Jack o'Lantern: creating from skratch

Do you know these "advisers" who just love advising but never follow their own advice? I bet you do. And did it ever happen to you that you said "I would/could/should do this and that" but never actually did? I bet it did!!!

And I will lie to you if I say that I am any different!!!

But this Halloween I've decided to change some things and follow my own advice.

In one of my previous posts I've written about Character development and since it's a Halloween season I decided to create some Halloween illustration (although it’s a bit late for that).
I've written down some keywords - my associations with Halloween - on little notes, folded them and tuck them in a small plastic bag. And then I started pulling some of them out.
The problem was that all the notes I pulled out were too abstract for my inexperienced taste: there were things like “rough” and “speed” and something else, things like that. So I've decided that since it was the first time I did something like that I was allowed to cheat a bit. I looked at my list and chose three words: "pumpkin", "hat" and "fire" and combined it all together.

Pretty easy, I'd say.

So after some work this sketch was made




followed by this unfinished illustration.

I promise that as soon as it's finished - I will show it to you.

In the meantime – have a great Halloween!!!!

The power of Kewords: Developing a character piece by piece

I must admit - I don't remember whether I've read about it or have I thought about it myself. Either way there is another, really cool method of developing a character/theme.

You take an empty paper sheet, divide it in to small pieces and on each piece you write a keyword related to the specific theme you are working on.

Say you're working on a Halloween illustration, and you need to develop an image. So you write every single word associated with Halloween: Jack’o'lantern, ghoul, bat, Frankenstein etc. You mix all these pieces of paper and then you randomly choose two or three pieces, like Jack’o'Lantern + Frankenstein + bat.
And you work from there.

Have you ever tried this method and had it work for you?

Happy Halloween and lots of candies :)