art student
I have decided to try and animate my story ‘An Aspiring Actress’. One because I think it is engaging and would be fun to animate, and two because it doesn’t have many elements to it and I have a better chance of finishing it.
I’m first going to try it as a 3D animation, making lil figurines and scenes and see how that goes, and if that proves unsuccessful then I’ll go down a different route. 
Things to consider:
Stop motion is an animation technique that physically manipulates an object so that it appears to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a fast sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using plasticine is called clay animation or “clay-mation”. Not all stop motion requires figures or models; many stop motion films can involve using humans, household appliances and other things for comedic effect.
As I’m now looking at people such as Neil Giaman (author of Coraline) and Time Burton (producer of Corpse Bride) I feel like stop motion animation is a good next step. I’ve always been amazed at stop motion and the artistry that goes into making them. Coraline is my favourite film of all time, and I love the book as well. The mixture of innocence and darkness excites me; not to mention how intricate her world is. Every stop motion film Burton has made I am also madly in love with, I just cant get over how amazingly well put together they are.
I would love to try and make one of my own stories come to life in such an amazing way. 
Timothy Walter Burton (born August 25, 1958) is an American film director, producer, artist, writer, and animator. He is known for his dark, gothic, eccentric, and quirky fantasy films such as Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), the animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).
I have always loved and been inspired by Tim Burton. He has such a unique mind that just wants to express itself, and he doesn’t do it for anyone but himself. He’s said before that he knows he’s not good at drawing, and people have told him so, but he also said he loves drawing and will continue anyway.
I have always been inspired by him, and I want to look for a way to incorporate him, hisspirit, into my work. 
As I’ve decided to move away from the childhood ide, I’ve decided to retrace my steps in order to move forward. I am now looking into Tim Burton and his unique outlook on the world.
This is an A1 drawing of the main character from ‘The visitor” (my short story).
It has been suggested through trial and error that less is more when it comes to ink drawings and I think this reflects well in this drawing.
I am very fond of Lucca and his story but I have decided to go in the stop motion animation route, and this story has to many sets and elements.
However bringing a character to life was good practice and beneficial to this idea.
I think this short story would make an engaging, endearing animation. In the spirit of tim burton and his animation such as ‘The nightmare before Christmas”, I thought it would be appropriate to go down the stop motion route.
This is a short story I wrote inspired by dark children’s writers that I plan to use as inspiration.
I used to write short stories inspired by Tim Burton, Brothers Grimm and Neil Gaiman. In the spirit of illustration I thought I would do a painting to accompany them.
I found it enjoyable creating characters from scratch/ from people I know. Using Neil Giaman’s twisted childlike way of writing, and Tim Burton’s dark and odd story lines- I created pieces of writing that conveyed adult stories in a juvenile context.
I decided to work on my illustration route by scaling it up. This allowed me to try different materials and different techniques. It also showed how scale creates a bigger impact, and makes me want to play around with scale more.
When one of my friends saw it she said that it looked very ‘Tim Burton-y’, which is something I’m very interested in.
Tim burton has a very unique and scary way of illustrating children’s stories, which is something I’ve always wanted to be able to do myself; so I think this is the next avenue i’ll explore.
Angus also saw my first failed attempted at the up-scaled illustration; and said that the simplistic style made it interesting, so maybe ill try out drawing things randomly and quickly to try and achieve this again.
This artist worked in lots of mediums. But the work that stood out to me was the work he did with children. He did performances and spray painting pieces with young people, as well as making an exhibition booklet out of his friend’s daughter’s drawings.
This gave me an idea to develop on my childhood topic, to involve the kids. His work gave me the idea to go to a school and ask some children to do a painting and present them as an actual exhibition in an adult gallery. This would be a comment on the art world and how kids can create more engaging things than established artists.
I would like to start playing around with scale a bit and seeing what different impacts different sized pieces have. I have always worked on a small scale so would like to strop out of my comfort zone a bit. And depending on which style of recreation I go for, a giant child’s drawing could become very endearing and nostalgic, or very unnerving and unsettling.
As my idea is all about the recreation of my childhood drawings, it seemed important to try out recreating one completely how it was drawn originally. This isn’t the sort of thing that I would normally do, and I’m not sure how successful the piece is. However it was a worth while experiment and I’ll bring it up in studio to get some outside opionions. 
Also, if I were to continue with this style then I would get hold of the original materials to use. I think it would be quite interesting to then display the original and the remake together and see if people can tell which is which.
My first idea/ experiment was to make my childhood drawing sinister. More making a response to the original than recreating it. 
As an excersise in studio we were asked to respond to one in a list of quotes.
In the spirit of childhood, I responded to the quote ‘when they tried to detach the skeleton in which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust’- in the form of an illustration. Illustrations are typically decorative and used in children’s books to keep the child engaged. Using such a dark quote supports my original idea of darkening innocence childish things, and could be something to look in to.
I think I’ve narrowed it down to these. The drawings on the left I’ve decided would look better recreated how it would look in real life. The ones on the right I think would look good drawn in a darker more twisted way.
I’ll do a couple of each and see which is more successful.
I have been looking through my childhood drawing trying to decide which ones to recreate. I’m finding it a bit difficult because I haven’t yet decided if I want to recreate it in a purely practical way, in the sense I would just draw it how I would do now- or if I would draw them in a dark way. This matters as to which pictures I chose.
Pablo Picasso
Picasso was obsessed with children’s art – so much so that his pictures of children often double as self-portraits. This was the case in 1923, when he painted his own son, Paulo, drawing while sitting at a table.
Matisse
His painting of Pierre, which is included in The Child in Art, is a wonderfully impish image. Pierre wears a striped jumper and a rose-pink hat. His hat, a formless cloud of colour emanating from his head like a kind of halo of frustration and impatience, accentuates the sulkiness of his expression which, with brilliant economy, captures the truculence of a thwarted child.
I have recently discovered several of my drawing from when I was 6-9. I noticed how cheerful the compositions were and thought about how different my art is today, and thought it would be interesting to recreate these drawings in my current (darker) style. 
I have always been interested in mental illnesses and how people sufferering see the world. I would like to create a series so people could empathise.
Artists that have explored mental illness:
Georgia O’Keeffe
She suffered a mental breakdown in the early 1930s and had to be hospitalized. At age 46, O’Keeffe was admitted to Doctors Hospital in New York City after suffering from anxiety and depression–she reportedly had weeping spells and would go without eating or sleeping. Missing a deadline for a mural that was commissioned for Radio City Music Hall and her husband’s public affair were the major causes of her breakdown.
Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes
Spanish painter Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes often has his work divided into two periods: before and after his illness. His paintings reflected his mental and physical instability that later culminated in him becoming permanently deaf.
Legendary artist Pablo Picasso is said to have struggled with clinical depression. His body of work was often inspired heavily by his wives and mistresses, some of whom also suffered from mental health disorders. Most famously, his portraits of Dora Maar became increasingly severe as their relationship suffered.
My summer project was influenced by Arturo Herrera. He is a Venezuelan visual artist who was born in 1959. He exhibits internationally, known for his fusing of cartoons and collage.
Employing fragments of popular culture imagery, Herrera creates collages, felt sculptures and wall paintings which could be described as abstract, if not pop art. His work is very colourful and without order, which is what drew me to his work.
His particular style of work I was captivated by was his Disney compositions. Using popular children’s Disney characters, he explores ideas of sex and violence.
Having such an innocent icon at the centre of the piece makes for an ironic and thought-provoking piece. The entire body of work (for me) represents the loss of innocence and purity a we all eventually turn into adults, and essentially the world of sin.
I have always been interested in art exploring such themes and have done so myself in the past. However, I really liked Herrera’s use of the children’s characters to explore sexual themes as the contrast makes a huge impact the viewer.
I have used a similar collage style and different layers to represent the loss of innocence and the exploration of sexual themes.
Rachel Gibson 