Process and Production Summer Brief Initial Digital Sketches

These are some quick digital trace overs I did to get an idea for the characters and the kind of atmosphere and clothes they'd wear, I also did a quick colour layer for the wednesday image. Both of the sketches are of the actors I imagined would play the characters.

This is a rough idea I had for a comic cover for chapter 17 of American Gods I started developing it more as practice because over the summer I've not really been doing much digital work I've been focused on working traditionally. As you can clearly see it's unfinished and even then some parts would have to reworked such as the bottom of the jacket and most of the background but you get the general idea.

The last digital piece I've done is based on the two undertakers in the book Mr.Jacquel and Mr.Ibis, I based the two characters on actors Idris Elba and Danny Pudi. It's only a rough quick layout but it sums up the tone of the two characters quite well I think.

Process and Production Summer Brief American Gods Casting

When I was first reading the book I assigned all the characters actors in my head which really helped me visualize the film when I read it. this has most of the main cast of the books some of them have changed recently but most are still the same.

Process and Production Summer Brief Nicolas Delort

During my research on Neil Gaiman I found these images based on American Gods by Nicolas Delort done on clay board, I love these images I think they perfectly capture the atmosphere of the book and I also think the composition of the pieces works really well which is helped by the strong contrast between the areas of black and white. Though the perspective on the second image looks a little bit odd with the figures in the foreground looking slightly out of place.

Process and Production Summer Brief Neil Gaiman Book Covers

I found this set of book covers for Neil Gaiman's books I really liked the use of type, I think it suits the tone of his novels really well, I also really like the simple illustrations I think they really suit the books, the American Gods one is my favourite I love the simple illustration of the world tree and the colour scheme works best out of all the covers except maybe the Stardust one. Unfortunately I couldn't find out who designed the covers.

Process and Production Summer Brief Anansi Boys

For my Neil Gaiman research I decided to focus on American Gods, I also decided to read Anansi Boys which is a semi sequel in that it doesn't follow any of the main characters from American Gods but it does include Mr Nancy in a small role but he instigates the main plot of the book. It shares a lot of similar themes to American Gods and elaborates a lot on the back story of Mr Nancy, his extended family and the mythology of the "god" he's based off, so I though it would be important to read this but not essential it just adds another layer to the story.

Process and Production Summer Brief American Gods

When I decided to do Neil Gaiman, I decided to re-read my favourite book American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I decided to make notes this time I think on the end I might have gone a bit overboard but at least now I have a comprehensive overview of the book which will be useful for the project as it's got an overview of all the events that happen in the book. It also really helped me keep a track of all the characters in the book and notice a lot of bits that I missed the first couple of times I read it, but this time I went much more in depth.

Process and Production Summer Brief Neil Gaiman Research

As I started doing more research into Neil Gaiman I quickly realised he was going to be my choice for my final author as I started research him I found out more and more interesting stuff about him. I had a feeling I'd end up doing him when I first saw the list of authors though I tried not to be biased when I researched the authors. I decided early on that I didn't want to focus on Sandman or any of his graphic novel work I'm much more interested in his novels than comics.

Process and Production Summer Brief Three Authors

I'd decided on my 3 authors at this point Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore and it ended up being a toss up between Aldus Huxley and George Orwell but in the end I picked George Orwell as I felt I knew his work much better, and they both had fairly similar themes for there books so I didn't want to pick both. Though by this point I started to veer away from Alan Moore as I realised that I'd already looked at him for my Context of Practice module last year and I had trouble coming up with ideas for projects from him, Plus I really wanted to avoid doing a comic book author as I feel there work already has a very distinct tone of voice and associated imagery. I quickly got bored when researching into George Orwell as a person as well and he only had 2 books I was interested in.

Process and Production Summer Brief More Research

At this point I read and re-read books by some of the authors I'd decided on my list and this really helped me cut it down to three as some of the ones I thought I would be interested in weren't as appealing after reading the book, One such book is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino which I was really interested in from the initial description but after reading I felt it wasn't really for me though I did enjoy reading it. I also read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams though again I enjoyed the book I didn't really think the tone fitted with my style of illustration, as humour is not really my strong suit. At this point I also ruled out Terry Pratchett as it felt like to massive a task as I wasn't really familiar with his work at the time and the scope of his work is very hard to get through in a short amount of time.

Process and Production Summer Brief Author Research

When I first received this brief I initially looked down the list and while there was a lot of authors I knew there was a few I recognised but didn't know there work so I decided to look into all the authors initially and gradually narrow it down to the three I'd be most interested in researching. There was quite a few names that I wrote off very quickly when I started researching them as they didn't fit with my interests at all.

This narrowed it down to a list of seven names, at this point that I was much more interested in the books rather than the authors themselves so I decided to focus on that.