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Final Pieces - Lord of the Flies Graphic Novel

Evaluation

Investigation

The theme of this project was to create a graphic novel based on the book lord of the flies. When I first got told about this project I generally found it an interesting opportunity creatively interpret something and show off and expand your story telling skills. Making a graphic novel is also something I havent done since I was 13 but I do generally like to read a lot of graphic novels so I wanted to see how much I have changed since then in terms of story telling and visually.


Experimentation

In the build up to my novel I started out by reading the book and other source material to fully understand the story and its other creative interpretations from head to toe, then after knowing what act I would be illustrating I started making my storyboard. Throughout this story board I tried to add elements of my own interpretation, like how Ralphe found the conch and how piggys nickname being revealed to everyone was an accident. This was to show off my own skills off story telling and to hopefully enhance the quality of the story. I also looked to pay tribute and be loyal to the overall story in my storyboard. Throughout the dialogue between characters I would try and  incorporate word for word the dialogue between characters in the book to capture the same and overall personalty of the characters like Jack, Ralphe and Piggy. I think I,ve done this successfully, my own creative elements are in the story and the overall meaning and concept of the original story is this in my storyboard.

After having my story board I then design all my main characters that would appear throughout the story and when i had my final designs I would draw them all multiple times before drawing them in the novel to fully and understand the structure, distinctive details and personality of each character. I think this this was overall successful in the final outcome, I think you can tell who is who at least with the main characters anyway like Ralphe, Piggy, and Jack and you can tell from facial features who your suppose to like and who not to.

After this I then designed the more background characters and objects but didn't spend too much time and depth on them because of how much time I had and because they were less significant to the overall story.

Finally I did some experimenting with the background, things like the beach, jungle and sea to establish the right amount of detail in the background so it looks convincing of their environment but at the same time isnt stealing focus from the main characters and their dialogue. I then did some experimenting with colouring the characters and their surroundings. I did one brief experiment with water colour and although it looked interesting it would taken to long to get the colours the right tone and shade compared to colouring them on digitally. At the same time digitally colouring in does look every appealing when you find the right colours and tone. It was also a problem at first because I did not have much experience with colouring in digitally, but once I had a good understanding of the right techniques to use it was all fine.


Realisation

My original intension for this project was to fully illustrate the whole of the first act from when the book starts to when the the children see a ship pass by but miss it because the fire was out, but because of how much depth i wanted to go into each scene and develop the characters with dialogue (because i felt that was one of the strongest points of the book) my story only got to half way through the first act.

One problem I came across when illustrating the novel was colouring in took more time then I hoped it would and wasn't going to get the whole thing coloured in on time. I unfortunately didn't overcome this problem because spending up the colouring process and spending less time on detail would have looked to poor a quality if i wanted to get the best fitting colours and right amount of detail in the tones and textures. So in the end I only coloured in 5 pages and left the remaining 9 black and white.
Another problem I had with colouring in was the gradient tool. The tones it added looked interesting and added depth, but if not used right it wouldn't look too convincing when it contrasts with the simplistic style of the ink outlines of my illustrations. I eventually sorted this problem with enough experimenting before colouring in the actual novel. I decided to only us the gradients way in the background with things like the sky and the jungle. That as a resulted added some interesting depth and quality to the background and didn't contrast too much with the characters and their simple and cartoon like pen out lines. As for adding shade to the characters and things in the foreground I just used simple block shading to complement the simple and cartoon like style of the drawings.
On minor problem is i did make a few mistakes with the structure of some of the images and the characters details when illustrating the storyboard, but once I had scanned in these images I corrected them on photoshop before I coloured them in digitally.

I think constantly try to have each image in each panel of my illustration at a different perspective has worked out well and it has kept it visually appealing throughout. Which I am very pleased with considering the whole of the story is set on the island and can sometimes it can be difficult keeping the set from getting boring visually.
I think all my characters look distinctive from one another and I think I have captured their personalities well from the book.
I think Ive told the story at a good pace and have developed most of the characters well and built up some strong dialog throughout the story as I feel the story and dialog are strong factors of the book. If i had more time I would of in fact made more depth in dialog, especially with background characters like Johnny, sam and eric as they were a bit under developed.
Looking back now am happy with the style of my work. While it does look simple and cartoony as a pose to the traditional style of graphic novels and comic books that is part of the charm to the images. There is a lot of character and personality in the simplicity of my drawings. The facial expressions and boy language are always very clear. If theres was more time though i would have experimented with more styles when designing my characters.

Overall I think from the time Ive had my novel is successful in telling its story in creative and innovative ways while still being loyal to the book and having the overall meaning. If theres was more time I would have coloured in the whole of the 14 pages. If this was a bigger project i would have liked to illustrate the whole of the book into a graphic novel as I only illustrated the first chapter from the book which was mostly build up and i was interested in creating and illustrating the payoff and testing the characters more as the story progressed.

Pages for the Graphic Novel

Pages are all fully illustrated and are now ready to be scanned in and coloured in digitally

Final Colour Experiment

More Colour and Page experiments

Other Design Work

Ralphes uniform and the the Choirs uniform -

Image Research

A theatre adaption of Lord of the Flies at the "Theatre Royal in Glasgow"

http://www.adult-size-school-uniform.com/acatalog/Theatre_Productions_At_Adult_Size_School_Uniform.html

An image of boys in a 1950s school uniform

http://opencrits.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/lord-of-flies-august-prompt-wip.html

School Cloak

http://www.aliexpress.com/price/stores-school-uniforms-price.html

The cloaks Jack and the choir wore in the 1963 film adaption of Lord of the Flies

http://castle_rock.webs.com/random.htm

Final Design

 A colour image of Ralphe and Jack wearing the uniforms

The Island -

Image Research

http://www.123rf.com/photo_4758365_beautiful-tropical-island.html

http://www.smscs.com/photo/tropical_island_wallpaper_widescreen.html

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Andre-Vltchek/2504

First design:

All the element are there to create a convincing image of an island in the distance but maybe there is a bit too much going on and as a result it looks a bit messy 

Second design

While this looks alot less messy and fits more with the simplistic style of my novel so far, there is still not quiet something convincing about it to create a solid image. 

Nevertheless i just noticed looking back at my storyboard there is never a image of the whole island at any point in my novel so i left this as it is instead of wasting time trying to perfect something that wont appear in the end product.

Plane -

Image Research of planes from the 1950s

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/01/09/nwa_history

http://hawaii.gov/hawaiiaviation/aviation-photos/1950-1959/honolulu-international-airport/united-airlines

I went with the second design as it looks the more solid (design wise and structurally). i also generally looks like something that woud carry lots of people. I also need the plane to be able to eject part of the plane carrying the passengers for the sake of the story.