INITIAL IDEAS/THUMBNAILS
For our final brief of the semester (within the drawing module), we were tasked with creating a 'Lockdown Diary' which would illustrate a true story of our lockdown experiences. Here are my initial ideas and thumbnails which consisted of illustrations of my daily lockdown life. I will also link my Pinterest board that I used for research & inspiration. I looked particularly at Chris Ware for inspiration on what to include in my story and how to illustrate it and I found his series 'Building Stories' extremely useful.

​www.pinterest.co.uk/ailsaellen7/uni-project-lockdown-stories/

I liked how this project was so personal to everyone - no ones story was going to be the same. I went with the concept of diary entries as I got up to quite a lot in lockdown and the days did tend to be quite different. I was fortunate enough to be working most days during these months, with many of my shifts starting at 4am due to the demand in store as a result of covid. As for many, lockdown was extremely boring, but for me I kept working, continued with my shopping addiction, kept in touch with my family (who all live in Scotland), and once the restrictions were put in place I met up with my friends. Unpopular opinion I know, but I actually enjoyed lockdown!

I produced all of my work in dip pen and ink as this is my favourite technique, and I scanned in all of my work and inserted it into a grid in photoshop. I then converted this to an indesign file and uploaded to ISSUU to produce a digital book which I will link below. I kept the same grid style throughout as this helped keep the story flowing, and I took influence from Charlie Mackesy who produces lots of ink illustrations with handwritten notes.

Final lockdown diary:

​issuu.com/ailsaforrester/docs/lockdown_diary_final