This exercise required me to collect a number of informational or instructional illustrations to help with an illustration of my own.
I thought about where to find different pamphlets and I checked out my local library, museum, and tourist office. My results were pretty meagre. I found a handful of pamphlets but nothing with a lot of informational artwork on them. The most valuable one was about recycling.
I also did a few searches online. The first thing that came to mind when thinking about instructive art was those accompanying illustrations on wikiHow articles, which are, you know, famously bad. Poorly drawn and puzzling in execution. There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to taking particularly obtuse illustrations out of context, https://www.reddit.com/r/disneyvacation/ See for example:
How to discipline your fish
Confident in how not to proceed, I also reread some key sections of two books I’m familiar with that I thought would be helpful for this exercise. Making Comics by Scott McCloud and Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner. Both offer fantastic insights into panelisation and theory in making comic art.
As I kept going with the exercise I decided to use some inspiration from another artbook I have, Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo. I’m a fan of the animated series and I like the simple hand-drawn style and cute features. I thought something similar would work well from informational illustration.
I was inspired by this simple artstyle, pioneered by Pendleton Ward.
For my illustration I was torn between choosing making a cup of tea and playing a tune on an instrument. The former I thought would be easier than the latter.
Never one to shy from a challenge, I tried tackling the one on playing a tune. Something I felt was very difficult to do with only visuals. Straight away I figured I needed to decide whether it was going to be sort of jokey and impressionistic, or useful and informative. In remembering my feedback from part 2 I decided to try and keep it informative, in keeping with what I perceived to be the intention of the exercise.
I did a few pages of sketchwork.
I was stuck with exactly what elements to portray in the exercise. I found that certain things, purchasing a guitar, tuning, music theory, are overly technical and simply not suited to visual medium for explanation. I settled on a few areas I thought were either very visual processes, or simple enough to portray visually without a lot of words. I arranged them in a step by step way, and built it into this little comic. I ended up with four steps, 1) learning three complementary chords 2) familiarising yourself with a piece of music using those chords 3) working out the chord sequence through further listening and experimentation 4) practise!
I chose to work digitally to get my colours as bright as possible and to make moving elements around a little easier. I wanted to keep the backgrounds and gutters clear and uncluttered to keep the information concise.
I tried to keep the designs and colours as bright and cheerful as possible, and to keep my instructions brief and clear. I stuck to mostly primary colours, and changed the main colour of each step to keep visual interest. I also presented it in a long format, which is really effective on scrolling platforms like blogs. This is something McCloud talks about in his books.
I showed it to my girlfriend and asked her to review it, which I will post here in full:
uh huh
very good
i like how you both show the cords with the dots, but also have illustrations about finger placement. very useful
yeah, i mean, i get it as like, you get the chords, it is shown how to do the chords, there is a song that i assume has those chords, so you should listen to it and try to copy it until it sounds good 😛
So, I would call this comic a success.
References
Eisner, W. (2008). Comics and Sequential Art. Revised edition. New York: Norton.
McCloud, S. (2006). Making Comics. New York: HarperCollins.
McDonnell, C. (2014). Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo. London: Titan Books.
Josh Robbins OCA Learning Log 