Week 5 - Characters

Here I started to think about the singular beings that would inhabit the different layers of dream that my character is exploring. Unlike the big castle in which the story begins, where the main character is largely alone, except for toys, the town and the woods have people she will have to grow to adapt to. The characters from the town still have a human form in general while the forest ones tend to be smaller and more animal and plant characteristics. Some corrupted characters are also included.

Week 4 - Thumbnails

This week I have been working on ideas for each page of my booklet. This first image shows an overview of pages 9 to 16 and the one below this one simply allows you to look at them closer.

They show my main character interacting with other beings and let me visualize the composition and aim for clarity and readability, even at this very rough stage.  

Week 3 - Mother, girl protagonist

I just recently started to generate ideas for some character's appearance.

I want to start producing a work of images related to my story and apply to an artist's residency, presenting them along with my graphic novel project. If I were selected, I'd be able to work on my graphic novel in a distraction-free environment.

Here are the first ideas for the main character (girl), and her mother. 

Week 2 - Research Project

Erika Medina

Merritt E. Johnson

HUMN-311 Visual Art Seminar

Research Project

With the purpose of defining the visual style and mood of the story that I am currently working on,  my project for this semester consists of illustrating the places and characters that could ultimately appear in the final product. The story revolves around a small Mexican girl who lives pampered although isolated. She then moves to another place, which is inhabited by strange creatures and where she cannot enjoy the privileges she had in her big house. These places are actually layers of her own dream. The ultimate purpose of this story is to become a graphic novel, accompanied by incidental small comics of the protagonist daily struggles. For the series of images that will function as visual notes for my project, I will be researching about the social and historical context of central Mexico during the decade of the post-revolution, around 1920.  This will include places and architecture in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Jalisco’s countryside and rich mountain towns. 

These ink and graphite images are soft, mostly black and white also depict fantastic beings of all sizes that inhabit this unknown land. Although the content of the story is ideal for teenagers and young adults due to its sombreness, the simple and naive style of the work resembles the style of children’s books and fairy tales, which in their origins were also directed to older audiences due to their depiction of mature themes and violence. Another source of inspiration for this project are Mexican the visual tendencies of drawing and printmaking works of the 20th century. It limited palettes, often whimsical characters and satirical, although somber content, make them ideal visual references for the style and mood of my illustrations.

José Clemente Orozco
a Note I (The Masses)
1935
Lithograph
325x423 mm

Week 1 - Statement

I will use this course to look closely to the social situation of the post-revolutionary Mexico, especially in Mexico City and the central estate of Jalisco.

Although the time and place of my story is Mexico after its civil war, the story is in fact about the main character’s internalization of her own reality since the reader will soon discover that she is actually traveling through layers of her own dream. What she finds as she moves around her unconscious is mainly influenced by her mother’s obsession for the privileged situation she lived before her father was exiled and she had to move from Mexico City to Jalisco, where the elites and the church were able to keep their properties.

Given the nature of the main character’s journey, some research on psychology can be useful for my project as well.

I’ll use this information to start generating ideas about character’s and locations for the story.