Project Overview Nobrow was set up in 2008 to provide an independent publishing platform for illustration and the graphic arts that would showcase some of the best talent out there today, whether fresh out of college or from the ranks of well-seasoned veterans. Nobrow’s aim is to place a renewed focus on quality in print, using wherever possible the best materials they can get our hands on and always trying to play with format, color, size and design to ensure that our publications are well conceived and individual. They work closely with locally based printers wherever possible so that they can be involved in the creative process from start to finish and they always try to achieve finished pwroducts that are not only filled with great work, but that themselves are art objects, to be coveted, collected and cherished.
By Sam Hamer
At the beginning of this project I was flooded with ideas and started straight away with looking at books and the interweb to search for the gods and goddesses of the past and present. I wanted to get some more information on this subject so I visited the British Museum and gathered some image based research to get a taste of the past religions and what people believed. Also it was interesting to see how the gods were portrayed back then. It made me think that these characters were just make believe and could not of been real for some of the things they did seemed unbelievable. I didn’t want to make a book that was based around past gods as I didn’t want my final publication to be then questioned and shaped around the original gods, previous idea and beliefs. The sixteen pages needed to be simple, funny and engaging for the reader and also have a narrative within it too. I believe I have achieved this and by doing this I have learn how to separate colours digitally and also by hand which has been a real challenge for me understanding this method. It was like drawing backwards, filling in block colours before detailing the illustration. By doing this it has made me more confident with the idea of making drawings on Photoshop and a better understanding of how companies such as Nobrow achieve their styles. I now know where i want to go with my own personal style and can improve my drawings by using the techqiue i have learnt within this project and carry it forward and hopefully learn more by using it with my other work. This was a really enjoyable project to do and to be able to get help from Sam Author from Nobrow was amazing as he is a big inspiration and gave us really good advice to improve our own work. This research book shows how i got from the beginning to the end through drawings and photographs and should give you a good idea of what happened on the way while working on this project.
First idea of having no idea.
British Museum, London
So I started my research in the British Museum and looked at the past to get a realisation of what kind of religions were around and also what people believed and looked up to for hope and reassurance, as all religions like to the gods for answers and help within their lives. This was an instant connection that could be made that people from all around the world were worshipping gods and goddess’s hundreds of years ago and still do today.
These were my first ideas on illustrations for my book.
I started to take my illustrations alittle to serious and i was loosing the fun within them. I didnt want any of the gods to take on to realistic features as this was only something to compare to in real life and make things seem wrong. i like drawings that are free and loose. The god of beauty to the right looks to real and the hand amurging from the mountain was on track to looking to real also. I put my pencil down and reviewed my ideas at this point.
I was getting annoyed at my progress of the project at this point and drew these mountains. By later give me inspiration towards my final outcome.
I stopped looking at the past gods and what went on years ago in a time i never experianced and took inspiration straight from my own life. I asked myself what gods, if i truely believed in them would i look up to and worship? Then i thought well maybe there are gods that look out for me giving me what i need to achieve things that happen each day of my life. The god i chose to pick were as follows:
God of energy God of wealth Goddness of dreams Goddness of self belief God of fear God of good times So from this i started picturing what these would look like if i did bump into them one day. Once i had drawn them i did go backwards and realise that there were similar gods to the ones i had created but were alittle but more serious and complex than mine but this was good because i wanted to make a childish silly fun looking book and not be to picky with how much they my gods related to actual past and present gods as this would be abit boring in my eyes!
The drawing was just the start of the process with creating these illustrations. The process i took them through on photoshop cleaned them up and added textures and more interesting lines and added a more bold and vibrant outcome. It’s hard to explain the complete process in this book but basically i used alot of photoshop and nothing else except pens and pencils and a lot of tracing paper also.
In these drawings it was a case of how I would imagine what a god or goddess would look like and how it would relate to personal likes and hates but mainly likes. I began to think about the certain things in life I enjoy and do, problems and things that bother me. I drew everything that came to my head and began to think of possible outcomes for a series of gods that were personal to me and people could also relate to also and to give them a 21st century twist on it also.
To make this pink skin colour i used very light amounts of green and red.
Using colour in the project was alittle different to other projects. It seemed more complex and i dont know if this was because i was worrying about it more so at the start but it didnt click until right at the end of this project. Layering the colours over each other to create new colours was great fun. I knew this was going to happen but there is a great satifaction when you do it yourself on the computer screen and i spent hours playing with this. On the left are some hand done colour plans and also a rough texture i made by flicking paint onto paper.
Image: Playing with Photoshop was the main time taker of this project. Theere was a lot of scanning in and alternations to drawing to get them to be able to print nicely and as this was my first time really playing with this style of work it proved to be a really hard process. Working in layers and pictures the image finished before it was even drawn was the hardest so you had to keep thinking about the final result and not give up. Also colours were a big problem as we could only use two so that selection was needed to be made quickly so i chose ‘Red’ and ‘Green’ as they worked well together. Playing with the tools on PS also was a challenge but was super fun at the same time, i spent a lot of time moving coloured layers around and seeing where they looked best. I did alot of inverting too along with changing the levels of block colours to get them right. Opacity was a key thing aswell and pleayed with this to make new colours within my two chosen colours which was simple but great fun to do and proved to be the bext way to see what the final outcome would look like. One i got my head around all of this on photoshop i was able to speed through my ideas and get my drawings onto my mac, but this did take me along time to figure out sometimes.
Here are the three original drawings of the image on the left here, i had to do this as each colour was a different one, so being ‘Green’ ‘Purple’ and ‘White/paper’ These were not my final colour but just to see how i would go about this in the long run.
I began to think about what my gods would look like finished and I used these drawings and inverted them from black to white, which i made transparent and layed them over block colours. Then deleted this layer onto the block colour then easraising the drawn layer to create outlines on the block colours. It sounds complex but its not once you have your head around it.
Machu Picchu
I needed to give the gods i had made a place of rest, a home where they were known for being. This made me think were there any mountains that already exsisted with god like reasons for going there. I found these mountains called ‘Machu Picchu’ its also the first track off the new Strokes album too. Then i wanted to include mountains inside my structure so i decided to make the gods live together in the mountains of Hope where people would go to get there problems solved. To keep this theme strong thoughout the book i used mountains to house the text and each god had their own mountain where they would call home.
Here was some feedback i got from a group crit we had to help us with our ideas and what we needed to do to push our ideas forward and improve what we had already.
With this project given to us by Nobrow I think I have achieved a likable piece of work that not only I can relate to but others that also read it will see the light hearted approach to creating six gods and goddess that relate to the goings on of today. From the god of wealth to the goddess of self belief these are things people have to be able to relate to and I know if they are printed in a book then these people wont fill on their own with these ideas floating around in their heads and can take comfort from this publication I have made. I always like to find books and songs that make me feel like a better person and I believe that this book does this for me and I hope that it will do the same to people who look at it also. This research booklet has a lot of illustrations in, but I found that a lot of the work drawing and playing with the computer and I think it became more about how to use specific software than gods. It seemed to be just a theme to create the visuals and the idea of basing our created gods around passed pantheons was just to give us an idea of what previously went on in religion. I didn’t go too deep into the history of a lot of religions and their chosen beliefs, although this is an interesting area I personally am a hard person to keep my concentration at a high level so I decided to work with my own ideas and make the connections at a later stage which worked better for me. I didn’t want to get to caught up in the whole research thing and at the beginning I could feel this pulling me down and I was loosing inspiration to push my ideas and getting lost in the past events and I didn’t really want my final book to relate too much with the real world as has been done and would problem end up a bit boring I think. At the end of the day I think the whole idea of gods were stories made up for people to have something to work for and look up too and have to know that they were going to be ok if they worshipped a god. Nowadays people are wrapped up in their own worlds and trying to earn enough to live a good life and do not worry about religion and belief too much, even though there are people out there that do and there the people who keep such things going, spreading the word of god like beliefs but for now I am going to keep with what I believe and live in my make believe world as most of the time its easier and you can pretty much do whatever you want to whenever you want too. I hope that the final piece I have made reaches the hands of people that find things sometimes a little to much and can take a step back
Here are my final gods and how they look in the finished book. You can see how i have used the layers of colour to create new colours by overlaying them with eachother. But yes i played with them alot on screen and i now hope they will look great on paper once printed.