Final Evaluation

 Explain your approach to the THEME, how does your final product link to the THEME.
 Compare your proposal to your final product.
 What stayed the same, and what was different?
 Why did it stay the same? OR why did it change?
 Reflect on your research and how it informed/changed the development of your
final idea.
 How well did you manage your time? What methods did you use to manage your
project? Explain answers.
 What skills did you use?
 What problems did you face?
 What have you learnt during this project? What would you do differently?
 Reflect on peer and tutor feedback.

For my final project I have chosen the theme it around a forgotten adventurer on a planet filled with strange and terrifying monsters which he as decided to document in a bestiary for future explorers. The final product which I have produced it 4 pages of this adventurer’s bestiary.

The first is a journal like page in which the adventurer has recorded the name of the planet he is on, the date which he does not know yet, the number of day and night cycles he has observed, the number of unique species he has observed, the number of species that he has currently recorded and he also written some notes about the planet such as general observations and details about the state of the plant and its atmosphere.

 

The second page is a sketch of a large hairy creature based of off the Wendigo from native american folklore, however unlike the mythological description of a human like skeletal figure with a dear skull for a head and long skinny arms with large clawed hands, I have chosen to give to give my Wendigo a very large stocky and muscular body with a large dear skull head tipped with 4 antlers and 2 large horns protruding from the creatures back, this creature is also completely covered in thick fur except for its large clawed hands and its goat like hooves. This page also features some general descriptions of the creature such as a approximate size, the environment which it resides in and some general observation about its features and its behavior.

The third page is a sketch of a massive crocodile like creature Which is deigned around a few different reptiles such as sharks, Komodo dragons various dinosaurs and prehistoric alligators, This final design features a large alligator body and head but with many eyes, a front horn around the nose, a Pachycephalosaurus head plate adorned with spikes, the mouth of the creature is filled with hundreds of shark teeth. the body of the animal has the general shape of a crocodile or an alligator but with a few alteration, for starters the creature has no back legs instead having 4 front legs with the the second pair being located directly behind the standard front legs but these back most legs are inverted as to allow the creature to run faster without having its legs crossover, the back of the creature is topped with stegosaurus spines leading all the way down to the tail which is tipped with a club-like collection of spikes. This page similar to the second also features some general descriptions of the creature such as a approximate size, the environment which it resides in and some general observation about its features and its similarity’s to extinct earth creatures.

 

The final page I have produced is a sketch of a large fly like creature which uses a lot of different features from various insects such as, bees, wasps, mantises, fly’s and misquotes. the result of this mash up is a insect like creature with the tail of a wasp the body of a fly and the head of a mosquito, the creatures body also features eight legs with the front 2 being bees legs, the middle 4 being wasps legs and the back 2 also being wasps legs. the body also has two mantis claws on the section f body in front of the front legs. The head of the creature has a mosquito eye, proboscis, feelers and antenna but the head also features a mantis mouth. The tail of the creature is a standard wasp tail but with some small spikes on its black striped areas and a much large stinger than usual with poison dripping from it. The creature also has 3 pairs of wings with the two back pairs are located on the main body and are bee wings with the front pair being larger than the back, the other set of wings is located on the front section of the body and are fly wings. This page similar to the second and third also features some general descriptions of the creature such as a approximate size, the environment which it resides in and some general observation about its features and the justification for its name.

 

Over all my pages have mostly stuck to the brief but there have been some deviations from the original plan. the first main change I made from the proposal was that I decided to only produce 3 creature sketch instead of the 4 I originally planned to produce, I did this because I felt that it was more important to be able to spend longer on 3 sketches than trying to rush out 4 sketches as I wanted to focus more on the quality of the work, it also for this reason that I chose not to include side views of the characters, also I have never drawn character profile shots and I didn’t want the sketches to look bad for the exhibition I chose to draw each sketch from a different angle. Another way which I have strayed from the proposal is by not labeling the parts of the creature, the reason I have didn’t this is because I felt that because I used parts of earth creatures and mixed them together that each part would be easily recognizable and wouldn’t need explaining, another reason I have chosen to to include labels is because when  I had finished my sketches there wasn’t much room left on the page as I drew them in enlarged A3 and I didn’t want to shrink them down too much other wise I might have lost a lot of the detail. The final way I deviated from the proposal is by including the journal first page, the reason I did this is because I wanted people at the exhibition to understand the aesthetic I was going for and I thought that the page might add some more context to the project and the sketches as a whole.

Apart from those changes my project followed the proposal pretty well, for example I tried to make all the characters look as if they belonged in specific environments belonging in air for the fly, land for the Wendigo and sea for the crocodile. I achieved this by using creatures which belong in that environment such as when designing the Wendigo I only used design aspects from land based creatures which belonged in similar environments such as deer, goats, cows and wolves.

This project has been quite challenging and has required a lot of preparation and research to complete, This research came from many different sources such as mood boards, books, movies, initial ideas, test pieces and online tutorials. However I have found that some of these research sources were more helpful than others and helped me with different areas of the project. Collecting mood boards on my theme allowed me to gather ideas on what sort of sketches I would need to produce and what to include in them, this research also gave me the idea to to make the sketches fit into a bestiary similar to the spider-wick Chronicles.

I also used a multitude of different reference images from mood boards which I gathered on Pinterest, I used these images to collect ideas and use different aspects of images as references when drawing some more unique body parts such as insect legs, goat hooves, deer skulls and mantis mandibles. Collecting these mood boards has been really helpful and has allowed me experiment with more unique designs and look through the images had given me more ideas about how I can put these ideas together in better ways allowing my sketches to be more original and look better as well as fitting more within my theme.

These are the three main mood boards which I gathered for my ideas generation which helped a lot with that task but they also helped when designing my final sketches as the boards contained a lot of different anatomy and strange designs which also made me change my original ideas for my final sketches to be more refined and realistic as well as looking much better in the end. I will continue to use mood boards in future projects because of how useful they are for gathering ideas and reference images.

During the course of this project I encountered a few problems and challenges which I need to look back on so that I can avoid them in future. The first problem which I faced at he start of the project is that I had not finished the previous assignment and was still working on aspects of that previous project which stopped me from completely focusing on the initial research for this current project, this caused me to fall behind at the very start, however eventually I did catch up during the developed research task. The next challenge that I faced was that I spent too long on my initial idea sketches which overflowed into my final sketches so as a solution I used a sketch which I produced for a previous project which fit well into my theme and matched my brief. The final production went fairly well and I was able to complete them in time but I could have completed than much faster by finding quicker ways of completing my designs such as using stamps or properly designing my creatures before sketching them. I think that the main reason that I fell behind