Exercise -Visual Distortion

For this exercise we were asked to produce an illustration of a dog or cat which would be relatively realistic and convey some aspect of its characteristics/ personality.
I chose a few images of Tibetan mastiffs and produced some watercolour and pencil drawings trying to show the soft fur of the puppies and the smiley playful features of the dogs.

The next stage involved producing a collage of the dog and asked us to be experimental and try distorting / pushing the boundaries. For the first image I tore magazine cutting of a woman's hair and used it to represent the fur/coat of the dog and selected eyes from a model and a lampshade to represent the nose. This produced quite an unusual drawing but I think its still quite recognisable as a dog even with the extended limbs and funny hair do!

I came across the work of Peter Clark who produces amazing collage including some great ones of animals and dogs in particular using found papers and textures. These look like the animal with the proportions recognisable but are distinguished by the different tones and colourings achieved by the papers and collage.
I wanted to try achieve a similar effect and took my image of the mastiff puppy and worked different cuttings into the shape using a tartan shirt as the animals body, gardening pictures for the body and other cuttings.
I was quite pleased with the final result for a first attempt.

Peter Clark collage 

Online image - Peter Clark Collage Image Available from http://www.peterclarkcollage.com/pages/dogs3.html Accessed 5th January 2013

The next part involved producing a drawn representation of your collage then trying to incorporate the dog into a scene or narrative. I tried to draw from both my collages and to me the effect of the tartan collage reminded me of like a dog cape or coat and I had the idea of a dog playing in the rain wearing a tartan coat and wellies! To try and incorporate this to a bigger scene I remembered about an illustration I had outlined a while ago of a girl wearing a raincoat so I incorporated this image and added text which I think could be used as a part of a kids book or illustration.

I also experimented with the idea of the dog being in the hair salon based on my other collage and added it to a background of a hair salon. However,  I wasn't very happy with the actual illustration although I think the idea was okay. 

I really enjoyed experimenting with collage and it let me see the huge opportunity to use it in future illustrations and to be more open to ideas and making adaptations through working on a particular drawing.