The Girl and the Bird

My course leader Ashley Potter from Plymouth University has been running a project to investigate how different people tackle illustration work and how this may relate to their personalities. 

The project was entitled "Girl & Bird" this subject has been tackled many times in the past in all different ways and we were asked to interpret it however we liked, and then answer a questionnaire about our work which involved questions about ourselves, the work we did and about our personality types. 

I used this project as an opportunity to do a "real" illustration project, after months away from university I have found myself spending much less time on research and drawing development in the work I do and I wanted to push myself further in this one to try and create something exciting.

I used Pinterest to collect a variety of images to inspire me. Since I started learning aerial hoop I have been collecting different poses to motivate myself and I found myself drawn to the idea of including this in my work for this project as the grace and elegance of aerial artists posing in hoops reminds me of birds sat on branches. 

The first aerial girls I drew were ok, I found myself reverting back to the style I used when drawing the circus characters for my final year project. Whilst the facial expressions for that worked well, I wanted this girl to look less juvenile and more sophisticated.

After researching pierrot makeup and fashion illustrations I spent a while experimenting with different face styles in the drawings shown below. 

I much preferred these to the simplistic expressions I used to use and decided to carry this as a theme within the bird character. My first birds were fun, but rather fat :

I developed these using longer, curvier lines and more sophisticated faces, I wanted them to look more like birds of paradise.

For my final piece I chose a hanging pose for the girl on the hoop as I really liked the pose, I decided to use textured watercolour paper as it gave the line work a rougher style.

After scanning the drawing in I coloured it using Photoshop, I chose a palette of bright, fun colours to fit the fantastical theme, I was very happy with it and I hope to put prints online soon!