Words into Pictures
I didn't find in the is exercise quite the satisfying step forward from brainstorming that I had hoped; I found that a lot of my process simply involved mentally generating a brainstorm just as I had for the previous exercise and then drawing rather than writing things out. I'm not sure that I found the challenge of the adjective 'exotic' much different from that of the noun 'destructive', in that both readily suggested operative objects & actors to me. It was the use of mixed media and my attempts to efficiently convey various moods & concrete effects that really kept my interest.
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| Destruction |
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| Exotic |
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When I took on the prompt
Exotic I was troubled as an illustrator attempting to embrace both a decent standard of personal behaviour, and working in a public & multicultural marketplace; immediately aware of, and made uncomfortable by the obvious notion of the foreign as exotic, a tendency that leads to reductive
orientalism & similar kinds of
othering. However it seemed dishonest to attempt to escape from or ignore that image, so instead I attempted to contextualise the tendency from a more global, if perhaps rather naive perspective that everyone's culture is equally exotic from the outside, the businesswoman no more or less an oddity than the
Sikh Nihang or the
Masai tribesman.
Making a Moodboard
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| Moodboard: Destruction | |
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The next stage was bringing one of the visual brainstorms forward by investigating and combining found media related to the visual themes I had established. I found making the moodboard a much more deeply satisfying exercise. Partly it was the motivation to play with the [very] rudiments of photoshop image editing, and partly the jigsaw challenge of putting together the commonalities of disparate elements that make up something of the texture of Destruction: the central billowing shape of a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) devouring anthrax merges with atomic explosions, tsunami waves, fire and smoke. Or the correspondences between the Capone gang's arsenal and medieval medical manuals and the ruins of Nagasaki. The swarm of locusts that seem to merge into the rubble of the
Cabrini–Green demolition. Most of these images come from my pre-existing digital reference library, an archive approaching 75 GB I've kept for several years of any image that has caught my eye, sorted loosely into subject categories.
