Fears & Phobias | Mini Brief No.2

Today we were given the summary of our next mini-brief which is 'Fears & Phobias'. The task is to illustrate a fear or a phobia of our choice as a page for a 'Book of Fears'. I had a few ideas with fears of feet, bones, blood or flesh, fish. And then I thought "a fear of bats" would be something interesting to illustrate.

   A quick view of my sketchbook might explain better than I can with words alone...

 A requirement of the brief was that the final image would be monochrome - something which I was completely fine with!  I doodled some ideas about bats then went over them in black fineliner.

   I liked the second idea of working into detail with the face of a bat. Personally I found bats teeth are quite scary, and don't get me started on their snouts - terrifying!

   I was then stuck between two ideas, as per usual. So I continued to develop both of them. I worked with black ink to get a heavy texture, especially for the perspective of walking into a bat-cave.
   I then wasn't sure whether to work into pattern for the bats on the ceiling of the bat-cave. So this opted me to develop the other idea instead, haha.

After strolling through lots of bat images on the internet, I found the perfect reference for a bat. I did a quick sketch up, then worked with waterproof fineliner for the outline and ink washes for the shading. I then photo-copied my final image so I could continue to experiment with backgrounds and typography.

When I was happy with the idea I scanned the image onto my laptop and added a few tweaks digitally. I'm really happy with the result, it's not fussy and doesn't have fancy frills, it's just simple. The teeth do worry me slightly, I don't like the thought of being bitten by a being-flying-rat!


Thanks for for reading and I hope you enjoyed,
Nadine xx