Through the duration of Thought Bubble, there was an opportunity for us to put on an exhibition of a select number of people's work at Travelling Man, the local comic book store. There were up to 16 A2 spaces for people to hang posters, with no stipulation about the theme or what the posters contained, so long as they were suited to the sort of work that Travelling Man typically deals in.
The project was managed by Joe Shiels - which was a mixed experience (but not necessarily by his doing), because Matt (the manager) was somewhat difficult to get a hold of, which made it difficult to put queries through to them.
In between this there was a lot of difficulty deciding themes amongst everyone (in contrast to the Engineer's brief, where this was a lot more straight forward) - some people wanted an overall theme, some people were really against it. Everyone's work was very different from each others, so many thought giving it a 'theme' would unify it - but others felt it would restrict people too much. In the end, it was decided that we'd try to create some cohesion through a vague sense of colour scheme, and leave the subject matter up to us as individuals.
I tried to do something really different and out of my usual 'style' for this - choosing to draw a poster based on the game series 'Metroid' (since the original plan was to go for a sci-fi theme, which 80% of people ended up doing anyway). The colour palette we'd been given had been limited to the pink, blue and cream/white colours seen in the poster - so I was inspired a lot by Matt Taylor and Olly Moss' poster designs - especially in the way they both used colour and texture, which you can see in there work here:
Even though this was fanart I was really proud of how this came out, and I still really like it. I like the contrast between the white and the heavy texture; it gives Samus a focal point and makes her stand out from the background, which gives it a depth I hadn't really managed to create before. The textures were created with a mix of gradients, textured brushes (from Domareen's set) and used to build up contrast.
I think more than anything - I think this was a surprise for me, in that I can actually do a lot more complex and detailed work than I previously had done. I think compositionally this could have been pushed a lot further, but I do think that it's an improvement on what i've done previously. I've been told before that i've been relying too heavily on old methods of drawing and making pictures - but I feel things like this take those methods and tries to do something differently, which makes the images a lot stronger.
Over the course of the exhibition I made one sale - so a nice £15 (it cost me about £12 to print all 5). I'm going to try and sell the others privately, since i've had quite a few queries about them since advertising them on my art pages.
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