Exercise: Client visuals.

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This exercise requires me to take two finished illustrations and effectively reverse engineer them, inverting the process an art director editing towards a final image. I need to simplify them and render them in increasingly distilled line drawings.

For my two illustrations I had a look through my bookshelf for anything that would be good to use for the exercise. I chose two comic books I was pretty familiar with, one I had just finished reading recently, Spider-man: Blue by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, and the other is one of my favourite comics series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I wanted to pick illustrations that had a sense of movement or an interesting feeling associated with them. I chose this panel from the Spider-man comic:

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It features Spider-man giving a strong uppercut to his enemy, the Lizard. I like this one because it shows a great amount of movement and punch (pun intended). Spider-man’s fist is right at the apex of its arc, giving it this really powerful POW! effect. I felt like trying to boil this image down to simple lines while still keeping the sense of movement and impact of the drawing would be a great challenge and accurately reflect what it would be like to do the drawing in reverse. Many of the books on animation and drawing that I’ve read suggest beginning a drawing with a simple line of the effective movement of a character. I wanted to get better at doing that and I thought this would be good practise.

howto

In this panel in Lee and Buscema’s How to draw comics they emphasize using a centre line that runs through the character to convey the type of movement you want.

The second image I chose was this panel from League.

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In it, two of the main characters, Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo are looking sort of ominously into the distance while they’re pummeled by a strong wind. I chose this image because I wanted to try this exercise on a character’s face to see if I could capture their likeness and expression in very few lines. I’m always impressed by people who work in a style that’s almost deconstructivist, using few details to portray something very raw. Artists like Yoji Shinkawa [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoji_Shinkawa] and Nick Runge [https://www.nickrungeart.com/].

Yoji Shinkawa

Memory- Nick Runge

It’s a style I would love to focus on in my professional career, and it’s always so much more difficult than people think. It isn’t as simple as subtracting random lines! In some ways I thought this was likely to be more challenging than the first image.

Here are my drawings:

H7cpVGC6tqMBsW

I found this exercise pretty challenging. I was constantly tempted to keep adding more lines. Especially in the second more distilled version, I would find myself unhappy with how it was going so my first instinct was to keep developing the image. This is a really good exercise in restraint, and useful for my personally. I don’t feel the two final drawing were particularly successful, so I’m looking forward to returning to this exercise in a few days and seeing how it appears after a little distance.

References:

Lee, S. and Buscema, J. (2008). How to draw comics the marvel way. New Jersey: Paw Prints.

Loeb, J. and Sale, T. (2017). Spider-man: Blue. 2nd ed. New York: Marvel Comics.

Moore, A. and O’Neill, K. (2011) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Omnibus Edition. New York: DC Comics.

Exercise: Viewpoint.

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Unfortunately I came down with a sudden flu earlier during the week and lost a bit of time so I’m going to try and get a lot of work done over the weekend.

For this exercise I needed to arrange a collection of objects based on a theme. I needed to do a visual study by photographing them from several different angles in an exploratory way, and then do the same thing again but through sketching. Finally I needed to choose the most successful composition, justify it, and recreate it in pencil in a larger format.

For the theme I chose the morning after.  I used a near empty bottle of wine, a box of paracetamol and two cigarette butts. This was my attempt at humour.

Here are the photographs I took.

Here’s the sketchbook pages for my sketch studies.

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I found the process for this one really interesting. It made me realise the complexities of composition, not just in terms of arrangement, but also viewpoint. Raising or lowering the viewpoint, angling the frame relative to the objects, going very close up or far away, it all changes the composition in interesting ways. It was also a great exercise for practising perspective, capturing the same objects in the same position relative to each other in different ways. I’d like to repeat similar versions of the exercise in future for practise. It also tied together the information built on in the first exercise on image space in a very hands-on, practical way.

Here is the image that I found most successful.

DSCN1284

I like the way the camera focused on the gritty, gross texture of the cigarettes and the position of the paracetamol in the background is really pleasing. I think it captures the theme very well.

I thought the most effective vantage points in general were the ones that were very close to the ground and utilising unusual angles and combinations of closeups and skewed focus. These all contributed to the idea the morning after being something kind of disturbing, uncomfortable, maybe embarrassing.

Here’s my drawing of this image.

1rCBzoh

It was difficult to render the different textures, there’s some really challenging things going on, between the weird filter texture, the ash, glossy pillbox and glass bottle, all challenging to portray in graphite. But I’m pretty happy with the result, this isn’t how I would have initially chosen to do this still life but I found the process very enlightening.

Exercise: Image development. Part one: Images.

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I did a bit of brainstorming to come up with a good image to use for this exercise. I came up with a wide range of potential artworks, sort of broadly dividing them between concept art and fine art. I spent some time thinking about which image is right for the job, choosing some works for having a lot of content, some for having complex compositions, and so on. In the end I figured that the exercise was not so much about choosing the perfect image but more the methodology of image development.

In order: Ralph McQuarrie, Hiroshige, Katsuhiro Otomo, Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Delacroix, Hokusai, Kim Jung Gi, Ayami Kojima.

I decided on this piece of promotional artwork by Akihiko Yoshida. It has a large amount of characters and lots of places to zoom in and out from while retaining the core information of the image. I also just really love this artwork, and it reminded me of the hot/cold theme from the last exercise. It strikes me as something unique and personal.

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I stopped off at a copy shop and got the image printed ten times, then got to work arriving at ten different compositions.

I’ve labelled the images with words that relate to the content.

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Heroes

10

Stoic

16

Deception

20

Swashbuckling

1

Calm

8

Ready

7

Adventure

9

Battle

11

Fantasy

14

Brotherhood

Doing this exercise I was particularly impressed with Yoshida’s skills of composition. There were so many ways to combing the different figures and they all interlapped in interesting ways. The way the main protagonists form a star formation; the two betrayers appear very sinister when separated from the others; the sense of movement, comraderie and group dynamics are all very impressive.

I feel like in the uncropped image, the focal characters are the two in the foreground. It’s very easy to move the focus around and create unique combinations of characters with different focal points.

I think the way the image was constructed, it’s hard to alter the overall sense of drama in the different arrangements. Almost everything is unified in portraying a certain theme. A few of the characters do seem more reserved or out of place. The girl in the flowing white robes, who is a sort of healer, is not brandishing a weapon and seems different compared to the other characters.

Next I’m going to work on a drawing inspired by one of the cropped images.

Exercise: Reading an image.

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dr

Questions.

  • What is the image about. What is it saying?

This image tells a strong narrative and is easily determined by examining the constituent parts. The purpose of the image seems to be illustrating part of a story, or telling a story in its own right. There is a very strong use of hue contrast which has a strong bearing on the readability and metaphorical component of the image. It seems to be saying to me “adventure”, “danger”, “treasure”, “fantasy”.

  • Work out the narrative and identify the story.

The two protagonists are entering from the left. One is brave and the other is timid. They appear young and headstrong. They enter the cave or lair of a sleeping dragon, nestled on a mass of gold treasure. The cave is dark but the leading character wields a torch. There is the discarded remains of would-be dragon slayers littered around the entrance, armour and weaponry.

  • Describe the palette and tonal range which has been used. Note if the colours are hot or cold, whether the elements are detailed or textural, and where these approaches are used.

The palette goes from very hot colours to very cool colours, bright reds and languid blues. The dragon is a bright red, prompting a strong visual contrast and evoking danger. The torch that the lead character is holding is illuminating the entrance of the cave in fiery reds and yellows. The rock formations on the ceiling of the cave are rendered in more detail closest the torch. The seem to be almost molten and dripping. Again this evokes danger, entering the lair of the beast. The red dragon sitting atop to the yellow golden treasure shares its colour scheme with the fiery ceiling, suggesting the dragon of a fire-breathing variety. The blue tones around their feet and the remains of erstwhile adventurers seem to suggest almost melancholy, standing out in sharp contrast to the dangerous hot colours that surrounds it. The flesh tones and hair of the protagonists represent their own microcosmal contrast, their own little bit of fire and bravado in entering the cave.

  • Is there any connection between hot colour and the importance of the element in telling the story?

I think the hot colours are key. They scream danger. They evoke excitement, risk and reward. Importantly their impact is strengthened through the effective use of contrast. They add to the suspense and narrative fidelity of what is being presented in the image.

The image is intended to be read left to right. We can see this in how much of the detail and action takes place on the left side, while the right seems to recede into the darkness of the cave. The mind naturally finds movement from left to right comforting, familiar, it tells a story. (Interestingly this is true regardless of the directional orientation of your native language!) So it’s easy to identify the two adventurers as the heroes of the story. The dragon represents the other, the obstacle, the adversary.

It’s pretty clever that even though the dragon takes up the majority of space in the picture, showing it’s menacing size and adding to the sense of danger, the visual elements have been arranged and coloured in such a way as to focus our attention on the heroes. I think really, if you cropped the image nearly in half, it would have the same visual information, but by making it this big wide-angle with the dragon obscuring into the dark recesses of the cave, it successfully communicates the dragons imposing size and stature without sacrificing the hierarchy of the image.

dr
Cropping the image maintains the information but lessens the impact.

I find the decision to place the dragon further into the foreground than the adventurers interesting. Maybe it’s to present a more appealing angle to draw the heroes, more front-facing. Also interesting that the characters shadow is facing the wrong direction, perhaps to really hammer down them advancing into the cave.

Exercise: Illustrating visual space.

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I started off by finding the three images I needed for the exercises, a tree, a building, and a child. I moved them around and organised them on a few printable pages in different sizes. I did some photo editing to put them into greyscale, and then bumped the contrast all the way up for a two tone image. I did another version preserving the greyscale to create some visual difference. I moved them images around and fixed them in place with some blu-tac and did several scans.

  • How does your sense of the image and it’s meaning change when the figure is smaller than the other elements?

When the figure of the child is small and the other elements are large it creates an imposing image. The child feels lonely and isolated and dwarfed by large oppressive structures.

This image in particular creates that sense of imposition, exacerbated by the tilted angle of the piece.

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  • If the elements are at different angles to each other and at an angle to the frame, what dynamic is suggested?

Of course tilting perspective has been used by cinematographers for many decades, called dutch angles due to its use in Deutsche expressionist cinema, diagonality evokes uneasiness and tension.

I was reminded of this when I watched Rebel Without a Cause in the exercise on using reference. The famous scene where Jim pleads with his father to stand up for him as a beautiful bit of camera work where it transitions from a straight shot to a dutch tilt in mid scene, as the drama turns. I’ve time stamped it here: https://youtu.be/7014C_6ABAg?t=27

In looking at my cut-outs, it’s really interesting how effective diagonal angles are at creating a certain feeling. Even more disparate layouts where everything is horizontal and illogically positioned can maintain an element of orderliness compared to ones with strong diagonals. Compare these:

To me the right image evokes anxiety, chaos, uneasiness. It seems like the child is almost being pursued by the building. Everything assumes a sinister overtone.

  • If all the elements are completely horizontal or completely vertical in relation to the frame what dynamic is suggested? What is your opinion about this image and what sensation does it communicate?

Strict horizontals and verticals suggest order. See:

z13

It seems like the absurd arrangement of elements is contradicted by the orderliness of the vertical through-line. It’s like it’s saying that there’s a serious intention here, a message to be worked out. It says to me that there is structure and purpose to the image.

  • What is your favourite composition? Explain why you feel it is most successful.

If pressed, I think my favourite image is this one:

z9

It’s hard to pin down exactly what I like about it. It’s funny. It looks like the child is peering out over the building, and her expression is amusing. I like that the building, as sort of a classic example of order and structure is even rendered more realistically, and then the child with her great tree is just towering over it in this defiant way.

It reminds me of Dada. Maybe something like Raoul Hausmann. Anti-art.

References

Trachtman, P. (2006) A Brief History of Dada. [online] Smithsonian. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/dada-115169154/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2018]

Self-reflection on part 2

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After receiving my feedback for part 2 I have a lot of points to consider when moving on with the course.

Firstly I’ve given the blog a bit of a makeover and added some quality of life improvements. There are now more subcategories in each menu bar to easily find each exercise in the right sequence, and I’ve chosen a theme that keeps the menu bar visible at the top of the page. In the future I need to be more consistent in referencing my sources, and can freely post more types of images for example, illustration or critique since my blog is not for commercial gain and I don’t need to worry so much about copyright infringement.

My main takeaway from the feedback is to really focus on meeting the brief in each exercise. There were several occasions where I went off-brief, in the exercise on using reference, mark-making, choosing content, etc. I need to ask myself what exactly am I being asked to do. This is going to be my biggest goal going into part 3.

Specifically being more methodical in how I question the remit of a brief. I got some good feedback on how much unexplored territory I went past in the second assignment, point of sale display. Making sure to explore ideas thoughtfully and thoroughly, maybe not being so quick to abandon ideas or avoid following different creative threads.

Thinking about how my illustrations can be in service to a bigger story is a key point in improving my work in the future. I was advised that I have a passion for drawing and storytelling, so being thoughtful about how all components of a given drawing can add context and meaning to a narrative will help to elevate my work.

I’ll also try to be less selective with sharing parts of my sketchbook, including parts that weren’t successful. Showing the full scope of my research process and various brainstorms and doodles.

Something that I would like to do for the next part of the course is to try to make time for more suggested reading, working through some books on illustration, field drawing and perspective.

Assignment two: Point of sale display. Part two: painting.

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In reconsidering how to do the creating part of this assignment, I realised I didn’t want to feel constrained by overly narrow thinking. Maybe the dichotomy I had presented to either do the assignment traditionally or digitally was a bit limiting. I decided to paint my references in watercolour and see where the next step of the process took me, whether that involved creating a finished piece, incorporating some digital manipulation, or simply using my paintings as another form of visual reference for my final displays.

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I started my paintings and was pleasantly surprised with the results, I particular like how the strawberries came out.

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Next I tried to do a digital painting. It didn’t go well. Actually I expected the watercolours to be a failed experiment and to fall back on digital work, but the inverse turned out to be true. After a certain point I gave up rendering and realised these pieces weren’t going to suddenly start looking amazing and overtake my watercolour paintings. Here’s my abandoned digital creations for posterity.

At this point, I really liked how the strawberries came out, but was a little disappointed with the squash in comparison. In reading back over the assignment text I was struck by one part where it says that poor colour choices can lead to food looking unappetising. I felt a bit silly, thinking about a butternut squash and what makes it visually appealing, and it certainly isn’t the bumpy, beige outer skin. I cut the squash open to reveal the bright orange inside and tried painting it again. I’m much happier with this rendition. Ultimately I still think the strawberries turned out better, but I’m glad I took the time to study what went wrong with the squash and have another go at it.

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Happy enough with the results, I scanned in my two paintings and got to work on adding a textual element.

aaa2aaa

One thing I wanted to do now that I had my images on my computer was desaturate them and look at them as black and white images. This showed interesting results and made it very clear why the strawberries are a more successful painting. I tried to do some photo correction to make the pictures more appealing, and will certainly repeat this experiment in the future to check for effective contrast and value choices in my artwork.

 

After doing some minor adjustments I started adding text. I know that changing fonts mid sentence is considered a faux-pas, but I thought it looked good, so I kept it. I tried to arrange the text in as pleasing a way as possible. Feeling that the visual impact was a little basic, I locked the text layer and painted over it with little lightening strokes, trying to give it a kind of metallic, embossed look, really pursuing that “quality” angle.

Here are the final pieces:

aa

aa2

In reflecting on this assignment, I definitely feel like I’ve already made good progress as a visual artist since starting the course. Beforehand I probably would have just gone straight to the drawing with this assignment, but I think having the tools to approach a brief in a more deliberate way is very valuable and produces better work. I’m quite happy with the final pieces, creating something that is quite far away from what my original vision was, but allowing the creative process to bring me in a different unexpected direction.

Assignment two: Point of sale display. Part one: brainstorming.

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Going into this assignment I tried to latch onto the ideas of consolidating the skills learned so far in this course. I wanted to incorporate several of the techniques dealt with in the previous exercises. I made a list of the tools I wanted to utilize:

  • Making a spider diagram
  • Doing research
  • Drawing from observation
  • Making colouristic and textural decisions
  • Using black and white/contrast

I’m going to go back to this list several times as I progress with my drawing.

To set things off, I did a spider diagram.

Hvf2gs1

In evoking “quality” in accordance with the brief, I decided on approaching the illustration in a very painterly way. I wanted to emulate something that would be produced in a fine art atelier.

Confident in the direction I wanted to take, I took to pinterest and made a board of reference images. I really love this board, and some of the images I found I think are really fantastic, and I couldn’t think of a better way to evoke quality in doing an illustration. My inital idea was to do something that looks like an oil painting, but looking on pinterest I was more taken with working digitally or using watercolour.

https://pin.it/k3pqtsvsdl3e4u

I made some notes on how I wanted to approach the display. I weighed up the pros and cons of working traditionally or digitally. I noted the advantages of traditional painting, thinking it would make my work more expressive and naturalistic, and making it easier to draw directly from observation. However I will definitely want to do some image correction and typography on my computer, and scanning a painting will diminish the effect and quality. Doing the work digitally will allow me to play around with interesting textures, compositions and brush sets, but it won’t look as natural and it is harder to translate an observational drawing to digital. It’s also easier to print a digital creation.

cdkSfsz

I also looked at whether to do a single piece or a bundle or collection of fruits and vegetables. Noting the challenges in composition and out-of-season procurement when it comes to multiple items. I also felt that focusing on one item would evoke a feeling of quality, inspired by images like this: https://pin.it/ryzdockaxghijf

I wrote out a list of seasonal fruits and vegetables for both Summer and Autumn. For me the produce that I most associate with coming into season in Summer would be strawberries. For Autumn it would be root vegetables, or something like pumpkin or squash. One thing I really wanted to focus on for this exercise is colour theory. In approaching the assignment I was reminded of some reading I did recently on Van Gogh and his excellent and fairly radical use of complementary colours. This short article provides some good information. http://www.vangoghsstudiopractice.com/2011/05/the-effect-of-colour/

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I did a little refresher on some basic colour theory, some info here: http://www.poeticmind.co.uk/research/rgb-cmyk-colour-systems/

One of my favourite Van Gogh paintings is The Night Café, https://www.vincentvangogh.org/the-night-cafe.jsp

In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote of the painting:

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.

It’s a beautiful and deliberate use of colour.

In thinking about colours for my project, I thought about what colours I most associate with the respective season, and what colour works as its complement. Using the red strawberries, I wanted to utlize green in the drawing, and using an orange or earthy vegetable for Autumn, I wanted to incorporate blue. Not only do the pieces themselves utilize complementary colours, but I’m hoping that the pieces will also complement each other.

My next step was to procure the produce for my observational drawings. I made sure to keep an eye out for in store point of sale displays for any spontaneous inspiration. I went to my local fruit and veg shop and picked up the best pieces I could find for the assignment.

There were a few minor sales displays, but they had only very simple black pumpkin outlines for Halloween. I ended up buying a butternut squash for the Autumn display, and a punnet of strawberries for Summer.

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At this stage I was fairly confident with moving on to the drawing section of the assignment.

 

 

Exercise: Exploring drawing and painting.

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I have to admit I wasn’t completely enthused with the idea of this exercise. I feel like I’ve already spent a lot of time experimenting with different mediums and paper combinations. Regardless I went ahead and tried to do something different and try some really unusual combinations.

When I read the instructions for this exercise I was struck by the first line. “Create a sketchbook”.

“Hey!” I thought, “I just read about how to do that and it didn’t seem too hard!”

In one of the books in the recommended reading list for this unit, Sketch Your World: Essential Techniques for Drawing on Location, there’s a brief tutorial on how to make your own sketchbook. I’ve never done any kind of book binding before, so I was eager to try it out.

For this exercise, I need to use a variety of mediums on a variety of surfaces. I couldn’t see why I couldn’t use lots of different kinds of paper in my sketchbook, so I gathered as many as I could find and bound them together.

I got a darning needle and some twine and went about making my little sketchbook.

Next I needed to think of what to draw in my new sketchbook. I decided on something it would be fun to riff on and something I wouldn’t get bored drawing over and over again. I chose a cute cat head.

Now, looking back over this I realise I may have gone a little wild and possibly not met the brief for the exercise. But I wanted to do something that I found entertaining and fun, and something really tickles me about the idea of this insane person’s notebook filled with mismatched paper and strange variations of kitten heads. So, you know, take that how you will.

I also realised afterwards that the brief did say to label everything, which, uh, it’s a bit late for that. But here’s a non exhaustive list of what I used

Paper

  • cartridge paper
  • green pastel paper
  • hot press watercolour paper
  • bristol board
  • grey card stock
  • red card stock
  • newsprint
  • baking paper
  • black paper
  • toned mixed media paper

Mediums

  • felt tip pens
  • various pencils
  • graphite sticks
  • charcoal
  • black and red biros
  • watercolours
  • acrylic paints
  • india ink
  • wax crayons
  • markers
  • fine liner
  • white gel pen
  • correction fluid
  • paint marker

And here’s the result of this insane project:

Exercise: Visual metaphors.

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In searching for visual metaphors for this exercise I spent a lot of time looking at newspaper editorial cartoons. I’ve never done this explicitly before, to try and look for archives of political cartoons, websites, community forums, etc. I have to say, I found the whole ordeal pretty depressing. There seems to be a lot of new artists with large twitter followings making these very hateful, ignorant cartoons, sort of profiting out of the whirlwind of xenophobia and hatred stirred up by Mr. Trump in recent years. I looked at a few artists like Ben Garrison and A.F. Branco who were frankly just awful.

My one shining light in this research was this episode of the podcast Chapo Trap House where they do a sort of tour of a number of prominent right wing political illustrators. In the words of one of the hosts- “Newspaper editorial cartoons, which are, already you know, bad. Known for being not funny, incredibly poorly drawn, and generally just the scribblings of octogenarian cranks.” They went through comic strips such as Dry Bones, Mallard Filmore, and Day by Day. They walked through a lot of the tropes of the format, including very hokey attempts at metaphor where they will just use obtuse visual references but just excessively label everything for clarity, for example have a politician pulling a large weight and then write “the debt” on it. This sort of humourless, obvious work wasn’t appealing to me.

I did find two artists that were interesting. One is the syndicated editorial cartoonist for The Irish Times, who produces some pretty funny illustrations, also doing some pretty good caricature work. See an archive here: https://www.irishtimes.com/profile/martyn-turner-7.1837410

Also Adam Zyglis, who works for The Buffalo News- https://www.caglecartoons.com/archive.asp?ArtistID=%7B0BC09513-7316-44BD-9263-376ACC549066%7D

In digging through these editorial cartoons I thought of another medium which frequently employs visual metaphor, street art. Straight away I thought of Banksy-http://www.banksy.co.uk/

Some images from the website that I found very poignant and utilising visual metaphor without resorting to just labelling every individual item to get the point across, a very good example of what savvy illustrators can achieve-

At this point I remembered a book I had read at the library a few months ago, so I decided to go back and take it out again. It’s called Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine, compiled by William Parry. It showcases many photographs of beautiful street art done along the border wall in Palestine. Some examples of such art can be seen on this pinterest board: https://pin.it/fvgsn4rhrdxzf6

Satisfied with my research I moved onto doing my drawings.

I decided on “Censorship of the press” for my phrase.

Inspired by the work in exploring ideas visually in the Words into Pictures exercise, I sketched out some ideas, and then used a fine liner to give them a bit more visual fidelity. I tried to avoid spending a lot of time finding references, focusing more on getting the ideas out, and I’m happy with the results. I also wanted to avoid overexplaining things and relying on text as a crutch, so hopefully I communicated the ideas effectively.

vm

I asked my girlfriend what she thought the images meant, and I was happy that I got the intended meaning across.

Ref

Parry, William. Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine. Chicago Review Press, 2011.