Rob in da Hood Project

As part of my masters course we had guest clients setting briefs for us to complete, this was project was presented by Shelley Page of Dreamworks. The brief was to update a character to a modern day version from a list containing such characters as: Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Genghis Khan & George and the Dragon. I chose Robin Hood, the fictional English outlaw, and changed him into a dropped New York rapper, who steals jewellery (bling) and sells it to make money for a ghetto soup kitchen. The soup kitchen being run by the kind Father Tuck and frequented by the poor locals.

The project outcome was to develop the characters to a final version which would then be presented to Shelley. I had multiple meetings with my lecturer (Nigel Kitching) to try and iron out problems with the plot and try and keep it relevant to the original story. I had chosen to style the characters similar to that of Jamie Hewlett's comics since I really enjoy the look and it allows you to visually show the attitude and personality. The process of producing the artworks was to draw it out in pencil, then ink over it with a brush pen, then it was scanned and coloured in Photoshop. Looking back at it, I wished I had tried Illustrator earlier on as it really cleans up the lines and makes further corrections a lot easier.

I've continued to develop the project in my spare time to update it with more recent changes to how I work. Illustrator has defiantly been a step up and allowed to be generate art more quickly but also allow me to edit it on the fly. I generally find myself going back to the line after colouring it partially in to change something that doesn't look right or add more details.