Evaluation

Has my work communicated the nursery rhyme row row row your boat without words. Well after looking over my comic I don't think I have successfully shown the nursery rhyme. This is due to the fact without the words the rhyme is just too vague to be seen even though I tried to combine all the aspects of how to create a successful wordless piece I think I have selected the wrong type of text. Rhymes though well known aren't as popular as fairy tales like in my fmp and I think due to this communicating a nursery rhyme wordless would need to be a different formate. If I were to add text to my comic it would make perfect scene and be a surreal interesting take on the rhyme but I just don't think there's enough there to say it fully communicates the rhyme. If I were to re create this as an animation maybe it would have worked better but I feel as a comic it needs something else added to t like to be in a book of other nursery rhymes without text, in that situation the piece would work fine because it would be surrounded by similar rhymes in comic form and after seeing a few different ones would be noticeable and then you would understand what the subject was based on.
Though I do think as a wordless comic vaguely based on the rhyme it works because I have utilised all the aspects that need to be there to help communicate what happening such as gesture, scale, and expression and use of strong pattern to help show form. I think that if I were to do a selection like this then put them in a set based of how iv made this one it could work but as a stand alone comic I just don't think there is enough to the story of the rhyme to have it show through. Maybe if I had chosen a longer rhyme like twinkle twinkle little start I would have had more to work with and been able to make more pages giving me more space to properly interrogate the rhyme.
As a process I think my final images work with the use of the pattern and the spot colour to create  the form of the ocean and this is something I should try and put into my fmp rather than just always using full colour as spot colour allows me to highlight one aspect that I want the viewer to concentrate on and this could be a good way to brake up how I colour my stories in my fmp. I also would like to continue to look into wordless process as I have found it interesting and think if using a different story I could really put the techniques I learnt into a good solid wordless outcome.
So overall I think as a stand alone comic it doesn't 100% communicate the fact its about the nursery rhyme but if put in a collections with others like it, it would then be more noticeable and work a lot better.

Outcome

  After looking over all my experiments I found that the best way to communicate my wordless narrative will be through a comic as I can show passage of time and allow me to use as many panels needed to show gesture and scale that will help further the understanding of it being the nursery rhyme, row row row your boat.

Ruff idea drafts
  Throughout these pages I tried to combine all aspects of telling a wordless narrative together, the first draft seamed to just get down the idea but in the second I combined pages that showed scale, interesting viewpoints and most of all expression and interesting panel layout. The moon is very important through the panels and is in a fixed position throughout the comic except for the last scene this is supposed to show her journey has ended like in journey with the constant mountain in sight until you reach the end. I wanted this to help the story flow throughout the pages as a consistent element. I also used slight movements like in Jason's comics where each movement is stated witch I used to help show how relaxed the character feels in a situation witch would normally be seen as helpless and stranded, this feed the line life is like a dream as the character knows she will be okay even though the reader doesn't at the start when I showed how stranded she was in the sea using scale. Showing close ups of her expression was also used to show again she isn't scared but merry and content. I also found making the narrative surreal works best as it allows me to play on the last line life is like a dream, but made the surrealism slow starting as this is the end of the rhyme and I wanted to make it as obvious as I could using subtle ways like in Hilda by Luke Pearson.

F|inal page layouts

Final pages

  I have done these pages to show what the actual comic will look like.

Cover

pg1

pg2

Gesture, Body language and Facial expression.

  After looking at how others have created wordless narratives successfully like the animation Paperman and the comic by Jason, I found that a characters gesture, body language and expression is really important as this how to feed the narrative without using words. The best way to do this is to use bold gesture and exaggerated expression that the reader will be able to easily read and relate to. As in Paperman to make the expressions obvious they have enhanced the size of the eyes this makes the facial expressions more obvious and means the viewer tends to watch the eyes.  Unlike Paperman Jason's comics doesn't rely on facial expression it tells its narrative through dynamic actions and body language. As his panels are small and his character design is simple he uses gesture to show what's going on.
I have made my characters eyes larger in these sketch's to see if affects the expression. I feel this works well as long as you keep the eye simple, if you made them complicated it would take from the expression and wouldn't work as well. I also looked at strong movements and obvious ways to show a rowing motion.

Surrealism

Definition

noun

1. 1.

   a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Max Ernst, Ubu Imperator, (1923), Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ernst accessed 28/04/2014

 There are many forms of surrealism like personification or anthropomorphism, but mainly surrealism contains magic realism. I decided surrealism would suit my nursery rhyme as it would make illustrating it more fun and allow me to make the illustrations more interesting and different from how its been illustrated in the past. My first experiment was based on the first surrealist like Max Ernst who's work was very magical and unique. My only problem with making the story to surreal like this image is that you wont be able to see clearly what nursery rhyme it is and without words to explain this defiantly wont work.

 So after that I decided to play living corpse to create a surreal character I could use in my nursery rhyme. This would allow to not only have a unique odd character but mean I would have to completely think about how this character would communicate through gestures and expressions. 

Original living corpse

My version

I made my version of the character cuter and more stylised, I wanted the character to be simple but show personality through how it dresses and stands. Much like in Jason's comic this character has a simple face but due to the fact my character will mainly be rowing the boat throughout the panels I decided to use other parts of the face other than just the eyes to show expression such as the bow and the characters whiskers. 

I feel that this character would work better in a rhyme where the character didn't need to be contained to a boat as I could utilise gesture and body language better. Making the rhyme surreal seams too be a good idea but to make it more magical realism and dream like rather than making it to odd and weird, I still need to be able to communicate it without words and making it to surreal just makes it to unclear. 

Once I realised this I created a short wordless 3 panel sequence showing a level of surrealism that works due to how subtle it is, in these panels iv made her hair and the sea linked as one entity as the patterns I used worked for both. The is more obvious in the last panel but this still relates the the line 'Life is but a dream'.

This works much better and dose not detracting from the rhyme like before but still enhances like in Hilda and the midnight giant, subtle but noticeable. 

Colour

 Usually in my work I tend to use a lot of colours and so in this project I want to use a tamer selection of colours or no colour at all.

  Colour without us realising can affect our behaviour and how we perceive things. The oddest thing is that every culture perceives colour differently, in western Europe red may mean bold and passion but in India it marks purity at weddings, yellow in England may be reassuring while in France it signals jealousy and in china masculinity. In nature colour is used to attract mates or hide from predators.

-http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01q8qq1  15 minute radio documentary, Feeling Colour, first broadcast Wednesday 30 January 2013, accessed 05/03/2014

 As my nursery rhyme is based on the sea I picked blue to based my colour selection.

  I found the one of the covers of the books I had looked at had an interesting cover that caught my eye. The cover of Blankets consists of blues and white, I really like how this cover stands out and only uses simple colour rather than full colour. I wanted to try using spot colour similar to the cover of Blankets, and tried to only use the colour blue for the sea because this is an important part of my rhyme and makes its vast size compared to the boat stand out. This experiment shows that using spot colour makes the boat stand out through the mass of pattern that is the sea. It works well as it helps separate the pattern of the sea from the boat and moon.

Blankets cover

Black and white

Black and white images can work just as well as seen in comics, the book that I found uses black and white images successfully was Blankets, the images in this comic use the white space and line to create shades of grey to add tone to the image. The black and white images in this book are striking and stand out due to the contrast. I tried to create images that stood out and used not just black and white gradient but grey tones as well. My first experiment was made to help me understand text, mixing text with images as even though my project is wordless is still something I need to understand before disregarding it. This image is black and white as that was the brief but this meaning I had to think about contrast and how I could make my paper cut style more simple. I further experiment with this in my second image as this is wordless and from my rhyme, adding in grey scales gave me more to use and this didn't work as well as the experiment before because I gave myself to much to work with and so then didn't think about space as much as I did with the black and white image.

Ruff ideas for black and white image

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

  

Tone and spot colour

  On this comic page I used spot colour and tone together as I realised that I hadn't considers the white space that I would have left on the page, and this lessons the impact of blue and white. Also this story is supposed to be set at night and you cant really tell with so much white making the image seam as if in day. Though the combination of how the hatching works with the blue and the pattern used for the waves, I find the softer tones of the watercolours grey to work better because it makes the image softer and more suited to how the words of the rhyme, using the association of the soft grey tone with merriment and relaxation. 

After changing the background to be black I found the blue and white worked better as the white was less dominate but this makes the hatching on the boat for the tone stand out more and this isn't what I was trying to do. 

Pattern

Definition:

An artistic or decorative design

or

A design of natural or accidental origin: patterns of bird formations

Pottery of ancient Greece

Geometric art

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_art accessed 03/03/2014

  This was a movement when the pottery would be covered in decorative geometric shapes such as triangles, zigzags, meander and swastika with linear patterns around the neck and base of the vase.

Black figure pottery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amasis_Painter#Decorative_Elements accessed 03/03/2014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery_of_ancient_Greece#Protogeometric_styles accessed 03/03/2014

     This was a technique that came along in 480 BC where the artist would paint detailed silhouetted figures onto the pottery. They painted scenes of warriors and animals mainly and in these you can see even though very decorative they contain a feeling of structured and narrative.  One vase painter who was well known for his black figured pottery was known as Amasis painter, he painted narrative tales about mythology. But he was also known for his non narrative painting of the gods and human interacting but when looked at know seem to have an unknown narrative made up by the viewer. His work was very symmetrical and was painted with care using shapes to create decorative images. Another strong decorative part of Amasis painters work is his use of floral patterns or bands of zigzags or lines to separate the panel that contained the figures. This made the panels stand out and gave a clean finish.

   The use of pattern in black figure pottery breaks up the strong areas of black and makes it more interesting to look at. I also think the pattern add more form to the figures as well especially when used on the beards or clothing. There is also the use of decorative pattern around the panel; these patterns are sometimes simple or as bit more complex like in figure 1 with the flower pattern around the top. This helps break the image up and adds to the fact its attractive decorative piece that richer people would have in their homes as sometimes telling a story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Herakles_Olympos_Louvre_F30_full.jpg

Herakles entering Olympus, location Louvre museum, origin Athens accessed 03/03/2014

Persian rugs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_carpet   accessed 03/03/2014

http://www.william-morris.co.uk/ accessed 03/03/2014

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003vdc5 -William Morris and the Muslims duration 25 minutes first broadcast Monday 10 august 2009 produced by Ian chambers accessed 03/03/2014

  Persian rugs are decorative items made of wool, silk and cotton; they are highly regarded in Persian arts. They contain a variety of pattern that is planned out before the making will begin. The main thing Persian rugs will contain is a motif, which will vary depending on where the rug was made but they contain only one and all have different meanings.

  William Morris was an English designer from the 19^th century who was inspired by Turkish ceramics and Persian carpets. His patterns were heavily inspired by carpets that were imported and was taken by the natural aspects of the world and thought it was romantic and at the time Victorian homes had too much things in them.  He liked simple patterns and proceeded to merge Islamic ideas into his patterns that were very symmetrical and repetition. He wanted his work to have meaning and beauty.

http://seamsandstitches.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/william-morris-2/  (image) accessed 03/03/2014

Artists

Paul Berthan

   Paul Berthan was a graphic artist who's work was hight decorative. He was well known for his interpretations of art nouveau. A lot of his work was created using lithographs, and was heavily inspired by Japanese woodcuts. 

  Berthan's work is defined by his use of striking pattern and lines. His images stand out due to there vibrant colours he uses. A lot of Berthans patterns are continuous and flow around the female form, his use of pattern can range from subtle as in figure 2 to loud in figure 1. Figure 2 portrays a delicate female and this is shown by his use of quieter pattern with subdued colours. I will try and use pattern as Berthan dose to help make my subject more detailed and make them look harder at the image as it wont have words so ill need to draw the viewer in another way and I feel pattern might help. 

Figure 1
Two girls with a printing press, 1896, Located The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

Figure 2
Poster for L'Ermitage 1897, medium lithograph, Located The Bridgeman Art Library 

Gustav Klimt

    Klimts work uses pattern to create form without lines, his patterns stand out and without knowing we understand the form that is being created because of the limbs and heads added onto the forms. This makes the forms solid but have no defining line so at the same time feel more natural. Klimts work always seem to have a select colour pallet as in the two example underneath he uses rich colours like golden yellows, purples and brown, these colours work well together and compliment each other. He is also well known for using gold leaf within his work. Pattern makes his work stand out and catches the eye because they are his own created patterns and this means its you wont have seen them before. 

- Art nouveau, by Rosalind Ormiston and Michael Robinson, edited by Sara Robson, 2013, published by Flame Tree publishing limited London

-Paul Berthan pg 26-27, pg114-115

-Gustav Klimt pg186-187

Other ways to use pattern

  Pattern can be applied to a multiple of different things such as clothing and buildings. Here are a few examples I looked at to see what I could apply pattern to to enhance telling my story without words.

C.Neeon Autumn/Winter 07/08 collection 'Sharing Secrets'

Barkow Leibinger Architeken, Gatehouse of Trimpf Gmbtl, 2007

Chris Bosse, Digital Origami,2007

Annette Schroter, Blickins Land 2, 2003, Papercut 250x190cm

Sun Young Byun, The house in the painting the painting in the house, 2007, Acrylic on canvas 120x85cm

- Patterns 2 Design, Art and Architecture, Published by the German National Libary, Printed in Germany, 2008

Experiments

  I first looked creating my own patterns that I could transfer into my work and created a sample image in a workshop witch helped me understand that continuous patterns work better as you wont get gaps with no pattern. It also helped me realise pattern is best of only being used for sections not the whole image as it is in my workshop piece. I find my workshop piece a bit to much and you don't really appreciate the pattern like in Klimt's work, mine was just to crowed. 

Pattern workshop

  After I decided that I would create two patterns that could be used to create the form of the sea and another to be used on the female so she wasn't lost in the pattern of the sea, and so she stood out as an important part of the narrative.

 With these I created a short scene from an animation, using these patterns to create the form of the sea and the girls body like Berthan and Klimt. I have created 3 versions to see what works best, A silent animation, a version with a musical score and one with sound. I did this to see what works best after looking a animations like paperman and rain town.

Music: Raindrops by Stanislav Bunin from the game Eternal Sonata

Sound: recorded of youtube stock sea sounds.

  Overall I feel the animation that uses the sound works best as the version with the music will take away from the viewer relating the video to the nursery rhyme unlike the sound version witch just adds a levels of the real world into it enhancing the surrealism of the animation. I feel the pattern works well as the sea as its a large form that the pattern allows it to move fluently without large movements. Also the pattern highlights the importance of the sea. Though I do find using such a solid pattern for the sea can be distracting and I think using a simpler pattern may translate the form better.
  This pattern is more freer and is similar to how I draw hair relating to my nursery rhyme line 'life is like a dream'. Using pattern will help communicate my nursery rhyme as it will make my outcome more interesting and decorative meaning the viewer will look into my pieces more to reveal the narrative.

Interactivity and scale

 After looking at Journey and finding this was the only wordless adventure game I looked at other platforms that use the landscape and surroundings to emphasis the story and viewer like Journey does and found that the Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame does the same thing. The building Notre Dame in this film constantly over looks the city and they use dynamic shots of it to exaggerate the scale to the city and people. Using view points to amplify the buildings size really impacts the viewers feeling of such a holy place.

Layout art by Tom Shannon

Background art by Fred Warter, Kathy Altieri and David Goetz

- The art of The Hunchback of Notre Dame,1996, text by Stephen Rebello, published by Hyperion New York

- The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Disney, original release 1996, DVD released 2013, directors Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise

Sketches on how I could use size
   Here are some ideas I tired on how I could uses size to help communicate my narrative, I tried using perspective and pattern to show the scale of the sea and how unpredictable it can be.

Pop Up

http://www.markhiner.co.uk/history-text.htm  accessed 05/03/2014

http://assprouen.free.fr/denoville/activites.php  image accessed 05/03/2014

  A pop-up book is a book in which the content goes into a third dimensional (3D), this term is used for books that contain interactive elements such as flaps and pull tabs as well as images that come off the page.

  This dates back to the 13^th century when the first recognised interactive item was the hand written documents called Volvelles. Volvelles were used by fortune tellers or ones that read the stars they were discs that spun around a pivotal point, they generally had symbols or words concealed within them. At this point in time pop-up books weren’t for children as they were used to teach the human anatomy, it wasn’t until the late 18^th century that books started being made for children as before this time a lot of children couldn’t read. The first company to produce a series of pop-up children’s book was a company called Dean & Son in London. Due to this other pop-up items came along such as pop-up greeting cards and paper dolls witch quickly became very popular. Now day’s pop-up books are getting more complex and are still very popular with children.

http://wp.robertsabuda.com/make-your-own-pop-ups/  make you own pop ups will be helpful accessed 05/03/2014

From Robert Sabudas Q&A page;

Question:  ‘Why do you think pop-up books appeal to adults?

RS: I think pop-ups appeal to adults because it allows them to revert back to their childhood experiences with things that amaze them. When an adult’s eyes light up when turning the page of a pop-up I know they’ve become big kids again!’ 

 I thought this was interesting as I had my pop-up idea pinned down that it had to appeal to children but I have found a large number of adults enjoy these books either for themselves or with their children. I will remember this when I am finalizing an idea for pop-up experiment and may try to make an adult pop-up version. 

Beauty and the beast pop up book by Robert Sabudas

Beauty and the beast pop up book by Robert Sabudas

- Beauty and the Beast, A pop up book of a classic fairy tale, by Robert Sabuda,2010, Published by Simon and Schuster Great Britain

  Pop up is another good way to show scale and adds another dimension to the narrative.It will allow me to show the size of the sea and at the same time lead the narrative along using 3D elements. Although my pop ups wont be as complicated as Sabudas so I have looked at some simpler and different ways I could use this element to experiment with to show the size of the sea compared to the boat. I also want to see if adding a 3D element helps me explain the narrative without words.

Pop up tester

After making this cheap sample I found I needed to move the boat over so it doesn't catch in the bend and that the second person in the boat throws off how large I wanted the sea to be compared to the person in the boat.

Other pop up books

- Cinderella, A three dimensional fairy tale, By Jane Ray, 2012, published by Walker Books Ltd London

  This book uses 3 layers to show a panoramic views of the scene. This is less pop up but still adds depth into the image and in these 2 scene shows how grand the ball room is, I could test this and see if it has the same effect on how large the sea is.

Experiments
  I chose to create a simpler pop up as I haven't really looked at making pop up before and didn't want to dive in deep but found that simple pop ups work just as nice. I created this as a size experiment, it works well showing the size of the sea even thought its the boat I made pop up, thought it doesn't seem to communicate the narrative very well on its own if  it was in a book with the rest of the story as pop up I think it would communicate better but as it stands on its own it doesn't have enough to back it up. I think to also communicate the narrative better it needed to have more like if I had added waves that popped up this would have meant the experiment would have even shown the scale better. Over all if I were to do pop up it would need to have other pages surrounding it rather than just being a single image, but is a good way to show scale.

Layered Pop up
 This was another scale experiment and this works a lot better as a single image that the experiment I did before, it still couldn't communicate the whole rhyme on its own but works much better then the before. As a scale experiment it works as the layers show more depth than the experiment before and is easier to manipulate meaning I could do more with this than the traditional pop up. If I was to do this it would need to be in a book rather than a single image as I could show more into the narrative meaning it would communicate it much better.

Another way I could show scale would be to create an small scene showing how large the sea is. I had the boat smaller and then had the camera zoom in slowly, I used a bird eye prospective like Disney did in the Hunch back of notre dame to give the building a menacing presence, I didn't want the sea to be scary but show how alone she was in this large body of water.

Overall I think having a zoomed out view of the sea works well to show how vast and alone she is weather this fully communicates the story on it's own though is another thing. To have just scale showing a story that is predominately in the sea doesn't work as well as if it was in a destroyed world like journey or in a city like the hunch back of notre dame. So I will combine this idea of using scale and viewpoint with other experiments and see if that helps communicate the story more as on its own as a sample it doesn't show the rhyme at all.