Project 1 Fantasy Appliance: Progress 1

 For my fantasy appliance project, I decided to go with a toaster. I had no particular reason for choosing it, and it took a little thinking to work out what I would combine it with. I started thinking about bread itself, and the process of creating it. One of the main ingredients of bread is flour, and that is milled from wheat using big machines. I got stuck on the thought of a bread machine for a while, and I thought about a funny way of portraying how bread and toast could be created. Cows eat a ton, and produce a lot of waste from their grazing in fields. And then it came to me: what if I had toaster cows grazing in wheat fields, and instead of creating waste, they created toast? I thought that was pretty clever, so I stuck with it and went to Illustrator with my toaster pictures. 

If you go to my previous blog post, you can see the three toaster angles I captured for this project. I threw them into Illustrator and traced away with the pen tool. Once those were crisp, I looked on the internet and found a bunch of reference photographs of cows, laid them over the toasters, and got to work making some cow toasters.

When the cow toasters were looking good, I then thought about how I'd lay out the scene. I think of rolling hills when I think about farm animals, so I went with that. I also decided to do some selective outlining, with the background having no outlines to emphasize the cow toasters as the main subject of the image. 

And here is where I've got to with my image so far. I plan on making the rolling hills filled with wheat, and have the cow with his tongue out with some in his mouth. I'm going to do more with shading on the cows and toasters, and the cows will cast a shadow onto the ground as well.