylows, Tiddy Mun and Yallery brown. As you can see below, I didn't only collect stories. I found some beautiful poems about these creatures and I seriously doubted about using those, but eventually I decided on the stories because that was really the core of the project and they were just every bit as interesting as the poems. Together with the stories about these creatures, I also collected a few images as inspiration. These were illustrated as well as just actual pictures someone took, movie posters etc.
PICKING THE STORIES
Picking which stories to use was a fairly simple process. I looked at the length of the stories; did they have scenes I could depict? Or did they have very little detail and not of much use to me? Were they more like poems? These were all deciding factor to me for picking the stories for which I would make an illustration.
SKETCHING
Now I knew which creatures, I could start sketching them. I opened a new file in Adobe Photoshop and started doing simple and quick sketches. After I did those I chose the two that really popped out for me for each creature and did some quick colored sketches with gouache brushes that I found on the Adobe Site. From those colored sketches I'd pick the ones I really wanted to illustrate.
ILLUSTRATIONS
So now I had my sketches, research stories and everything and thus it was time to get to work on a finished product. First of: illustrating. I picked out the sketches that I thought fit best with the stories I had chosen and started working them out with care. Still I liked the sketchy feel that the gouache brushes gave and I didn't want to change that effect too much. Opening up Photoshop, I kept the sketches as an example and started illustrating. I decided to keep the backgrounds for each of them black or some other dark color and played around a little with light and shading.
