Frederieke Arps

I start off ideation by writing down ways I can interpret the assignment; literal; as a metaphor; symbolic; in a narrative, etc.

Sometimes I develop a very rough initial idea a little bit more before doing 'spider-form' brainstorming.

I collect other facts about the subject matter. In this case I found out that several cultures have a saying that when one is in need of water, one should follow an elephant. Elephants will lead one to water sources.

I try different ways of brainstorming: this is the spider-form. You write down ideas or words you associate with the main concept. You then write down words you associate with those one-step-removed words. I find that this leads me to fresh interpretations of topics that at first only bring up cliched images.

I decided I wanted to do sequential art for this project and set myself the task of writing around 12 different story lines for this particular topic (elephants can't jump).

After talking to the teacher I decided to pursue three ideas; one being a sequential drawing and the other being single images.

The second stage of developing the concept with regard to composition takes place by drawing roughs: more detailed and refined images based on the thumbnails.

If I had pursued this rough I would have started by changing the size of the single images of the elephants jumping in order to create tension and rhythm.

I changed the composition after I had shown the image to a fellow student who has a better sense of design than I do. I liked the overlap of the elephant over the earth and I also liked the colours. After this composition I tweaked the sizes of the elephants, printed the Adobe Illustrator file out and painted the image in gouache.

After I had printed the Adobe Illustrator file, I cut out pieces of the colour and taped them to illustration board. I mixed gouache, painted a little strip next to the swatch and checked whether it was the same colour after it had dried. Darker value colours dry darker and very low value colours dry lighter in my experience (thank you William Hodges). It took me about an hour for every colour to mix and about half an hour to tape off the edges with blue scotch tape (before I found big sheets of masking tape!). The painting then took about a minute for each colour.