21 Pirates sounded like a great idea from the word go. The line-up is stellar and I really love the concept- the brief is fun and relevant. This years theme is "Film and Game". I must admit, I don't know much about gaming, not counting some of the PS1 games I had as a kid, and my film knowledge can be a bit obscure, so this brief challenged me to be creative and use this to my advantage. For gaming I focused on art styles I found inspiring, and then thought of films that would best fit these styles, as that meant the composition would be sorted in terms of both concept and style simultaneously, allowing for the most efficient execution. I thought sticking to my strengths and personal aesthetic would be best- so I considered games with cute, manga-inspired styles much like my own, such as Love Live!, Pokemon, Animal Crossing and Cooking Mama. I also considered Street Fighter II, as it's really cult and I've always wanted to try pixel art.
Eventually I whittled the decision down to Cooking Mama and Ratatouille versus Street Fighter II and Kung Fu Panda, and the final decision, quite thankfully, was made by Liam, who thought Cooking Rat sounded good.
Getting the Cooking Mama style down was more challenging than expected- it's technically a very simple style but given its recongisablitity, hard to imitate. After two failed sketches I decided I'd be better adding some of my own style into the piece, which not only made it easier to stylise, but I think is much more unique.
I'm relatively happy with the final piece! It took a long time as the final print is A1 and given it needed to be of printable quality, this made for a very big file! As I also scan in all my lines from paper and colour in Photoshop, it also made for a technical challenge- I had to turn off all background programmes in order to work on it on my laptop, and given my scanner is only A4 and sewing together an A1 piece from A4 slices sounded painful the lines are from a meticulous A3 version scanned at 800dpi and then sized and cleaned. Cooking Mama also has a very clean colouring style, so I had to work very close up to achieve this (not least because Photoshop has no stabliser!).
In this case, I was working during the holidays with what equipment I had available, but in future I think I need to better get to grips with Illustrator and creating lines on a tablet, is it would have saved me a lot of this hassle. In this illustration, I think I've done a good job of getting what I hope will print as clean lines, but the original A3 composition means that even after some editing, the main graphic doesn't quite fill the canvas as well as it could, which is regrettable. I think if I'd thought it through, I would have sized up some of the vegetables beneath the banner to better fill the page.
I really enjoyed hand-rendering the text, and have never used so many strokes in my life! The pun doesn't really work in English because "rat" is only one syllable whereas the Japanese "ratto" has two and is therefore a better fit for "Mama". I think while this isn't optimal, the main image is sufficiently recognisable and the general gist is easy for those who know the film and game.
I'd really like to go to the opening but unfortunately I have an event on the same weekend in London, though I am still considering making the trip and potentially having a hectic, exhausting and probably fun time of it all!
EDIT: I got sent some pictures from the exhibition! Thank you to Liam for these!
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