This exercise is about making an illustrated strip for young teenagers, helping to cope with the onset of puberty.
I thought that this was an interesting challenge. I need to make five frames for the strip, which is relatively short if I want to approach it in a narrativising way. I did some brainstorming. I decided that I wanted to approach this from a slightly different angle, since the exercise left it open as to which area of puberty to tackle. It’s such a broad topic and there are so many aspects which are so often completely left out of the discussion.
After thinking about it, I decided I didn’t want to just deal with the pure biology of it, since this is usually the first and often the only thing that kids are exposed to when it comes to puberty in the education system. I figured I would go for a topic that is really endemic and seldom spoken about with teenagers, and that’s the issue of media representation, body dysmorphia, self-esteem and general body issues.
I went about doing some research and looked up the informational pages about puberty on a number of sites, the NHS and the HSE. Both of which I found quite clinical and maybe not that useful for young teens. What I actually found most useful when working on my script for the exercise was the page by Planned Parenthood. However none of these sites had any illustrations. I thought about what style I wanted to go for and came up with a few ideas for inspiration.
Firstly a couple of Nintendo game series came to mind. Splatoon has an interesting modern style, the main cast is depicted as preteens and it’s really fashion forward, using modern street styles as its aesthetic base. A selection of concept art can be found here.
The Pokémon series, currently in the midst of a huge resurgence in popularity, also has a very youthful, street-fashion image in its character design. Particularly iconic for the series is the work of veteran concept artist Ken Sugimori, a selection of his character artwork for the series can be found here.
Another source of inspiration that came to mind is the relatively recent, popular and well received manga My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, which has a really beautiful and quirky artstyle.
I think this artstyle really conveys adolescent anxiety and insecurity.
I went about writing a script and doing rough thumbnails.
I drew my main character for the separate cover illustration.
Next I did another page of thumbnails to finalise everything before going on.
I inked and drew out final versions of everything.
Before scanning them in and tidying them up digitally.
I think this is my favourite work I’ve done for the course. I like the design of my character and I think the comic reads quite well.
In the beginning of this section it says that children’s publishing is an area many illustrators are interested in and is very competitive.
For this exercise I need to go through a process of brainstorming and making illustrations for children.
I found the wording of this exercise very confusing and I wasn’t always sure what exactly is being asked. The first thing is to collect “as many examples of imagery for children as possible”, which seems an impossibly long task, but I settled for compiling research of what’s big in the market at the moment.
I went onto the Amazon website and helpfully they had already laid out categories almost identical to the ones listed in the exercise.
Immediately I had to confront the question posed at the end of the exercise, as many of the same books reappeared in multiple categories. It’s pretty clear that there’s a good deal of overlap and that the categories are only rough indicators mainly for parents and publishers.
I sifted through the bestsellers of each category and found it difficult to precisely place them in this category or that for the purpose of the exercise, but I did as best I could.
Pre-reader
Pre-school (3-5)
Early Reader (5-7)
Established Reader (7-9)
Older Agre Groups
I then had to choose two age groups and do some brainstorming. I was a bit at sea here. I didn’t want to choose the “older” group and just draw whatever I usually draw as I felt it would be a bit of a cop-out and not really in keeping with what the exercise is asking, but at the same time I had very little interest in working with the pre-reader groups. In the end I chose the early reader and established reader groups. I thought it would be interesting to choose two groups so close to each other, and try and understand the differences between the categories a little better.
I chose the word “wild” as a theme, for no particular reason, and started writing down some stuff. Some ideas for different sources of inspiration, some potential themes or elements to include.
For my animals I went for a rabbit for the younger group and a cat for the older group. No complex reasoning, I just figured the rabbit was a little more cute and unthreatening and the cat was a little craftier and, well I just like them!
In preparation for coming up with different elements, I did a bit of reading. I’ve been going through a bit of manga recently, which is traditionally divided into several categories depending on target gender and age. Kodomomuke manga is targeted at children and are usually very funny, whimsical and impart good morals. I read a little bit of Yotsuba, which kind of straddles the line a bit between early and established readers, just to get an idea of tone and content.
I think moralising is particularly important for children’s literature, so in keeping with the wild theme, I imagined an environmentally conscious story about these animals living in the forest. For the art style I wanted to work with I was inspired by artists like Akira Toriyama. I have an artbook of many of Toriyama’s sketches and finished illustrations for the Dragon Ball series, Dragon Ball: The Complete Illustrations.
During my sketching I came across a couple of problems. One is that creating a whole new character from the beginning is really challenging and time-consuming. To get the design down pat, and also to have it be repeatable over different positions and expressions, takes a lot of time and practise which I think was sort of outside the scope of this exercise. I also had second thoughts about the style I chose to take inspiration from, as Toriyama has such a unique and iconic way of drawing, and I think it’s really hard to be inspired and not just look like a cheap imitation.
In the end I drew the rabbit character running away from a forest poacher character. I wanted to make the hero seem cheeky and mischievous, something I associate with some of my favourite characters from my childhood, and kind of a staple of the children’s genre. The cat I have in more of a combat pose, with a speech bubble to establish it as something for a more advanced reader. I like the contrast between the two pieces, I think it’s pretty clear that they target distinct age groups. I went with traditional media, ink pens and watercolour, as I think this is quite quaint and something I associate with children’s illustrations.
I inked both illustrations. During this process I realised I was quite out of practise. Particularly when it comes to line weight, this is something I want to spend more time focusing on.
Next I painted the illustration for the younger group, to take it to a more finished state.
And scanned it.
I think, you know, obviously it’s not so easy to put children into these different brackets. There’s going to be natural differences between kids at different stages in terms of reading ability and personal preferences. The categories are for the convenience of parents and publishers. Looking through the work I compiled, honestly I found it difficult to even categories a lot of established, successful series. They should be thought of as guidelines only.
I don’t think children’s illustrations always need to be in bright colours. I chose bright colours for my work in the exercise because I think as a society we want to protect children from darker and more mature themes until they’re old enough to really understand and cope with them.
References
Azuma, K. (2010). Yotsuba &!. New York: Yen.
Toriyama, A. (2006). Dragon ball, vol. 1. London: Gollancz Manga.
Toriyama, A. (2008) Dragon Ball: The Complete Illustrations. Japan: Viz Media, Shonen Jump.
I need to design the packaging for three varieties of organic biscuits for children, featuring extinct animals.
Well, the first thing to do is go to the shops and research the market.
I went to my local Aldi and had a look around while doing my shopping. Being a sort of discount supermarket they didn’t have a huge selection, particularly not of recognisable branded products, but the closest I found was this shelf of organic products marketed for small children by Mamia.
Immediately you see the hallmarks of this kind of packaging, bright and pastel colouring, simple illustrations and bubbly sans-serif fonts.
There were a handful of other products in the biscuit section that featured illustrations where you can see similar patterns.
Well I was a bit dissatisfied with the results of my first adventure, so I took some more pictures at another supermarket.
So, how do I get my designs to stand out from the crowd? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not very confident in my design skills. The packaging in stores already are nearly always very bright colours that are meant to stand out as much as possible, so it makes sense to take a similar approach. What I want to aim for with my designs is to keep things really simple and not confuse my designs with too many complicated elements.
Wanting to do some secondary research, I went to the library and had a look for any books on graphic design. There wasn’t much but I did find What is Graphic Design? by Quentin Newark. I didn’t really enjoy it to be honest. I think it fell into the trap where an artist believes that their particular area of work is the most important and transcendent of all other forms. One topic I was exposed to is how graphic design is intricately associated with capitalism and materialist, consumer culture. To quote Rudy VanderLans, “The problem with design is that it almost dare not open its eyes to what is really going on, to its complicity, and to its manifest failure to face up to its own responsibilities and argue that design might be anything other than a servant of commercial interests.” The book talks about the connection between graphic design and advertising, with some designers claiming there is simply no difference between the two.
Well, now I was having a little bit of trouble with the exercise. As an artist I’m interested in making things that are subversive or even transgressive. Art interests me when it challenges corporate interests, when it’s combative or political. I’m reminded of recent controversies where corporations appropriate progressive voices for their own purposes, to generate profit. It seems to me that product advertising is either inane at best, or actively destructive to progressive causes at worst. A later chapter in the book talks about packaging: “One might think that this was a field best suited to graphic experimentation, given the compelling need to stand out; however, packaging tends to be one of the most conservative areas of design. […] packaging, with its severe limits on individual expression, is one of the few design disciplines that values continuity over bold new statements.”
My attempt at finding inspiration left me jaded.
Without any other ideas I started sketching what I thought might work for the assignment.
I settled on simple silhouettes of dinosaurs eating the biscuits. Without much else to go on and sort of wanting to ignore all of the research I did, I decided to go with my original goal, experiment with keeping things simple in my design choices.
I drew up the designs digitally.
I’m not unhappy with the designs. I think the chocolate chip one is the most successful in terms of colour choices and readability. I do like the font that I chose, I think it really makes the final design.
I think ironically this is probably the best pure design work I’ve done for the course so far. It’s not something that really interests me, but on considering it, it is useful to develop an understanding of how images are read, the value of simplicity and for want of a better word, graphicness.
For how to improve the designs, I think definitely making sure that colours contrast not just in hue, but also in value, demonstrated by how the pale blue and dark brown form the best combination.
For this exercise I came across some interesting questions on the ethics of graphic design and its relationship to Capital. The issue of artistic integrity and transactional art goes back centuries, and like many issues, they seem all the more exaggerated and present in contemporary society.
Thinking about issues like this, and where I as an artist fit into them is something important to consider in the future.
References
Newark, Q. (2007) What is graphic design? UK: Ivy Press.
Firstly I had to draw a list of words in a descriptive way.
Next I had to use my computer software to choose fonts that matched the words. Fonts are a strange and foreign area to me, I’m not exactly familiar with importing fonts and having a wide variety for different tasks. I decided to stick first with default fonts just to try and understand the more subtle differences between them.
Then I repeated the exercise looking at a font library and learning how to download and install them.
I think it was worth doing both. The former definitely helps to come to terms with the more subtle differences in more neutral fonts.
I printed out both sets. I don’t really know how coloured pencils work, in fact I don’t even own any! But I borrowed some and traced the words.
It was fun to pick the colours. One thing that I didn’t intend but noticed afterwards is that almost all of the colours I picked for the opposite words were contrasting colours too, that made me confident that I had picked pretty sensible colours.
Finally I had to draw the words free hand using a variety of suitable colours and materials.
For a quick rundown:
Big: I pasted on thick black cardstock.
Small: A thin dip pen.
Fat: I used acrylic paint in a rich madder colour, applied thickly. I wanted to try and get that globule like texture you see with thick acrylic paintings.
Thin: A simple fineliner.
Fast: I used a sanguine pastel. My logic was that it’s a medium very useful for fast expressive sketching. I ran my finger along it to smear it in a way that mimics a speed blur effect.
Slow: A cerulean blue watercolour.
Fun: Neon marker.
Boring: HB graphite pencil.
Calm: Soothing green paint, text written in negative with white gel pen.
Mad: I wrote the text in water, then used a dropper with a crimson ink to splash into the water. This one wasn’t as visually impressive as I hoped.
For this exercise the brief is to create book jackets for travel guides for the locations Istanbul, Helsinki, and Milan.
Spending time talking with some of the other students I found out that this is one of those dreaded exercises nobody seemed to be excited for! I was pretty intrigued by it. I see it as interesting challenge as one of the areas I really wanted to work on for this part is my design skills. I wanted to experiment with not over-complicating my compositions and try some fairly minimal presentations. Unfortunately the brief specifically asked for “many elements” being brought together, so this might be a bit headache inducing! But I’m going to try and keep that in mind as I go forward.
So, for this I didn’t really have a predetermined idea of what a travel guide looks like. To be honest I don’t think I’ve ever owned or read one before, so not having any preconceptions I thought it might be a good idea to just brainstorm right off the bat some interesting ideas, and then go on to the research stage. I’ve also never been to any of the destinations, and don’t know that much about them.
I came up with a format that I liked thinking about Istanbul, coming up with a kind of cascading image setup. I also revealed that I know almost nothing about Helsinki or Milan! (Sports cars, douchebags, pizzas? :S )
Next I headed to Pinterest to get a better idea of what to expect from a travel guide cover.
A lot of the generic travel guides simply featured a photograph of some of the local architecture. A recurring theme I noticed is the cover divided into fourths and featuring snapshots. There were however some really interesting illustrations that gave me some great ideas for composition.
Cover illustration by Satoshi Hashimoto 橋本聡
One particularly good series are these travel guides by some media company called TheMonacle, which I’ve never heard of but the title immediately tells you everything you need to know about them. Regardless, the covers for these travel guides are really good. Upon a little bit of investigation, I found that the illustrator for this series is an artist named Satoshi Hashimoto, and looking through his portfolio I think his work is really brilliant and a great example of illustration in this field.
To experiment with some of the compositions that piqued my interest, I decided to stick with brainstorming Istanbul, it being the only city I knew even a little about!
By David Klein
One of the images I found really inspiring was this travel poster for Hong Kong by artist David Klein. I love the way it’s a very simple, impactful image of a woman’s face in traditional clothing and makeup, but worked into her garb are these more detailed elements of the city. I thought that this was an excellent way of doing a better job at the design part, while making sure to meet the brief by including many detailed elements. I researched further and found that it’s part of a series of posters Klein did for Trans World Airlines in the 60s. I love this series and many of the posters solve specific problems I was having, particularly in relation to creating a cohesive collection for three different cities, without just reusing the same composition each time. I think it’s a beautiful example of having a unified collection while using different compositions and unique imagery.
At this stage I went back and reread the brief just to make sure I was following it. I was taken by one specific word I overlooked earlier. “Create illustrations in which many elements are brought together in a diagrammatic way”. I was a bit confused by what’s meant by diagrammatic, being a kind of specific word. The exercise also challenges you to write your own brief, so I figured I would choose a few different headings and make sure each book jacket had images representative of the themes I chose, useful things to feature in a travel guide.
At this point I had a look at some of the other student blogs to see what some of the other students had done, and I realised I had made another pretty big oversight reading the brief, and that’s that they specifically want a book jacket and not just a cover. So I need to come up with a design for front and back.
I went about researching each of the three cities, choosing elements that I wanted to feature in my drawings. I don’t need to go step by step detailing everything I learned, but I’ll list the various references I used below. For general summation, for Istanbul I wanted to focus on the city’s rich history and diverse culture. For Helsinki I wanted to celebrate its modernity, youth and progressivism. And for Milan I thought that showing it’s fashion and consumer culture seemed to be the main draw for tourists.
I did some brainstorming work and drew up thumbnails for the jacket mockups.
I think for all three of the designs I ran into specific problems. Generally I found it difficult to condense the respective cultures into one image. Firstly, from the perspective of not being a part of, and really only being cursorily familiar with these cities, I found it hard to represent the variety of different peoples and customs. I also tried to avoid just drawing things that I found personally interesting. So, for example, with the Milan cover, I chose to feature fashion, sports cars and soccer, even though I don’t care at all about those things, but I figured it was one of the main attractions of their tourist industry. But focusing on those kind of hyper-consumerist areas I wondered if I might have been misrepresenting parts of the city. I had the same problem with Istanbul, a city which is historically a very progressive, secular area in that part of the world, with a huge diversity of people and cultures. It’s also in the midst of a tumultuous political situation seeing increasing movements towards dictatorship, clamp downs on democracy and reinforcements of religious fundamentalism. How can you accurately take a snapshot of such a complex region for the purposes of a simple tourist brochure? I didn’t really find the answers to these questions, but I hope that the areas I chose to focus on and portray were fair and inoffensive.
These are my sketch layers for each jacket. I spent some time colouring each of them to try and bring them to a more finished state.
I spent the most time on Istanbul, trying to bring it to a convincing mock-up.
I’m relatively happy with the designs. I think they all have very different styles that help reflect their respective cities. I enjoyed finding ideas for the fonts and drawing them out freehand. I really like the overall layout and the black backgrounds I think creates cohesion between the covers and would help them stand out.
References
Alvesgaspar. (2013). Lutheran Cathedral in Helsinki, Finland. [image] Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org [Accessed 07 Feb. 2019]
C messier. (2017). Interior of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan. [image] Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org [Accessed 07 Feb. 2019]
Dersaadet. (2002). Sultan Ahmed Mosque Istanbul Turkey. [image] Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org [Accessed 06 Feb. 2019]
Dmgultekin. (2010). Istanbul Grand Bazaar. [image] Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org [Accessed 06 Feb. 2019]
This is quite a long exercise that focuses on a specific methodology. There’s a lot to do and a lot to wrap my head around, but it starts off pretty simple. Buy a newspaper! Let’s get to it.
I went out and got the Irish Times. I was a little concerned there wouldn’t be any editorial illustrations, since I think it’s a bit of a dying art, and I have railed against it before as a kind of generally unfunny, poorly drawn hobby for cranky aging artists! But I know the Times employs at least one relatively good cartoonist who makes a couple pieces a week, so I was hoping to get something at least.
Apparently Thursday’s Times supplements are one about residential properties. An area not famous for featuring editorial cartooning… and one for technology, which fortunately did feature a single illustration! Which was credited as being by… a stock photo website. Oh dear. The rest of the newspaper had nothing at all, not even a funnies section.
Oh well, I suppose the next most sensible thing would be to wait and get a Sunday paper, which will hopefully contain a few illustrations. If that fails I guess I’ll have to resort to online searches. So, I’ll put the exercise on hold for now!
I managed to get another copy of the Times, this time a weekend edition. This time it came with a lot of supplements. Still, illustrations were few and far between but there were a bit more this time.
This is an illustration by Dearbhla Kelly about teenagers in financial trouble due to drug addiction.
The title of the piece is: DRUG DEBTS: WHEN PARENTS HAVE TO PAY.
I think it’s quite a good piece. You can tell visually the worry and anxiety on the young girl, the specter hanging ominously behind her representing drug debts. It uses a kind of fragmented, abstract style to convey chaos, uncertainty and danger. The shadowy figures are worked into the outer elements, everything is jagged and sharp. Overall I think it’s a pretty successful illustration.
I looked up the artist and found her portfolio website: http://dearbhlala.com/ which I have to say, is really impressive.
As far as I can tell the only other commissioned piece was this cartoon by an artist I featured in a previous exercise, Martyn Turner. This portrays Health Minister Simon Harris attempting to cover up the recent scandal of the exorbitant cost overruns of a new children’s hospital. However he doesn’t receive any assistance because nurses are currently striking nationwide due to poor working conditions and low wages.
The title of the piece is Children’s hospital cost overrun a symptom of deeper ailment. It talks about the government and Health Service Executive generally being incompetent and dysfunctional and mismanaging funds.
In terms of the illustration, it’s a pretty standard editorial cartoon. I don’t think the caricature is particularly good.
It also does that lazy political cartoon thing where it will just label every object as a ham-fisted metaphor, like his briefcase saying “Minister for Overruns” and the files saying “inflated costs” or whatever.
I also found the cartoon sort of visually confusing. To be honest it took me a few minutes of looking at it before I understood what was meant to be happening, and I have been following both of the situations it is referencing. Overall not a great illustration.
Two other illustrations were from image sites. And that’s really all there was across the two newspapers I bought.
The next step is to imagine that I have been commissioned to create an illustration for this newspaper. I need to choose from a list of headings and begin a process of brainstorming my illustration.
I chose Throwing your money away, for no particular reason, I felt like all the headlines were much of a much. It’s suggested that I either write something myself or find an existing article with similar heading. Well, I just threw the phrase into Google and went to the news section to see what came up. I didn’t want to be overly selective, imagining being actually asked to illustrate for a newspaper, it’s likely I wouldn’t have a huge amount of choice (or more like any at all!) in the wording of the article.
I found this article at news.com.au, apparently an Australian news website. It’s about a self-help author who promotes frugal living. I found the article kind of annoying and emblematic of problems in consumer society. This person was smart enough to point out that buying wasteful products increases demand for them, but completely separates from and even disparages environmental movements that focus on actually criticizing the corporations that create the waste in the first place, or concepts like your carbon footprint and buying sustainably sourced products. But I’m digressing!
Reading through it I thought that this was going to be really challenging, I didn’t think there was much to go on. Well, I printed out the article and attacked it with a highlighter looking for images to work with.
I knew already that I was going to have problems deciding whether to draw something informative, funny, diagrammatic or whatnot. I went about the brainstorming process.
In the end I decided to do a two-panel comic illustrating one of the ways described in the article of how people waste their money. Pretty simply, a couple buy a large shank of meat at a discount price, and end up throwing most of it away. My intention was to create something funny that provided a bit of levity to the piece, while demonstrating an aspect of “throwing your money away”.
I laid out the comic in the same dimensions as the political cartoon from earlier (23cm x 14cm) and then I drew the illustration. In following the advice of the exercise, I scanned in my drawing to experiment with different colours and presentations.
“Throwing your money away”
I did a version that utilised screentones, which I’ve always liked and makes sense for presentation in a newspaper. Another is coloured in a more loose style, another that I feel is something you would see in a newspaper.
Overall I have to say I’m not happy with the final piece or many of the decisions I made along the way. The illustration that I liked the most during my research was the more abstract, decorative piece by Dearbhla Kelly, and I think I should have attempted something similar. I also think I should have been choosier with my article and heading. My intention was to challenge myself by picking something difficult or random, and seeing what I could do with it, but the result was a fairly bad decision that I found personally difficult to be creative with. I don’t think the image I created really elevates the article in any way.
If I had to lay out a strategy on how I would approach the exercise differently it would be:
do more primary research, look for other sources of editorial illustrations.
be more considerate in which article I choose to base my illustration on.
do an illustration that I connect with more personally.
For this exercise I’m choosing an area of authorial practise and picking some artwork I’ve made already for the course that would be appropriate for it.
I started by leafing through all the images I’ve made for the course and making a digital collage of anything I thought had any merit as something to be printed.
I wanted to make sure I gave due consideration to all the areas of authorial practise mentioned in the course material. Most of the artworks I looked at understandably I felt best suited prints, some maybe fashion printing, and a few more as decorative illustrations.
Making a fanzine of the coursework I’ve done so far would be an interesting challenge, but a lot of work, and probably not very profitable! Some of the exercises favoured illustrations targeted at children so there were one or two artworks that I feel would be a good fit for children’s publishing.
I decided to put a bit of effort into really materialising one of the artworks as some kind of marketable thing. There are a lot of webistes available that some of my other artist friends use to sell merch, like redbubble and society6. There’s also local print and copy shops that I’ve used in the past to make prints for different fairs and conventions. Online stores can also do printmaking. All of these options can wind up pretty expensive. I’ve made a print of one of my artworks for a previous assignment just to see it as a real poster.
Many of the artworks I feel would look okay if I were to get prints made of them, and I think I will need to get many of them printed when I submit my work for assessment. I wanted to do something a little more interesting that just choosing some choice works and sending them to the printers though.
My girlfriend has done some printmaking in the past so I asked her what would be a good practise to follow to create something for the course, without being exorbitantly labour intensive or expensive.
She said transfer printing is really easy to do so I went with her advice and thought about what images might work on something like a t-shirt or a tote bag.
I went to my local craft store and bought some transfer paper, and then headed to the supermarket and got some plain white cotton t-shirts.
I chose three images to print, wanting a good variety of styles. I printed them onto the transfer paper (and used up the last of my printer ink…) and transferred them onto the t-shirts with an iron.
Here’s the final results.
And an obligatory cringey mirror selfie, replete with messy room.
I’m glad I decided to do some printing for this exercise. It was fun and easy to do. It made me happy to see my work on a t-shirt, it made me confident as an artist to see something tangible with artwork that I’ve made on it.
Josh Robbins OCA Learning Log 