Initial Ideas So Far

By looking back at my mood boards and the mind map I had created in the last post, I went along and sketches some initial ideas that sprung into mind. Now I'm going to take a step back and have a look at them to see which ones I could possibly develop.

Here’s my first set of initial sketches, which were inspired by the phrase that the “eyes are the windows to the soul”. For the one on the top left I wanted to say that the eyes could speak a thousand words but if we covered them up, could we really guess the person’s true emotions?

The sketch next to it is of a “typical teenager” wearing a hoody. He would have scars all over his face that – to the viewer – would make him appear dangerous and violent. I’m going to include a little caption beneath to explain he had gotten those scars from a car accident to contrast strongly with the viewer’s first impressions. I’m not too sure if this message would work however, so I’m going to move on from that idea.

I imitated Joe Cardiello’s style for the line drawing as I used a technique where I didn’t take the pen off the paper. I really liked this because it could portray the message that all humans are imperfect like the lines I drew. I think I shall use this line technique in my other sketches.

The little sketches next to it are developments of my eye idea, where I’m thinking of drawing a face within the eye. I’m not really too sure about this idea though.

This is my second page of initial sketches, where I went along the idea of doing diagrams to label the different parts of the face to show the viewer how they change with different emotions. This idea would probably be more scientific and I could perhaps do a series of facial expressions.

I then looked at theatre masks and I want to develop this idea and do a series of them. I am kind of interested in how people paint Chinese theatre masks so shall do a brief research on them.

This is a developed idea of showcasing different facial expressions in one illustration, and I hope to do another line drawing (probably in Photoshop so that I don’t ruin the original sketch) inspired by Joe Cardiello’s style. I took photos of myself pulling different expressions to use as a reference.                                                                                           

This is a developed idea of drawing theatre masks (and also a development of the previous sketch) to represent different facial expressions. If I continue to develop this then I would like to use watercolour paint to create some sort of “smoke” for the background, and then do strong lines around the masks to stand out from the different colours.

This is a further development with the mask idea, but instead of someone holding a mask I'm going to do them holding their own "face". I'm going to fill the place where their face should be with type of different emotions. 
It is rather sketchy because I still need to decide on what emotions to include and how I'm going to layer them out. I also need to find some references - might take photos of myself - for the hand and "mask". 

Conclusion:

From my sketches I can see that I have been leaning towards the idea of portraying different facial expressions. This is both a good and bad thing but I would like to expand my ideas a bit more so that I could look into different aspects of the psychology of faces, not just emotions.