I've started working with a combination of gouache and paper cutting, which I think works well with the bold shapes of the monsters, but can be a bit messy and hard to control at times, this is where the papercut will come in later! Although the process is quite long I find it really satisfying trying to create flat colours and textures with the paint, it doesn't always work, and is much more successful when painting small areas of colour. The papercut makes it a lot easier to make a nice clean line, which is quite difficult when you just use paint as it smudges and colour pigment is inconsistent.
I wanted to try and stay away from bold black outlines on the bodies, I wanted to try playing around with coloured lines to see how that would affect the tone of voice of the character. I Was finding it quite difficult to properly convey emotions through the monsters, so to help me come up with ideas, I started just making monsters that I thought looked pretty.
I would have to get a sharper cutting tool when I do my final bits, because I found it quite difficult to cut really small intricate lines with the scissors that I had, although the triangle gace is working really well in this. I think the designs work best when the eyes and mouth and left black and white to create a nice contrast with the textured bodies, it helps the face to stand out too.
I tried to be as creative as possible when designing my monsters, because I wanted to keep them simple, and not too over detailed, but I was still confined by the format of the sketchbook, so I moved onto using larger sheets of paper.
