OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book Evaluation

Overall, this has been a really successful project. I don't think there has been any point that anything has gone massively wrong, and the space in between major key points of delivery allowed us plenty of time to develop our work - which means that the end point has come out really professionally.

I think one aspect i've definitely enjoyed is not having sole control over the entire project. This was reflected in the Thought Bubble work too, but I definitely think having a set boundary to work in, set by someone else, working with other people to bounce ideas off really works for me - mostly because I don't get lost in stupid details or get confused or distressed about organising things. That isn't to say that I need to shy away from big self-driven projects; on the contrary, I think I probably need to take more of them on to build up my skills - but I definitely prefer it when i'm not the sole person responsible. 

Another positive challenge from the brief was learning to discuss and present illustration-based ideas with someone who wasn't from a creative background. Kerry and the other engineering staff had little understanding about how illustration briefs worked, so it was our job to facilitate this and still meet their requirements. In spite of this though, things still went really smoothly - and the experience of doing this has set me up well for working with future clients. 

OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 8

The Colouring book launch was awesome! Here are some photos I took during it - it felt really strange seeing the colouring book properly assembled and in the flesh, not just on a computer screen. The event went completely smoothly with almost no hiccups - the pens worked fine on the paper, the roll of paper only fell on a child once (the paper was velcro'd to the frame, so no damage happened) - and we had some cheesy marketing photos taken which was fun, if not a little bit awkward.

We got in the Yorkshire Evening Post, which was nice! Overall it was a lovely end to the project as a whole. At a debrief afterwards, Kerry gave us all a present (really nice champagne!) and a card, which was really nice of her. It was nice to end the project on a high, and also to have taken part in something that ran so smoothly. 

It was briefly discussed that there was potential for the project to lead to further work - but regardless of whether or not that comes to fruition, I feel as a standalone, i've got some really good work out of this and i've really enjoyed taking part in it.  

OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 7

The secondary part of this project was a large-scale launch event that was held in the Trinity Kitchen in Leeds, where copies of the book could be handed out. Kerry wanted to attempt to make an enormous large scale colouring book page for people to colour on - which used the double page spreads that Paul and Adam made for the book.

Me and adam got invited to visit the Uni to go and look at his design blown up full-size, to make sure he was okay with it. It looked really cool! and it was interesting to see a project approach large-scale illustration work differently to the way me and Tom approached the #Getintocomics project, which was all handpainted (Adam and Paul's designs were vectorised in order for them to be printed full scale like this)

As part of my contribution to this - I helped Martell from Progression find suitable pens to use for a colouring page on this scale. I've had experience of large scale colouring in/painting in the past, and I know a lot about pen types - so I suggested we either went with thick-nib Edding or Berol markers, both of which can be ordered from YPO. They're water-based, not bleedy, and are formulated for kids to use, which makes them suitable for large scale colouring like this.

Whilst this isn't an illustration based exercise - helping to sort this out directly helped when I was later looking at sourcing supplies for the ANORAK magazine brief (Studio Brief 6) - so it ended up being a significant discovery.

OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 6

A Polaroid Zatul asked someone to take. Look how smiley and not terrified we all are.

So once the prototype had been printed up, the books were distributed to the upper management, so that a meeting could be arranged with the University of Leeds staff, Fred & Martell Baines from the Progression & Outreach department (who facilitated the organisation and creation of the original brief) and the Leeds College of Art management.  

The meeting was basically for us to showcase the project, allow us to discuss and talk about our work on the project and also allow for some serious talks about research pedagogies amongst students and staff - and other fun things.

The book was really well received - the upper management were really impressed with how well we had collaborated and how the project had come together. I think what made us work so well as a group, was that we only had to be individually responsible for the work we were assigned (which meant we didn't have to handle the entire project at once) and that organisation and correspondence was place firmly in the hands of one person - which on this project was Adam. 

Having clear boundaries about who was responsible for what, and also having the facebook page allowed everyone to communicate freely and post their ideas regularly. This allowed us to keep tabs on the project throughout, and laid our deadlines out clearly in front of us. 

In real-life book publishing - illustration works the same way, with one person (or a department) working specifically with an illustrator to get work from them. You have clear deadlines to meet at various stages - which is exactly the same as what we had for making the book, which made it a lot easier to complete. 

The other positive outcome of the project was that we all got paid! Which was a nice outcome, I have to say. 

In order to properly assign the amounts we needed to be paid - we had a consultation with Fred, agreeing on our page rates. Based on advice from previous practitioners - it's usually better to go in higher and not undersell yourself (because if you go in too low at the start, it's all you'll ever get!). 

We agreed for a page rate of around £80 per page - so Initially recieved £160 for my two, then a further £80 for the second page. Everyone got varying amounts relative to the work they'd produced, as some had done more than others of provided later services like photography which they needed to be paid for. However - my total pay ended up at about £240 for the project - which may be low in the grand scheme of industry, but I was happy with given the scope of the project.

Once the books were properly prototyped - Kerry sent them off for the final print and we had to start getting ready for the big launch event (which is very exciting!) 

OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 5

 After we did the first round of colouring book pages, Kerry printed some initial testing copies and took them out into primary schools to test how well received they were/if their message was clear. The books went down a storm, apparently - and the teachers, parents and students all loved them.

However - one of the key parts of feedback that were given about them were that there wasn't enough diversity amongst the characters, and that we needed to include more minority representations in the final book. So Kerry asked us to come up with 4 more designs, for another 4 sections of engineering to ensure the book had a more equal spread of representation.

I wanted to draw a boy from an afro-caribbean background, with different hair types. The category of engineering I'd chosen to draw for was Mechanical Engineering - so I wanted to draw him fighting as a superhero with mechanical toys (like planes, cars), growing up into a Mechanical Engineer designing machines. 

I liked both of these as a character designs but I thought the little boy with shorter hair worked better - and you could see his facial expressions a lot clearer. I also experimented with them wearing face coverings like masks and goggles for a ~true superhero~ feel, but I felt it complicated their designs and they didn't need it so I got rid of it for the final design.

This is what the characters looked like on the final, both as a child and grown up. I created this the same way I did the others - I drew an initial Berol pen 'blueprint', which I then used as a sketch to draw the Cintiq lines over the top. This has definitely allowed me to get the lines as crisp as I could get them - a marked improvement on my previous digital ink-work. 

Compositionally I made this the same as the other two - mixing my character designs with existing reference imagery to make it look as accurate as possible whilst remaining stylised. 

Using imagery as a reference for pose and perspective has been really useful for this colouring book brief, and it's definitely going to be a technique I use again later if I do any more digital character work with line-work. 

Kerry was happy with the extra designs we submitted, and took them to make a prototype. The next time we saw the books was at a Principal's meeting, where we had to talk about the project with the upper management!

OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 4

Here are the two final pages I sent through to Adam. I tried to make the proportions of the characters a little bit less stylised, and I also decided that I didn't like the look of the black berol lines I originally did - so these ones were done digitally in photoshop, using a Cintiq. 

I hadn't used the Cintiq much before - despite being a pretty consistent graphics tablet user - so it was a bit of an odd transistion, because your sitting stance is completely different. However, I felt it was easier to get smoother lines with the Cintiq, and I think the strength of designs is in how nicely the lines have come out. 

In terms of drawing the designs themselves - I used a mixture of the sketches i'd done previously, and imagery to get the machines as accurate as possible (since they've not been my strong point in the past) Here are some of the references I looked at:

 

I've found having photos as a reference has had a positive impact on my compositions, as opposed to just drawing stuff from memory all the time. I think the reason I like how these have turned out compared to some of my other work is because the machines and the anatomy of the characters have been observed from elsewhere - which means that they look a lot more correctly proportioned. 

We took our designs to kerry in our next meeting, who adored them. Apart from the odd change on some of the other's pages - there was not much else to do at this point but wait until kerry had compiled the pages and sent the book into schools for testing. We were really excited to hear what they thought of them! 

OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 3

Here's a picture of Adam, courtesy of Will. I had loads of first hand photographs but they seem to have disappeared somewhere!

After getting our initial designs in, Kerry organised a trip for us to go visit the engineering faculty and go on a tour around it. The trip was for us to get a little bit more first-hand experience about what Engineering as an industry was about, and to understand more about the different subsets of engineering that were taught at the University of Leeds.

There are five different schools of engineering at Leeds - School of Chemical and Process Engineering, School of Civil Engineering, School of Computing, School of Electric and Electrical Engineering, and the School of Mechanical Engineering. What was interesting was seeing the difference between each of the different areas, and how each one links together to create and build all the different infrastructure that we use day-to-day. 

It was also really cool getting to see all the different labs and machines that the students were building, and using to build stuff! I've always found scientific equipment interesting. Getting to see them first hand was really a useful visual reference for understanding how we needed to draw it in the colouring book too.

Having had the tour, we left to continue working on our first designs for the book. 

OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 2

Here are the initial ideas and sketches I took with me to Kerry's meeting. I've been told off a lot in the past (especially by fred) for inking my sketches in berol pens/with thick black lines, as it 'kills' a lot of the movement and potential in them. However in this instance I deliberately chose to do this, because I wanted to see what it looked like 'inked' for a colouring book, and I wanted to display this to Kerry.

She was really happy with everything we all brought with us - but it was agreed immediately that we were going to need some sort of template as a guide to make sure that all of our ideas looked consistent when put into the book, despite all of our different drawing approaches. 

She liked the idea of the bubbles (which i'd drawn on my sample page) but wasn't as keen on it flooding the whole page. She also really liked the characters i'd drawn on the sample page - but felt the wall behind the girl might have been a bit too complicated to work for a kid's colouring book.

Bearing all this feedback in mind - Kerry sent adam some samples of potential 'bubbles' we could work with, who then made a sample template for us all to work our illustrations to. These were put up on the facebook group and distributed to us all via Google Drive

OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 1

At the start of level 6, we got approached with the opportunity to take part in a range of different live briefs. One of the live briefs that came in was from the University of Leeds, run by a lady called Kerry Baker - who is the Engineering Education Liaison officer for the Faculty of Engineering. 

Kerry came to the college with an idea to make a colouring book designed to encourage primary school children into going into engineering as a field when they were older. In order to do this - she wanted some illustrators to help make the work, so me, Adam Allsuch Boardman, Olivia Newsome, Will Grout and Paul Brough took on the challenge!

Kerry had already discussed a lot of the brief with Fred prior to us receiving it, so everything was fairly well spread out and clear; each of us would take on a couple of pages each - with the opportunity for two double page spreads also needing to be done. Kerry provided us with a really nice visual 'guide' to what being an engineer entails - and a list of each area of engineering that she wanted to be represented in the book, which can be seen here:

After our initial meeting with her, Adam was elected as the lead corresponder and project manager - and we set up a facebook page to keep tabs with each other throughout the project. Out of the list of potential areas, I chose Medical Engineering and Oceanographic Engineering to illustrate - and started putting ideas together for what I wanted them to look like.