Exercises: Words into Pictures & Making a Moodboard

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.

Destruction

Exotic

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

Moodboard: Destruction

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.

'Say hello'

'You are going to send a 'greetings card', telling your tutor about yourself, your interests and inspirations, the materials you feel comfortable working with and maybe what you would like to get from the course.'

 Having read the overall exercise I first put it aside and start doodling quite freely, puzzling out visually the first images that came immediately to mind. At this point I'm thinking about everything I can at once, a free-for-all of mixed compositions and formats and techniques. Among other things I worked loosely from reference photographs of life models & myself, generated indian- & William Morris-influenced repeating floral patterns and made vague architectural studies of the Duomo in Florence.

a sample: my first drawings are a period of free association, gathering raw ideas

'materials' thumbnails & notes

Once I had run out of steam I was fortunate because I could show my early workings to Jenna Chew, who I've been very lucky to know as a friend and sometime mentor for about a decade. Talking with her I revisited the brief, and she encouraged me to develop three divergent thumbnails; a part of the process I'm often very remiss in pursuing. I needed a few seeds to grow three distinct approaches from. I returned to the source, picked out and de-constructed the key phrase:

'yourself, your interests and inspirations, the materials you feel comfortable working with and maybe what you would like to get from the course'

Since I expected to be working in traditional media with gouache, ink and brushes, to a certain extent my use of  "materials" could be figuratively (as well as literally) translucent, so I wasn't enormously worried about representing this element whatever solution I settled on--they would be literally represented by their concrete presence. In this I had the advantage of knowing that I have a narrow and educated primary audience.

I provisionally separated out "interests" as chiefly external phenomena that one is attracted to because of one's visual DNA and "inspirations" as the building blocks of that DNA, things that aren't primarily conscious. Or, in other words, as external and internal. In practice I reasoned the type of icons that represent an interest and an inspiration would be very similar, so that by illustrating one I would imply the other, but the way that those icons would appear in relation to the self would obviously differ.


Those three words each became the catalyst for one of my thumbnails-although in this case at least my inclination was to create A5 studies, half scale to my intended final illustration and full scale to the intended greetings-card size reproduction, more like visual synopses than the more exact 'elevator pitch' function of a thumbnail..

"Myself" jumps out obviously as the keystone for the illustration--this is the central idea that all other elements have to support. Immediately I started to think that, as the doodling had suggested, I should visually represent myself, myself as a practitioner--so how concrete or abstract would I appear? What's the most efficient way to represent myself that can embrace my interests, inspirations and my favoured materials? Which ways of doing things, what images from around and inside me, are most integral to making me myself?



Both the British illustrators I studied were notable for the way they used cutting and empty space, actual and visual, to create their compositions. In all my thumbnails I decided to pursue this sense of emptiness balanced with structure. On the other hand I knew that I had no natural desire to create bold planes of flat colour. I like bold crisp shapes to be counterbalanced by bleeding and imperfect edges, transparency and worn textured surfaces. In the final illustration I turned to sponging for this purpose, a standby for filling space with tone while imparting texture.

'influences' (left) & 'inspirations' thumbnails

preparatory compositional drawing

Though I quite dramatically altered the composition between my chosen thumbnail & final, many of the figurative elements were already in place at this stage and remained little changed through to the end. I returned to reference photography to create a reasonably realistic profile silhouette of myself. In my first assignments my instinct was always to start working with paper. I decided to stay the course and created a stencil for the outline of my head & cut masking tape for the nostrils and eyes.

The elements I settled on were all that came to mind easily and were polysymbolic. The Duomo, though here a rather poor cartoon summoned largely from memory is a recurring image of my visit to Florence, which was an artistically formative time in my life that kindled my fascination with the history & architecture of continental europe and reinforced my desire to continue studying & playing in the realm of the visual arts. In fact all of these were drawn with minimal reference, which allowed me to work quickly & easily while giving them the characteristic, somewhat childish look of imagined objects.

This isn't the first appearance of the kissing couple, either. Aside from the important role eros & romance have played in the course of my life generally, human gross anatomy is one of the areas of drawing I've been interested in for longest.

The Chinese lung emerging from clouds is both a specific, dominant icon of asian art and emblematic of a general fascination with the creatures of myth & legend, the kind of fanciful stories in which the knight in shining armour might often figure, bridging the gap between real and imagined histories. The suit of armour as a beautiful, supremely functional yet conceptually horrifying object has been with me for a long time, too.

Ever since I was a baby tracing the foliage on the old William Morris fabric covered sofa my parents used to own I have loved twining patterns, which in my mind have become emblematic of the constrained organic formalism I adore in indian & persian art.

Probably the least familiar to most people is Japanese tokusatsu hero Ultraman, a visual icon of Japanese pop culture which from the crass to the esoteric has saturated my consciousness for most of my life. I grew up in the eras of Power Rangers and Pokémon dominating the playground discourse, and mass-produced Japanese commercial/aesthetic culture has only expanded its reach since then.



The speech balloon as well as being tied to my long term typographic & calligraphic dilettanism is to me deeply redolent of so many of the comic books I've grown up with.

This last worked out as a digital element, both as a necessity from a craft point of view, since a stencil or resist of so delicate a shape is beyond my skill and means to render as smoothly as I desired, and an opportunity to work outside my comfort zone, tying somewhat back into the "what you would like to get from the course" part of the brief. I intended for the 'tail' of the speech balloon to roughly mimic the sinuous blue body of the lung as it coils though my head.

Final illustration, the speech balloon element is digital

close-up of the traditional element

The most important lesson that has been impressed on me so far, working on the first part of the course, is to do with process. As a hobbyist there's rarely a need to deal with rigid goals or deadlines so the biggest challenge in embarking on a formal illustration course is that for the first time I have to examine my process and begin to define a sustainable, efficient workflow. From what I've gleaned by talking with other hobbyists and practicing illustrators everyone's process is different, and we all experience our private malaises and agonies at different points. Hopefully I can absorb the many valuable time-worn lessons around me while staying away from a predetermined rote of what I "should" be doing, and refining my own practice as a streamlined, repeatable formula.

Exercise: Spider Diagrams

Spider diagrams, the bane of my secondary school existence! I've always found them deeply frustrating because I hardly ever manage to come up with unexpected thoughts or ideas (those with appended question marks, in this case), so most of the time I would just try to intuit what the teacher was looking for and write that. It seems to me that we just used to call them brainstorms. The playground urban legend was that the word was considered too non-PC.

These obviously get more orderly and nuanced as I progress towards 'Angry', the last word. That doesn't seem to be a function of how difficult I found each word to generate content for, but rather a matter of getting accustomed to the format. I think the hardest was 'Childhood', as I was a dull, miserable child and have so few concrete memories of my early life. Other than that, once I approached gestalt & semi-fictionalised experiences, none of them seemed particularly difficult.

Previously I hadn't examined the rationale behind the way I fill in spider diagrams, but looking at these my approach seems clearly a narrative one, fuelled by storytelling "What next...? And then...?" questions, as if a camera is panning along a scene for me. Walking along the beach, for example, we look down and see towels and deckchairs. I also notice I tend to skip over some useful and obvious words--for instance children and wind are both missing from 'Seaside'--because I tend to take them as read.

Writing a Brief: Hollie Chastain's "Daydreaming" (2010)

Hollie Chastain-Daydreaming

I largely fictionalised the context for this illustration (to my knowledge T.E.D. Magazine doesn't even exist), since as far as I know the piece was produced as a stand-alone artwork, and I regret if I missed the point of the exercise...but I thought that if I was going to invent a brief I may as well go all the way. I loosely structured the brief on the first one I found via google: this one.

Clients - T.E.D. Magazine 

Overview

A magazine is being developed to align with with the Technology, Entertainment, Design series of talks, dedicated to "Ideas Worth Spreading". The publishers are asking for a broad range of art to match the creative and open-minded aspirations of the organisation.

This brief is for a splash image, opening an article that will expand on the themes presented Sir Ken Robinson in his talk: Do Schools Kill Creativity? (youtube link)

  

Usage

Similar to publications like New Scientist magazine, the illustration will take up most of one "standard" size (8 3/8" X 10 3/4") page, with the article beginning on the facing page. The publication is aimed at a sophisticated, design-conscious audience with an interest in authentic expression. Subtlety is a watchword; we're looking for potent, suggestive expression rather than a didactic editorial approach. Ideally the illustration will be visually rich, with elements that reward a second look, but not dominated by intense colours or excessive detail. 

 We'd like you to evoke, in a classroom environment, the dangers of a rigid, academically regimented school system and the benefits that creativity can bring to education. In this case we're not focusing on characters or a concrete setting-or even on a strictly defined narrative of opposition-but on the 'feeling' of school, and the idea of imagination conflicting with achievement, in the narrow way we define it in schools. It's important to show children in the illustration and frame imagination, new ideas and creativity as positive forces that conflict with conventional educational practices. 

We're looking for an image that will evoke childhood both through real media techniques and a sense of place, and show us a child's view of school, but not through naive or childlike rendering. We're hoping you can bring in elements of collage and found textural elements, materials and media that wouldn't look entirely out of place in a primary or secondary school classroom, to highlight the gap between the world of the classroom-- flat, faded, precise and monochrome--and the world of the imagination--having depth or volume, abstract and vivid.

Getting the Gist: Hard Edge of Empire II

Completing my visual exploration of Charles Stross' essay The Hard Edge of Empire. I really focused in a particular paragraph that presents the concrete realities that would accompany a mundane steampunk society. I wanted to create an illustration that a reader would instantly recognise as springing forth directly from the life and world Stross imagines for us, concentrated down into a single narrative moment that still relates to the overall tone of the essay. The real readers and writers of fantastic fiction are presented here with the hidden underbelly of the heroic worlds they read about: a mere imagined downward pan of the eyeline reveals that science adventurers and gunslingers are supported by an iniquitous system that has been willfully ignored. While the privileged heroes are left distant and anonymous, the oppressed look us right in the eye.

"empty-headed graces of debutantes raised from birth to be bargaining chips" close observation of period costume and machinery were important in shaping both the specific visual design and tone of the final illustration.	"the empty-stomached anguish of a young prostitute on the streets of a northern town"/ "fading eyesight and mangled fingers of nine year olds forces to labour on steam-powered looms" the crippled mother and children were the most important group, the most challenging and ultimately the least successful.
"forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours"	"casual boiled-beef brutality of the soldiers who take the King's shilling to break the heads of union members" many choices I made, from cropping the faces of the upper figures to strongly splitting the composition and colour scheme are intended to 'pull focus' away from the commonly aristocratic concerns of steampunk to the cruelty of their society & the less fortunate masses

~

in progress

final

Getting the Gist: Hard Edge of Empire I

Though I'm rather stretching the brief the editorial I've chosen is author Charles Stross' essay The Hard Edge of Empire, in which he decries the divorce of modern 'steampunk' fantasy fiction from the harsh realities of the Victorian world it hearkens back to. As with the previous history of illustration exercise, I immediately saw something that I wanted to express and what I could add to the dialog of the work. I want to express Stross' idea that no matter how romantic the trappings of a fantastical age of 'science adventure' may seem, an honest appraisal would require much more attention to be paid to human suffering & brutality. For that reason, and because of his clear links with Dickens whom the author references I'm being influenced somewhat by Hogarthian moral images of human life swirling together in a chaotic mêlée of interwoven incidents.

a strongly divided and vertical composition seems vital for communicating the ideas of oppression & hierarchy

the main challenge I'm working on is to create a set of plausible character vignettes

History of Illustration: Rob Ryan (b)