Tutorial with Helen 24/2/20

Today i ended up having two tutorials with Helen, one about my project in general and another specifically about my brief. Although i was not anxious to go over my brief i am glad we have covered it as it has allowed me to update it with my new ideas as i did not want to do this before recieving feedback. Luckerly my brief was pretty good the first time round so it was only minor changes mainly to do with language which needed to be changed.

Now having updated my brief and spoken to Helen about my project she agreed that a younger age demographic may be more appropriate which is what i have been thinking since starting to create my imagery. Instead of my previous age range of 8-11 i have decided to lower it down to 5-10. I feel this is a lot more appropriate and also suits my softer colour pallet a lot better.

The main focus from my first tutorial was Helen mentioning that there needs to be some sort of story behind my aliens. For this we covered the ideas of:

• Hanging out together
• Interacting with eachother
• Talking
• Flying
• Sitting
• Lying down
• Dancing
• Sitting on each other shoulders
• Trees/ city scape
• Urban enviorment
• Space
• Cars and space ships
• Hobbies e.g. gymnastics, the park
• Having a picknick

Now aiming for a younger demographic i feel this should inspire some new ideas. A point which i felt was really interesting was breaking up my collection of 30 designs into much smaller collections which all work together but relate to slightly different themes e.g. a set at the park, a set in space, a set in an urban landscape ect. I feel breaking my collection down into much smaller groups will be really beneficial as i will be able to focus my ideas a lot more. My first step toward creating these stories will be trying to edit my aliens digitally so they look as if they’re facing each other and interacting. This will take some playing about on Photoshop; however, i am sure there is a way of doing this.

Another point that was raised was that my aliens need some sort of facial expressions. I mentioned that i have previously experimented with mouths; however, felt these didn’t work. Instead Helen mentioned using emojis to gather inspiration. I think this is a really good idea as it is amazing how emojis, although using the same template can convey so many emotions. When thinking about editing my aliens i will definitely refer to emojis to gain inspiration on different emotions they can be conveying when chatting to each other.

Although having created my iridescent experiments Helen also mentioned that i need more background ideas. For these she suggested stripes or spots. I feel to keep these within my style i can create them once again utilising the liquify tool on Photoshop. This should allow me to create these pattern; however, create them in a slightly childish way which i feel will really relate to my theme. Before deciding whether to include spots and stripes i feel i should decide on the scenes i want to create as these may inspire new ideas or relate best to stripes or spots.

Overall i found catching up with Helen really useful as i want to start creating my designs soon. From here i need to have quite a big think about what scenes and storys i want to portray and how i want to create these, either through watercolours, digitally or in a whole different way. I feel this could really help bring all my imagery together and also help my aliens to look more playful so they’re more appropriate for my new younger demographic.