APP Home (AOI): Initial Sketches & Ideas

I used the information I had collected while I was researching on London stories to draw up some initial sketches. These were going to be very 'rough' sketches because I wanted to get my thoughts on paper as quick as possible so that I could focus of the general idea rather than the details. 

I start by drawing up a mind map on one of my first stories – Alba to Brutus – and tried to think of as many related words as possible to describe a giant before working on my sketch. I find it easier to describe the character through mind maps first because it allows me to broaden my mind a little bit and I could also look up at some images for inspiration that are related to these words.

Here I explored the idea of Gogmagog and Corineas being guardians of London, and wanted to link that with the Domesday book that registers every occupant in London (and in Britain). 

However I realised that the giant is the main focus on the piece and I want my viewers to concentrate on the city of London more, so I tried a different perspective.

There was a problem with my idea... There was only one giant, and London has two! I went back to have a look at the brief to see if I could do two versions but it states that I needed to portray London stories in one image, so I scrapped that idea.

I began to look through fantasy paintings and was inspired to replace the giant with a woman, who could be portrayed as “My Fair Lady” in the rhyme of London Bridge. She could then be holding London Bridge but I was worried that it didn't show London as a vibrant city, so thought that she could instead have a crown in the shape of London Bridge and hold the city in her hands.

I then delved deeper into this idea and thought that in order to incorporate more stories of London into the piece I could have main characters floating off the city and around the lady's head. However I moved onto focusing on how to draw hands by gathering photos and taking photos for reference.

I found myself getting too deep into my idea of My Fair Lady, so to avoid getting too attached to the idea I started drawing a mind map for another one of the stories: The Witch's Well. The main characters are the witch and the girl, with the girl running away with a sac of gold on her back.

I was initially inspired by Paul Shipper to create a poster with the girl at the centre running towards the audience and all of the other characters surrounding her, with the witch's eyes at the top. Then I came across the same problem I had before of this not portraying London as a whole, so I started drawing the witch chasing after the girl. I could then incorporate this into another piece. 

At this point I was starting to get frustrated; I just didn't know what I was doing! I realised that I really needed to research about composition in order to 'fill out' this idea but for now I just randomly sketched out some faces and then wrote notes beneath it so that I didn't forget this idea. 

This is probably the first time I've done a sketch in just under 2 minutes because I was bursting just to get my idea onto the page rather than worry about detail and composition.

I went back to the idea of generating a mind map and then from this mind map I created a list of possible ideas and how each character would  come together. I began to see that my idea of My Fair Lady seems to be the most appropriate and so I decided that I would develop it just a little bit before doing some experimentation on my previous idea. 

Conclusion:

By creating spontaneous and extremely quick sketches I was able to get my ideas down on paper before I got them. I included some annotations on the side of each sketch on ways I could develop it so that when I do reach that stage I could just look back and get on with it. 

I'm now going to do some experimentation with watercolour to see whether or not my sixth idea would be acceptable and if not I could then develop idea three.