I showed what I was doing to my tutor and we agreed that there should be an identifiable image repeated through all three designs to unite them. I told her about each of the scenes I was trying to illustrate for each book and the repetition we noticed was a character in distress. With this, I started drawing dark, grim looking human figures that could be worked into my drawings and textiles.
While struggling to draw small, featureless figures I was reminded of the few Anthony Gormley pieces I’d seen at the National Portrait gallery a few weeks ago.
His inky watercolour men are exactly what I am trying to capture, and so I started looking more at the negative space and shape and a lot less at detail and correct proportions.