Concept development with John Kenn Mortensen

This week we are practicing concept development with the Danish artist John Kenn Mortensen who is also educated on TAW and is about to create two comic books and makes really cool monster characters. http://johnkenn.blogspot.dk/

We have had concept development before but this time we have less theory and more practice, which is really great. We are doing three different assignments, which are all about creating concepts for stories.
The first assignment was to come up with a concept for a Nick Cave song "The Curse of Millhaven".

The concept should include story, settings, and character designs.

We should also write a two sentence pitch that shortly describes our concepts.

My pitch:
While looking for ideas for a new poem, the young writer Loretta discovers a side of herself that leads her to great inspiration. Soon this inspiration shows up to be more horrible than anyone in Millhaven can imagine.
Here are my sketches...

The town Millhaven



Loretta as a monster



Character: Loretta

Documentary

For two weeks we had the German artist and cartoonist Kai Pheiffer (http://kaipfeiffer.com) teaching us in documentary. We had one day to go researching on something we could create a 4 page comic about. I spent some hours in Viborg cathedral where I took pictures and drew in my sketchbook so I had "stuff" for my documentary. The result is down below:

Fable Tutorial

Fables and self editing

 

This week Paul Karasik is back from the U.S. to teach us in Language of comics and self editing. We have been working with fables, which we have been making into comics. My chosen fable is "The Lion and The Mouse" and right now I am making a tutorial that is going to show how I have been working with this fable step by step. It will come up later today...

 

 

Style study

This week we had another style study and Rune Ryberg was back to teach us! This time we had the entire week to study the two comic book artists Joann Sfar and David B, both French dudes.

Joann Sfar is known for his comic series "The Rabbi's Cat", which is about his own cat who gets the ability to speak...

     

Our first assignment was to make an illustration or a simple comic page using the style of Joann Sfar. For that we got a catalytic photo to get inspiration...

My illustration:

 

 

 

The second assignment was David B who is known for his Graphic novel, "Epileptic", which most of used as a reference.

 

 

The catalytic photo:

 

My illustration:

 

Gesture Drawing

A couple of weeks ago we had a Gesture Drawing Week where we were taught by the Irish artist Niall Laverty. 

It was a very inspiring and useful week where we had the chance to try out new tools and experiementing with characters. We even tried cutouts which I really enjoyed. Here are some examples of what I did…

Albert

Emil

Jam

Model

Aske

Aske

Mathilde

Sofie

Simone

Model

Heaven vs. Hell

We have been talking about texture and spatial qualities. The third assignment was to make an illustration that included a full environment, linear perspective, and atmosphere. The topic was Heaven vs. Hell. In my picture the devils are actually the good guys and they get attacked by God himself! (And yes, there is a banana in it..)

Some thumbnails..