Tutorial 1: Developing Roughs

Over the weekend, I spent time developing the selected thumbnails into roughs in my sketchbook by enlarging them, cleaning up on the details and adding colour, which I feel will enhance my drawings.

As for the musical instruments, I had difficulty drawing them due to the complexity of their keys, valves etc., hence I referred to images on the Internet to help me clear up the details. I found that the mid-section of the french horn too complicated so I simplified it. As for the choice of colours, I used pretty much similar colours for the instruments as real ones, except that I coloured the drum top bright yellow (though in this scanned pic it appears beige instead) and the grand piano wood brown (because I feel the usual black is such a boring colour). All in all, I had a fun time as after all, I am drawing and colouring things that I feel passionate about. After much work, here is the rough for thumbnail 1 (music-making):

I developed a variation of the above rough which is quite similar, except that a saxophone, timpani (a larger type of drum), inverted french horn and two adjacent accoustic pianos form the letters of my name instead:

When I presented the above roughs to my classmates in the Tuesday tutorial, they generally liked my concept, and unanimously agreed that I should choose the first rough for my final product, which was also in line with my original preference. However, they felt that I should use the timpani for the 'O' instead of the normal drum and that I should not have coloured the drum top yellow (which I also agreed looks pretty garish). Although I had initial reservations about the timpani, I decided to go ahead with it in my final product as it is after all more unique (just as a bass clarinet is more unique than a sax).

Now as for what I hate (smoking), I made no explicit changes from the thumbnail and just concentrated on the colour choice. I chose standard colours for the tobacco pipe (dark brown), cigarettes (brown and white), No Smoking sign (red) and ash (dark grey). I decided to colour the ash tray green because the rest of the colours were mostly dull and I thought green will help spice it up a little. I also made the outlines for the wisps of smoke more prominent for the reasons highlighted in my previous post. Here is my rough:

Subsequently, I had a headache in developing a variation but nonetheless came up with something very similar except that more cigarette butts were used in this version (perhaps to connote a type of excessiveness, as in chain smoking). A cloud of smoke was also used to form the 'O' instead of the ash tray:

My classmates again liked my concept, especially the use of a modified No Smoking sign to form the 'e'. They had no further comments, except to recommend that the first rough should be used for my final product.

Hence, armed with my classmates' helpful comments and my own intuition, I went about using Freehand to develop my final product.