Writing 3 (blog posts) for Crit 2

Time for round 2 of demon designs for my webcomic. To be honest, I was frustrated with how the last critique went. My fellow students didn't really seem to listen to me when I said that the three were meant to be designs and not "art pieces". I wanted feedback on if they were scary or not, and how to improve them. They wanted each to have a backstory, which I can understand for more important demons (Of which there will be a few). For those, I do have backstories because they're involved more in the story and need to be more developed character-wise. However, these monsters I'm designing for class are meant to be 'monsters of the week.' They will appear, be scary, then be defeated, probably to never show up again. It felt like I repeated this dozens of times but nobody listened and continued to look at the designs as art pieces, which isn't how I'm intending these to be taken.

Here's what I have so far. For these, I used ink and watercolor pencils.

 

Carlie Gernhart- Demon Design 4

  

Carlie Gernhart - Demon Design 5

 

I intend to have at least one more demon design by friday.  These are still oddly therapeutic to work on and are a great stress reliever. :)  While I've been looking at Stephen Gammell a lot for inspiration, I've also been browsing around the web. I've found an artist on Deviantart who goes by the username Atenebris who has amazing and creepy creature design:

 

Shamo by Atenebris 

 

Rigel by Atenebris

 

Kitty by Atenebris

I love how elegant and intimidating the first two are, and the eyes on the third make me want to play around with lighting effects more. It's also interesting to me how the last picture uses a color range not usually associated with scary things (it seems to have a cooler, cyan-ish tint to it, with a bit of magenta).

This week I'd also like to draw your attention to the awesome work of Mattie Parrigon:

http://mattieparrigon.blogspot.com/2016/01/writing-blog-posts1.html 

I really like her portraits, and like the sketchy quality her lines. Her series of nursing home portraits are my favorite of her works that I've seen so far (I'm particularly fond of the picture of the old man with the tattoos). 

Research Blog Post 3 (Context & Analyzing, Interpreting the data, Reporting and Evaluating Research)

Ultimately I'm limited in my scope of this project, since I wouldn't be able to travel to any large cities to get a bigger sample of opinions. However, any direction would help me in my future monster designing endeavors.

By figuring out what traits make a monster scarier than others to a large group of people, I can design more terrifying monsters and hopefully enhance the feeling of danger in my webcomic. Once I've established which set of traits rank among the top most terrifying, I can pick and choose which traits I'll incorporate into which design. I'm not going to limit myself to solely these traits when drawing monsters. Each monster may have one or two of the scariest traits, but for the sake of variety I'd switch it up and keep things fresh for my readers. The monsters they should feel more threatened by might have more of these traits than less important monsters.

Research Project - Beyond yourself (Data Collection)

In order to research my question, I had to figure out how to narrow my parameters. While it would be really interesting to find out what scares people the most about images, there's simply too many flavors of horror to do this. So, I've narrowed my research specifically to what monster design scares the most people. This means no scary little children, no psychotic killers, or anything of that nature. If I'm wanting to create horrifying demons in my webcomic, I think researching monster design is the path that will help me the most.

The way I've decided to go about this is that I'll take a few of my friends or co-workers and show them a series of images. These images will show different common elements I've noticed while researching monster designs. The participants will rate the elements on a scale from one to ten, one being not scary, and ten being terrifying.

I know that horror is also very subjective, so I'll review the results once the surveys have been completed and ask why the participant may have rated one attribute higher than another. I'll probably use Survey Monkey to make the survey, so that it's easily accessible to my participants.

Once the results are in, I'll average out which elements got the highest scores, and create a monster design based on those elements.

Research Topic - Fall 2015

For the Fall semester of 2015, I have to research a topic in art. For this, I've chosen to dig deeper into what specifically makes a drawing or illustration evoke feelings of terror in the viewer.

This could be particularly useful to me in the future, as I'm wanting to make a webcomic that features demons, and knowing how to make something elicit feelings of unease or fright in my readers could enhance my work.

I've heard people say about a picture "Oh, that's scary" but they never really give a specific reason why. I'm hoping to break it down and find out which particular elements cause those feelings.

Personally, I'm intrigued by the dark and macabre, and get a thrill out of horror movies and scary stories. I'm curious about why I feel these things, too, and how a simple image that can't harm me in any way can cause such a panicked reaction.