Paperchase // Progress

The watercolour you can see below I have painted and scanned in.  I intend to experiment with these in illustrator to help give a texture to my illustrations so they are not as flat/dull/black on white.  I imagine I will overlay a colour in a low opacity over the top of these to make it more uniformed.  It also makes sense to use watercolour as it will create a similar look as the sea.  (hopefully!)

I began the octopus illustrations by drawing more simple line drawings and then began to add detail.  To add a bit of light humour to them I have decided to characterize them by adding silly hairstyles and hats etc.

I am considering drawing a family of Octopuses, as you can see here there is a granny and a baby octopus.  As you can also see the illustrations are improving with the more times I draw, so by the time I'm finished and well practiced, hopefully they will be perfect!

A few Idea's for Characters:

Grandma
Posh Toff
Rollerskater? (might be too tricky!)
Baby Octo
Shopaholic

Before I go straight ahead and draw up all the octopuses, I am going to give a few different illustration methods a go first.

Just been to the computer resource office to hire out a wacom tablet, never used one before.  It is quite difficult.  The results do not look that professional and it is hard to add detail using the wacom tablet so it is hard to make them look good.  Here is my initial go at using the tablet:

The shapes of the octopus vary and are quite humorous but I think they would suit a younger target audience as they are quite warped and playful which makes me think they are quite childish looking.

Nevertheless I had a go at editing one of the outlines to see what it would look like:

A preview of live image trace using the colour option instead of black and white:

An ordinary live image trace, unfortunately this did not come out as detailed as I had anticipated so from now on I will be drawing black ink on white paper so when scanned the image quality will be better and more accurate.

 

To try and increase the image traceability, I edited the brightness & contrast and the threshold on photoshop, then took it back into illustrator to live trace again, and this happened: (This was not the desired effect however it does look quite good and interesting to look at.

Here is another attempt to get the desired effect.  This drawing was completed on white paper and when scanning it in I ensured to make the image quality better.