The story I received was about a car accident, and it sounded to me like a nightmare caused by trauma, with a little plot twist of a night lamp telling this story by displaying images to a person.
During reading the text, I made three thumbnails to picture my idea. It was a very effective way of taking notes of any ideas that came to my head at any point in the reading process.
First idea
My first thumbnail features a road surrounded by trees and a car heading towards the person in the middle of the road. I think it shows how in the story a person “suddenly arose” from sleep to have this picture in front of them. The story as a whole sounded a bit scary, so to picture this sense of fear, I planned to use one point perspective to show the car coming towards the viewer to show things from the perspective of a character.
Second Idea
The second idea was inspired by the ending of the story about a “night lamp” telling the story. It reminded me of these old night lamps that had pictures on the shade that was rotating and displaying images around the room. I created a thumbnail showing such a lamp ad displaying images of a car crash from the story. I think that’s an interesting way to tell a story. However, I think it’s too direct without any dipper meaning. I would prefer for the audience to feel some emotions when looking at the piece. For example, my previous idea focuses on the sense of fear, and although the car crash is not directly shown in the artwork, we can guess it will happen as the car is heading towards a person.
My third idea was to picture the story as a shattered glass piece showing reflections of various parts of the story, such as lights, car accident and fire. I thought it sounded like an interesting way of showing how broken is the character in the story to see all these horrible things.
The final choice of an idea
My final choice for the illustration was the first idea, as it gave me a chance to use the things about the perspective from last year and try something new in terms of light. While the other two ideas directly show the car accident, the first idea only suggests what may happen. I don’t think it’s necessary to show the whole accident as long as it is obvious what is going to happen. It is important in the art industry to create pieces that inspire and make the audience question the meaning behind them rather than show the obvious answers.
According to the text, the character is lying in their bed while the lamp telling their story. I thought It would be a good idea to show a character in bed in the middle of the road rather than on its own because then it makes the audience question the piece whether it is possibly someone’s dream or reality and what is going to happen to this person. The text doesn't directly mention the character being in a car accident, but it tells us what the character sees and feels, like in a dream. This is why I wanted to place the main character in the foreground, so it gives us the feeling of seeing things the way the character in the story does and makes people think about how the character felt being in the middle of the road with the car heading towards them.
I started by drawing a one-point perspective with a vanishing point in the middle on an A4 page. I used ink to paint an "untenanted road" as a dark road surrounded by trees. In the middle of the road, there is a car heading towards a person in the bed who just woke up. It is a reference to the part of the story where the character falls asleep for some time, after which wakes up and sees a story of the car accident displayed by their night lamp. I thought seeing an image of a car accident right after waking up in the middle of the night must feel like the person is in an actual car accident for a second, so that's where the idea of the car heading toward a person came.
The ink painting turned out to have a good perspective that I learnt to create in my first year. I also blended ink with water to get many light shades to create trees fading in the background to get perspective of the distance. I wanted to work further into this piece and add some more details mentioned in the text.
I was going to do further edits digitally, but I was worried about any folds or tears that may occur during the painting process. A simple solution was to use washi tape to secure the page by attaching it to the desk. This way the layers of ink and water did not damage the paper and left the page straight after it dried.
The ink painting turned out to have a good perspective that I learnt to create in my first year. I also blended ink with water to get many light shades to create trees fading in the background to get perspective of the distance. I wanted to work further into this piece and add some more details mentioned in the text.
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Mood board
I didn’t have any experience drawing a flashing light or anything like that. To understand how the car light work and the way it appears on the ground and flashes, I created a mood board with some examples and rough drawings. It helped me to decide how I wanted the flashing lights to appear in the drawing.
Next, in Krita, I digitally added colours mentioned in the story as “blue and orange lights”. I tried to place the colourful lights like the flashing car lights, but they looked out of place. So instead, I tried to separate them by using orange for car lights and blue for the sky.
Version 1
The final version
Using a piece of writing done by college student to create an illustration was very similar experience to working with script for comic. Compare to creative writing lessons we had this semester I found it easier to work with a bigger piece of writing because all the events, mood and characters are clearly stated and gives a lot of freedom for an artist to picture it in any way. The script we learnt how to write this year was more complex with a lot of directions on how each panel should look like, specifically the angles.