Week 3- Tone and Value – Joshua Graham's Blog

This week we focused on tone and value.

To start the week, our groups were changed, so some of us got to start work on a new world. The new world I’ve been working on is themed around ‘Magical Academia’, which was explained to me as a cross between Animal Crossing and Harry Potter. Having barely dipped my toes into fantasy and magical art, I was intimidated and excited to push myself out of my thematic comfort zone and work on something different.

Naturally, with us looking at tone and value this week, we were instructed to include various techniques along the lines of two-tone drawing and hatching/cross hatching within 6 more thumbnails and one larger hatched study. Seeing this got me excited considering my love for the chiaroscuro, but I had my reservations given the theme; I wasn’t sure how well these harsher techniques would merge into this world. With a lesser breadth of visual reference than with my original world, I threw myself into Photoshop to toy with some concepts and techniques.

By way of locations I featured, I took inspiration from some of Caity’s thumbnails and reimagined them- e.g. the forest (‘faerie forest’ in her original drawings), the ruins, the library (with ghost librarians), and in struggling for a final setting, Caity gave me the idea of a cauldron illuminating a potions classroom.

For my 16×9 study I expanded on the cauldron idea from one of my thumbnails.

Using these techniques has been a rewarding challenge thus far, and I find my use of tone to be effective in generating my intended moods and atmospheres.

I’ve created two characters in this world. One anthropomorphic cat I’ve named Liza (after Minelli, both because I’m a fan and because of their big eyes. I used reference from Fantastic Mr Fox for her design), and a more elegant, respected human figure in the world’s school environment I call Marlene Cushing (after Marlene Dietrich and the Cushing family in Crimson Peak, though her design is more based around Cass Elliott, Mae West and Ella Fitzgerald), who floats but wears a long enough dress so she looks to be gliding.

I haven’t finished (or started) finalised designs for these characters yet, but some sketchbook work gets their characters across