Response to Part 2 feedback

In the feedback for Part 2 of this course my tutor suggested many different illustrators, animators and styles for me to take a look at the work of. Having scanned through their work I chose a few illustrators to look at in more detail in order to try to understand their style and produce some sketches in a similar style.

Noma Bar

Based on the graphic style that I’ve used in some of my illustrations, and also use of metaphor, my tutor suggested taking a look into the work of Noma Bar. Noma Bar’s work looks simple but is really clever. There is usually more than one image that can be seen in each illustration – one object transforms into something else. The style is really simple and graphic and there’s typically a simple colour scheme with less than three colours. One quote that I saw from him stated that he’s aiming for ‘maximum communication with minimal elements’. Some of his work is political, some of it is witty. I decided to brainstorm ideas of objects that can be transformed into something else. My favourite from these sketches is ‘Ringpull Penguin’.

Hannah Hoch

In the ‘Choosing content’ exercise in part two I used a ‘found’ background and drew my illustration of a wartime detective on top of this. My tutor suggested taking this further and using parts of the background texture as elements of the character. He suggested taking a look at the work of Hannah Höch.

Hannah Höch used photomontage to creat whimsical images that typically feature people in some form or another. I find the images quite disturbing – partly because different elements in her images can be at very different scales, which is unsettling.

In order to have a play with this style. I decided to take ‘Ringpull penguin’ from my previous sketches and develop it further using photomontage.

I find Ringpull Penguin quite disturbing. I did not make things as out of proportion as in the work of Hannah Höch as I already found the process of making Ringpull Penguin uncomfortable. I could imagine this style being quite powerful if you were trying to make a statement – for example in this case it could be an environmental statement about the impact of human populations on the natural world.

Op art

In my assignment for Part 2 I created an image of a strawberry using offset lines. My tutor suggested that it might be interesting for me to take a look into Op Art (optical art). Op Art is a form of abstract art that uses optical illusions to create special effects within an image. These special effects include making the image appear three-dimensional, hiding images withing images, or making elements of the image move. A lot of Op Art is created in black and white varying the thickness of lines, changing the scale of patterns or offsetting black and white lines. Other Op Art makes use of colours to create optical illusions. I had a play in my sketchbook with some basic Op Art techniques. I’m not sure any were particularly successful – more time and effort needed – however, I think these techniques are useful to be aware of to incorporate into future illustrations.

Point of sale display

Final pieces – Summer strawberries and Autumn mushrooms.

The brief

The brief for this assignment is to create two ‘point of sale’ displays for a supermarket that promote summer and autumn fruit and vegetables. The images will be used within a campaign to promote a range of seasonal foods. The supermarket want to promote a notion of the quality of their food. The final reproduction size will be 12 x 12 inches.

The aim of the assignment is to consolidate the skills and knowledge gained from the projects and exercises so far, with a focus on research and gathering and evolving ideas.

Review of feedback from previous exercises and assignment

An important area of feedback from the exercises and assignment for part 1 was that I was too shy in documenting my activity in my learning log. My tutor suggested that I should include more of the messy work in progress that shows how I arrived at the final image and that I should spend longer reflecting on my own work and that of other practitioners. I have made improvements during the exercises for part 2; however, there is definitely a need to include more of my thoughts within the learning log. This is something that I think would be much easier to do within a physical learning log, rather than posting blogs online. Towards the end of the part 2 exercises I have changed the way that I approach the learning log blog. I have started writing the blog entries as I work through an exercise, rather than documenting the exercise at the end. This way I am less likely to miss writing down some of my thought processes and ideas.

I also need to find the time to reflect and write about other people’s work that I have been looking at. I do look at other illustrators’ work but rarely note this in my learning log. Part of this is that I don’t want the learning log to be something that I do simply because it is a requirement for the course. However, I did learn a lot about approaches and techniques in the first exercise of part 1 – analysing and trying to draw in the style of other illustrators. Therefore this is something that there would be value in me spending more time doing in the future. Maybe it would be a way of also developing my sketchbook practice – regularly looking at other illustrators’ work and having a go at creating images in their style.

A second area of feedback was that I should continue to keep mixing media and experimenting with different materials. I have tried to do this within part 2; however, I have a definite affinity for materials with which I can make accurate drawings and am uncomfortable with more ‘informal’ materials. I am not quite sure how to get away from this, some materials I find really frustrating. Maybe I should commit myself to doing a short course in these – to force me to learn about them.

Generating initial ideas

Based on my experiences in previous exercises, a really good way for me to start generating ideas is to brainstorm words and pictures to generate a lot of ideas quickly and not worry too much about the quality of my sketches. Then to flesh these out with a bit of colour so that I’m starting to think about what colours are associated with the themes.

Brainstorming summer and autumn fruit and vegetables.

I found this brainstorming exercise useful. It strikes me that the colour schemes of both the summer and autumn fruit and veg are currently surprisingly similar. This is something that I probably want to consider carefully going forward as I want the summer and autumn displays to be distinct.

I think that mushrooms, pumpkins and squashes are very evocative of autumn. These vegetables may also help to give the display a feeling of ‘quality’ by making use of some more unusual varieties of the vegetables.

Before I did this brainstorming exercise I was thinking of trying to stick with British varieties of vegetables due to current awareness of food miles etc. However, the vegetables in the image that I find most summery are the strawberries, watermelon and citrus fruits, many of which aren’t grown in the UK. I’m going to continue thinking about the seasons of summer and autumn before deciding which vegetables to use.

Shopping bag design from previous exercise.

Whilst brainstorming I also started to think about possibilities for the overall design of the piece. I have previously produced a design for a supermarket bag with fruit on it. For this bag I went for a geometric design. However, I’m wondering if illustrating fruit and vegetables in some sort of natural setting may help to provide a feeling of quality.

I decided to continue my brainstorming thinking about what objects, themes and colours I associate with summer and autumn.

The main thing that I am taking from brainstorming summer and autumn is to use bold primary colours in the summer illustration – blues, yellows, red, greens; and lots of yellows, reds and oranges in the autumn piece. I think that the summer piece should have a sense of fun and energy and play; whereas the autumn piece is more about cosiness.

I was a little undecided at this point as to whether it is a good idea to continue researching general themes e.g. summer/ autumn, or to begin the observational drawing side of the assignment. I think that it will be beneficial to start the observational drawings alongside collecting together moodboards on the topics of summer and autumn. I think that doing these things simultaneously may help me to start considering possibilities for the composition and materials that I want to use in the final piece.

I have decided to make my autumn point of sale display about Wild British Mushrooms. I think that this vegetable is not only seasonal but offers fabulous textures and has the feel of quality that the supermarket want to promote. I found deciding the fruit or vegetable for the summer display more challenging; however, ultimately I decided to continue the British theme by using Fresh British Strawberries.

Objective illustrations

My next step was to select different types of mushroom to sketch. Naively I thought that most UK mushrooms grow in autumn; however, I discovered that different mushrooms grow in different seasons. So in the interests of accuracy I selected chanterelles, ceps (porcini) and field blewits… Disappointingly this meant not illustrating the rather wonderful looking morel mushroom.

Sketchbook – experimenting with mushroom textures and colours.

I initially sketched the mushrooms in black fineliner. It took a little experimentation in my sketchbook to work out how to represent some of the textures of the mushrooms, particularly the irregular gills on the chanterelle. I experimented with various types of hatching, stippling and using different strengths of line. Ultimately I found that I got the most satisfying results using solid lines and stippling.

Objective drawings of mushrooms in black ink.

I decided to add a little colour to the image using watercolour. I think this helped to give the images a little more depth. I tried to keep the colours vibrant but within the realms of what is realistic for mushrooms. This is something that I will need to consider for my final piece – how to make sure the overall images isn’t dominted by brown.

I’m satisfied with the results for the chanterelle and the field blewit. I think the Porcini isn’t a particularly interesting image. Therefore for the final piece I’ll probably concentrate on the chanterelle and the field blewit.

Objective illustrations of mushrooms in black ink and watercolour.

I thought that drawing strawberries was going to be easy relative to the mushrooms but in fact found quite the opposite. I decided to make the illustrations in the same style as the mushrooms – using black ink and then adding some colour. The major difficulty that I have found with the strawberries is trying to accurately represent their skin. I found that it didn’t work trying to draw the pores of the strawberries using lines (see sketchbook); therefore I tried to use shades of colour.

Sketchbook – experimenting with strawberry textures and colours.

Objective illustrations of strawberries in black ink and watercolour (left) and black ink and pencil crayon (right).

I am not very satisfied with the results. The left hand image in watercolour is quite bold and the strawberries have volume; however, I haven’t managed to accurately represent the skin. I decided to try using pencil crayon to better represent the skin (right hand image). I did manage to capture the texture a little better using pencil crayon; however, the image is quite flat and lacks vibrancy. In the interests of time I’m going to move on to thinking about the final piece. If I have time I’d like to try using some different techniques and media to try to better represent the strawberries. I do like the strawberry flowers and am keen to try to incorporate these within the final piece.

When I drew the mushrooms I had to use photographs of the mushrooms. With the strawberries I used a combination of photographs and real fruit. I noticed that I found it easier when drawing real fruit because it is easier to analyse and explore the detail.

Design and composition – Summer

I am now going to start thinking more about the colour schemes, textures and media that I will use for the final pieces of work, before moving on to thinking about composition.

The moodboards helped me to think about the colours and textures that I would like to use in my final images. I was already aware from brainstorming autumn and summer about the colour schemes that I would like to use.

I quite quickly hit upon a fresh idea that I really liked – incorporating the patterns of deckchairs with a simple traditional British postcard composition into the summer design. I therefore googled examples of deckchair stripes and postcards and noted some of the key features of both in my sketchbook. This also made me think about the typeface that I’ll use on the final piece. I like the simple typface used on some of the cards that is similar to the iconic London Underground ‘Johnston’ typeface. I like the idea for this design it will be really simple and bold. I think it will work well for a point of sale display.

Sketchbook – playing with ideas for composition and texture

Results from a previous exercise – converting a black and white image into simple colours.

In my sketchbook I played around with different designs for the overall composition and also for how to represent the strawberry. In a previous exercise about using black and white I had had a play around using simple bold colours. I decided to use a similar technique here but with stripes – a simple background image that uses primary colours. In the end the composition of my final piece is a combination of the image from a previous exercise and images that I found researching old seaside postcards.

I decided that I would like to make the fruit really large and central in order that it can be seen from a distance. I spent sometime thinking about how to represent the strawberry. Should I keep the stripes in the same orientation as the background seaside scene? Should the lines of the strawberry be straight or should I try to gve the strawberry some volume? In the end I decided to keep it all very graphic.

Final work – Summer point of sale display

The final piece was produced in black fineliner and marker pen. I think it is a fun bold design that captures summer really well. I had intended to colour the strawberry in red and pink stripes. However, whilst I was making the illustration I realised that I quite liked that the red and white stripes remind me of old fashioned bathing suits. I think that the offset stripe pattern and curving the stripes to represent the sea works well. I’m unsure that I made a good choice of font. My decision was based on some of the fonts that I had seen on old postcards, however, it is maybe a bit austere set against an otherwise fun design. I’d consider either removing the text, or else choosing a more rounded, fun font.

I’m not sure that this final design makes good use of the objective drawings that I made earlier. I also became concerned that I was meant to represent the fruit in an objective way in the final piece. However, rereading the brief this is not stated, although there is an implication that maybe this was wanted. In future it would probably be sensible to ask for clarification on the brief when there is ambiguity. All in all, I’m very pleased with this final piece.

Design and composition – Autumn

I struggled with deciding upon a composition and colour scheme for the autumn mushrooms. I decided to focus upon a single mushroom because the display is for a supermarket and so is likely to be viewed from a distance. I chose to illustrate the chanterelle because it’s texturally the most interesting of the three mushrooms that I made objective illustrations of earlier. One of the tricky elements of this design is the colour scheme – the mushroom is very pale and combined with the reds and browns of autumn this could make for quite a brown design.

Sketchbook – playing with ideas for composition

Working out how to colour leaves and what colour might work for the background.

I was genreally pleased with the design in black and white. Interestingly, I drew the piece without the outer border and once I added this border I felt that the design looked a little cramped and also that the writing is in a slightly odd position.

I experimented with how to paint the autumn leaves and also with different background colours to try to brighten up the design and make it more eye catching as a point of sale display.

Final piece without coloured background.

In general I like the design of the final piece. I think that it represents autumn well and emphasizes quality, which was part of the original brief. I’m really pleased with the leaves; I did struggle a little painting the mushroom. I think that it worked well to use ink and watercolour. However, I’m unsure that it was a good idea to add the green around the edge of the mushroom. Maybe I should extend this further and have it fade out. My summer strawberries and autumn mushroom designs are very different from one another in style but I think that this helps to emphasize the different seasons. I have tried to tie the two designs together with the text, albeit this was not required as part of the brief.

Visual metaphors

The aim of this exercise is to sketch out a list of objects and subjects that could be used to symbolise the phrase ‘economic catastrophe’.

Choosing content

This exercise is about choosing content to produce a simple portrait of the character represented in the following exerpt of text.

The room was void and unquickened; it was like a room in a shop window but larger and emptier; and the middle-aged man who sat at the desk had never thought to impress himself upon what he entered every day. Comfort there was none nor discomfort; only did the occupant deign to qualify the pure neutrality of his surroundings, it would surely be austerity that would emerge. The spring sunshine turned bleak and functional as it passed the plate glass of the tall-uncurtained windows.

The windows were large; the big desk lay islanded in a creeping parallelogram of light; across this and before the eyes of the man sitting motionless passed slantwise and slowly a massive shaft of shadow.

Perhaps twenty times it passed to and fro, as if outside some great joy wheel oscillating idly in the derelict amusement park. And the man rose, clasped hands behind him and walked to a window – high up in New Scotland Yard. He looked out and war-time London lay beneath … on his brow was fixed a contraction; this he carried from desk to window, and now there was neither hardening nore relaxation as he looked out … during 15 years he had controlled the file of police papers which dealt with the abduction and subsequent history of feeble minded girls. Here lay his anger as he looked out over London … year by year the anger had burst deeper until now it was the innermost principle of the man.

Michael Innes Adapted from The Daffodil Affair.

Questions

If this were to be made into a film what would the main character be like?

Male. Middle-aged. Serious. Pensive. Angry. British. Detective.

What clothes would the character be wearing?

Trilby/fedora hat. Suit, shirt, tie. Shoes. Trench coat.

What furniture is in the main area where the action takes place?

Table/ desk. One or more chairs. Maybe a filing cabinet. Very little furniture. Plain, functional furniture from the 1930s/40s.

Collect visual reference material for the items on your list

Initial visual reference material (sources provided on individual photographs).

Textural and visual brainstorming and idea generation

I created a moodboard for the word ‘pensive’. Interestingly this moodboard highlighted quite cold colours, pale blues, greys and brown. I also quite like the idea of incorporating the crumpled paper, or old typed text into the image in order to convey the frustration that I think is present in the text. Maybe using old newsprint to fill in the image with collage, or alternatively as a background.

I used part of an image of paint flaking off a wall for the background and made a rough sketch of the character in front of this. I wanted the character to be shadowy and blend into the background somewhat. I think that it is quite a bleak image of the character staring out of the window down onto wartime London.

Using black and white

The aim of this exercise was to produce a line image around the word ‘sea’, then to invert the image and use shapes cut from the inverted image to fill in the original image.

Original line image and final black and white image.

My original line image did not work well for this exercise as there were too many different marks in it. Therefore when I inverted the original image using adobe photoshop I removed a lot of these detailed marks from the image. As I didn’t have access to a printer I decided to do the ‘cutting and sticking’ using adobe illustrator.

I like how bold the final image is when compared to the original. I cheated a little by using different tones for the sea, sky and sand, rather than sticking rigidly to black and white. A disadvantage of doing this task digitally is that I lost the ragged edges and texture that I would have got from cutting and sticking paper.

The final image has a very different feel to the original – day has turned to night and the sun has become the moon. The final image reminds me of a monochrome version of the types of images used on the US National Park posters that I discussed in an earlier post – simple, graphic, bold.

As I produced the final image in illustrator I decided to have a quick play with converting the monochrome image to colour but with a limited colour palette.

A subjective drawing

The aim of this exercise was to produce an illustration that illustrates an object, whilst highlighting a quality of the object. For this exercise I chose a packet of polo mints and wanted to highlight their ‘mintiness’. For the final illustration I combined collage using found materials with markerpen and fineliner.

I began by creating a moodboard to investigate different materials, which included, plastics, found papers from magazines and wrapping papers, different paints and pens on different papers. I gradually developed the idea of having a silhouette of the polo tube on a piece of green wrapping paper decorated with mint leaves in pen. I used tracing paper for the silhouette as I wanted to be able to see the decoration underneath. Finally once I’d completed the image I liked the idea of the leaves going beyond the edge of the image in order to highlight them further.

I like the simplicity of the final piece however, I think that it is a little boring. I think that it might have been more interesting to choose a different shape for the background block of colour and also to vary the size of the drawn leaves for example by making some of them bigger.

An objective drawing

The aim of this exercise was to use either pencil or fineliner to produce an objective drawing with a high degree of visual accuracy. I produced my drawing with a range of pencils from HB through to 2B.

I really enjoyed this exercise and I am quite pleased with the result. This exercise made me really look at the object and think about proportion. There are a lot of geometric patterns within the trainer design that I had never previously noticed. I chose this shoe because it has a lot of different textures, which made me experiment with shading and mark making to try to represent these textures e.g. smooth leather, versus rough webbing. The exercise also made me look carefully at the relative tones of different parts of the shoe in order to convert from the colour that I was seeing on the object to different shades of grey in the drawing.

Exploring drawing and painting

The aim of this exercise was to draw the same object using different media and different types of papers. I found it extremely hard to break away from the types of media that I like – anything that allows me to make accurate marks. I did enjoy the looseness of thumbprinting overlain with some obsessive markmaking (#5); despite this image least resembling what I was drawing. I hated trying the pastels and graphite, they were just frustrating, I guess they are intended for larger drawings. I think what I learnt from this exercise is that I need to loosen up and be more adventurous … easier said than done!

Leonardo da Vinci exhibition

This weekend I caught the last day of an exhibition of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci at Southampton Art Gallery. The sketches were beautiful, detailed drawings of anatomy, plants, technology and pictographs. It was mindblowing that they had been drawn over 500 years ago with an ink quill, or chalk. One of the elements of these drawings that interested me most in terms of how they were made was the amount of marks that were being used outside of the key object in the drawing rather than within it.

I really loved that many of these drawings were clearly a method to better understand how different objects (e.g. human bodies) work; while other drawings were using this understanding to design new technologies. Despite the drawings being in one sense very functional they were equally beautiful works of art.

One of the drawings stood out as very different to the rest. This drawing depicted a storm reaping destruction on a landscape. Apparently towards the end of Leonardo da Vinci’s life, he began to use the same techniques that he’d used to understand how objects work to think about death and destruction. I really like this use of drawing to think; not just to explain.

Using reference: the 1950s

The purpose of this exercise was to collect reference material in order to build up a picture of the 1950s from a visual perspective and then to produce an illustration that would give a modern teenager an idea of the 1950s.

The 1950s

Prior to doing this research I had thought of the 1950s as being quite a boring and drab post war era. However, my research revealed that many of the bold colourful designs of the 1960s were beginning to evolve albeit with a somewhat subdued colour pallette.

The 1950s seems to be an era in which people were beginning to have disposable income. House interiors are becoming more colourful; furniture is sleek and no longer purely functional; and colourful geometric patterns are common for wallpaper and soft furnishings.

Much of the advertising that I found from the 1950s was for the latest household gadgets. Advertising is bold and colourful and relies on illustration rather than photography. My main impressions of the 1950s from advertising are that everybody is terrifyingly happy despite the grotesque gender stereotyping that is being depicted.

Research

I began by brainstorming my pre-existing knowledge of the 1950s before pulling together moodboards on the topics of: people and costume; architecture and interioirs; art; graphic design; advertising; transport; film and TV; and surface pattern.

I also incorporated 1950s themes into my sketching practice.

One of my aims with this course is to experiment with different media, so I bought myself some watercolour paints and began to play around with using these to add colour to pen and ink drawings. I really liked how quickly they enabled colour to be added to rough sketches.

I thought about key objects that I felt represented the 1950s. I considered a range of compositions for the piece. I was keen to include reference to the gender stereotyping that I had discovered in 1950s advertising and the ubiquitous smiling. I considered different ways to illustrate objects from outside the home, for example by showing architecture and transport through the window or having a child play with toy cars and trains. In the end I decided to include the car in the magazine that the man is reading and a toy steam train that the child is playing with. In my draft compositions I also considered getting elements of 1950s art into the illustration by for example including a Hepburn style ornament, or some other artwork. However, this disapeared in the final piece because it felt too busy.

The original brief was to make an illustration of somebody sitting in a chair surrounded by typical artefacts to give a teenager an idea of the 1950s.

I really enjoyed using watercolours for this illustration. Originally I had planned to exclusively use paint; however, I ended returning to my ‘safety net’ of black ink in order to highlight different objects. I think that the illustration probably does a better job of illustrating gender stereotypes than really answering the brief. I think that I should have gone the whole hog on 1950s gratuitous smiling. Retrospectively I’m not sure that this scene would necessarily appeal to a teenage audience and maybe I should have opted for the character to be a teenager in a different setting, maybe their bedroom. If I were to spend more time on the illustration I think that it would be a fun challenge to make the illustration in the style of a 1950s advertising poster.