I'd done a bit of research before Christmas break where I did some moodboards to get a feel for the characters I'd be creating.
First and foremost I looked at general photos of families to look at their positioning, backdrops, and how they looked as well. I decided that I wanted to create a middle class family as they were a rising part of the Victorian society and would have a good balance of grandeur but also humbleness which would be fun to convey.
Next was twins, there's a certain eeriness to them that I really wanted to capture in the daughters. There's also an almost physic link between twins which I find really cool.
For my midwife I decided that I wanted a Caribean woman who was part of the high class black people of Victorian England. Victorian black people was something I came across during the summer holidays and it is a topic that really intrigued me and was glad that I could apply it to my project.
I also decided to look at actual midwifes ranging from the ones that would work in a public hospital to private midwifes that would work for richer families. I also found some midwifes that were convicted for murdering their charges, they have this eerie look in their eyes.
As this project is set in a certain period I wanted to make sure I got everything historically correct so I got these books from the library, this will greatly help me when designing. I spent the first few days going through these books noting their pages.
Books:
Victorian’s Unbuttoned by Sarah Levitt
Art and the Victorian middle class: Money and the making of cultural identity by Dianne Sachko Maclod
Black Victorians: Black people in British Art 1800-1900 Edited by Jan Marsh
Victorian Babylon: People, streets, and images in nineteenth-century London by Lynda Nead
Victorian Fashions & Costumes from Harper’s Bazar: 1867-1898 Edited and with an Introduction by Stella Blum
I collected all the named and dated images and put them on my pinterest board and made an art style exploration for the project. This is extremely important and will keep me grounded and give guidance. I used a pdf called Art Club: A Digital Publication by Extracurricular Activities, Mike Yamada and Victoria Yang to help with this; they break down what's needed in a style guide and what you need to analyse for it.
I then made a more refined guide, also adding a range of colours picked from all my reference images (magazines, paintings, article clippings) to get the correct Victorian colours. Everything's quite muted and they seem to use the same colours and just change how deep or light it is. Another thing that I noticed was that there aren't any solid blacks and the whites always have a tint to them, probably due to dying capabilities and their harsh clothes washing products (soda crystals).
Fun fact: the green dyes, though wonderful and sort after as the hot thing to have, was actually made using large quantities of arsenic often causing health problems and even death.
