Pre-production - inspiration

Have been working hard on the pre work hence all the blogging. It's going quite well, am keeping up the tempo on it and cracking on.

Here's some images I took when I was in Italy last summer. I was very lucky with this project to get Italy related subjects (Futurism, Venetian Villa, Fish Monger) I took a wealth of pictures while in Italy that are perfect for research, and plus saw & experienced the whole feel of the place.

These Fishermen were out and about every morning on Lago Maggiore. They would stand there for most the day. Check out the two guys in the bottom left, Italians love to lean like that while in conversation.. it's kinda like a 'right of passage' for them I presume!

I drew a picture of the guy in the top right one morning too :-

Then here's some of the inevitable thousands of pictures you end up taking in Venice! :

And lastly, was having a look through last years sketchbook yesterday, and came across some images that fit the style i'm going for in some way or another. Specifically the one on the right, was a hung-over drawing:

And finally, here's a little bit of a descriptive imagery for the fisherman character. When I did my presentation, Kathy said he seemed a little personality-less, and told me to think about what are his characteristics that make up his character.


It was an interesting observation because I want him to be a bit of a 'every-man' character. A bit of a nobody, so perhaps a bit bland and missing character. Similar to how we don't know the personalities of the animals in a nature documentary, we dont know there name (or how much change we got in there pocket) we just assign them as 'Lions', or 'Tigers', or 'Zebras' etc. This is what I want to go for with my fishmonger. I want him to be nameless.


However, being human, and having a human audience, there's going to need to be something a little deeper, and this sums up what i'm trying to go for, what kind of character:

I think perhaps the only one that maybe shouldn't be there is Clint Eastwood. Obviously a dude with alotta charisma. However I stuck him on there for that 'lone-ranger' character principle more than anything, the lone maverick.