Presentation

So my final major project for third year is going to be a sound piece accompanied by a series of moving illustrations. My idea is to use links to my dissertation topic (general theme of it is how fantasy stories and fairytales effect the development of children) in my work.

Fairy tales are written by people with their own political and social agenda, to mould the views and thoughts of young minds into what society desires them to be. An example of this would be the use of gender roles in the stories, in that they have always shown the desired role for women to be submissive and polite and to do household chores and their aim in life to be to find a husband and have a family.

My idea is to produce a set of illustrations that model a different version of fairytales, not necessarily total role reversal but just a more diverse and progressive approach. For example, a female lead fighting the dragon, two princes getting married, people of different races being the hero etc. Obviously this is something that has been happening more in recent years in some television shows and films but not as much as it should be, especially in mainstream media and it's something I really wanted to explore in my work as I have a lot of interest in the genre.

I want to use After Effects to create a parallax effect in my drawings to make them seem as if they are moving, and over the top I will have a soundscape (need to work on)

I chose the parallax effect over regular animation or another technique because it's something I had seen in previous years and had always wanted to try. I want to develop my after effects skills and this seemed like a good opportunity to take to push my adobe knowledge further. 

I have also found some artists whose work i'm finding really inspiring, once of them being Paula Rego. Rego is primarily well known for her paintings based on storybooks and folktales she learnt as a child. Her work is full of symbolism and feminist undertones, which is something I am going to explore in my own work.

Swallows the poison apple

War

Snow White playing with her fathers trophies

Semiotics is something I want to look into further in my piece, as I think there will be a lot of opportunity to add symbolism into my drawings which will enhance the depth behind them. Fairytales and folklore have a lot to draw from in regards to this topic which I intend to take advantage of, using artists like Paula Rego to help me.

I have begun doing some practice drawings and sketches for my piece, and I have been trying a few different techniques.Initially I wanted to produce a really detailed renaissance vibe with my illustrations but it has been a long time since I've properly drawn and I don't enjoy nor am I particularly good at realism/detail/colouring etc. I began one small drawing of a scene from sleeping beauty which I quickly abandoned as it just wasn't working. 

I thought about how I used to work best, and that was by going straight in with pen, and drawing roughly and quickly and then adding more detail later. I experimented with this style of drawing on a character idea for one of my drawings, a woman in battle armour, wielding a sword. This is one of my base ideas for one of the illustrations, having a woman fighting a dragon.

I discovered dragons were a lot harder to draw than I thought and spent a long time practising drawing them and I think this drawing will be one of the more challenging ones of the series. I still need to figure out the rest of my series, for example how many drawings there will be and exactly what they will be of.