OUIL 505 - Concept development

Some points of interest to me while reading The Metamorphosis:

-Gregor secretes a black ooze which isn't cockroach-like but is something I've been illustrating and incorporating into drawings

-He is an ex-lieutenant who is now a travelling salesman. A portrait of him as a lieutenant is hung on the wall.

-His writing desk is significant to him as it reminds him of his humanity.

In light of the last point, I drew an old fashioned writing desk and put a suitcase on top of it, as most travelling salesmen have similar ones. I want to see how I can merge these motifs

OUIL505 - Thumbnail development

I liked the potential that the thumbnail of Gregor peeking out the door had - it was both disturbing but also a bit silly, having him stood upright like that. I feel like this is a good reflection of the often ridiculous style of writing the story possesses with its bluntness, so I developed it into a bit of a rougher sketch:

 I then developed it further on the computer, redrawing the door to make it more solid and also adding colour:

I went for a limited colour palette since I don't feel confident enough to use a full one at this stage.
I'm not pleased with this image because it doesn't feel 'tight' enough as a composition - I suspect it's because of the perspective of Gregor's parents' heads which doesn't make a lot of sense and makes the rest of the arrangement fall flat. I will continue trying to re-work this.

OUIL505 - Visual Journal initial imaging

Going forward with Kafka's collection of short stories, I've begun by attempting to illustrate arguably hist most well known work, "The Metamorphosis", which is about the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa awakening one morning to find he has been transformed into a cockroach.

The flailing cockroach legs are the first visually described action of the book, so I felt it appropriate to begin my visual journal by illustrating it. 

The early thumbnails are my interpretation of the family's initial sighting of Gregor, a significant scene which I have been trying to compose based on what I read about composition in Loomis' "Creative Illustration".

Up until this point, I realized I hadn't done many studies of cockroaches themselves which would help this project move forward greatly, and so I went on to draw them from reference, playing with line and mark in a way that would most interestingly convey the mood of the story. I am particularly pleased with the cockroach which is made up of scribbles and legs - I want to incorporate this into an illustration at some point if I can make it fit.

OUIL505 Contextual reference texts

Adrian Tomine's book "New York Drawings"
A selection of quite simple compositions - I've noticed he uses a lot of close up images of people's head which help to 'frame' the illustrations and give them a bit more depth, which I assume makes a background scene easier to visualise on paper and fit with the figure in the foreground.

Loomis "Creative Illustration" 
I'm reading the chapter about composition in order to help improve my ability to compose illustrations and finding it really useful.

OUIL505 Applied Illustration - Studio Brief 1 - Project Proposal

Responsive - Secret 7" part 2

Since we are allowed to enter as many entries as we want into the Secret 7" competition, I've decided to do another design because I also really liked the song "Reflections" by Diana Ross and the Supremes.
This once again began with me listening to the lyrics of the song and illustrating what I felt it communicated. The key motifs I've picked out from the lyrics are the loss of time, love and happiness.

I thumbnailed a few initial ideas depicting a mirror which is radiating or holding all the concepts the song is singing about:

I like the idea of there being a woman looking through the mirror with white space all around, and her seeing all the things she lost within it.

I then did a more developed version of the mirror in watercolour, and laid it out as a test - the black corner lines are only there because I thought it might be interesting to have something else going on in the cover but I don't think it's really worth keeping, as I quite like the mirror being the sole object on the cover. 

I also re-drew the woman digitally and tried to give her dress a sparkly look like most of the motown dresses the artists would use when performing their songs

After vectorizing the watercolour drawing of the mirror, I coloured it in Photoshop and applied a texture since I didn't want to have the soulless look of flat vector colours. 

I tried removing the line work for the hearts, the hearts and flowers, and removing it altogether. In the end I decided to remove only certain lines in order to attain a nice compositional balance - I feel that the lines made certain areas 'heavier' than others.

I was left with 4 main compositional options:

I feel like the first composition packs the most punch because it reaches the edges of the cover, but feels quite constrained. Incorporating the woman into the design, I realized that the perspective of the mirror and her (particularly her placed hand) is completely off. I stretched the mirror out so it's a bit more correct, but I still think it looks a bit strange. 

In the end, I compromised between the first and second - make the mirror smaller but move the shapes so they reach off the page in order to fill out the composition. I think the woman could potentially have worked if I had drawn her and the mirror together, rather than separately and then hoping they would fit together. 

However at the same time, I think she makes an otherwise simple concept/design a lot weaker.

Responsive - WWF contextual research

The brief asks for "An integrated campaign that considers all communication channels relevant to the idea (ie print, digital, experiential…)". Me and Astrid are interested in exploring print and digital

Print products:

• Booklets
• Handouts/Flyers/Brochures (with fold-out posters, etc.)
• WWF-themed notepad with facts and information/illustrations on each page
• Fold-out fact cards

Each product could contain a sign-up card/form to support the WWF

Digital products:

• Mock-up social media pages
• Animated web banners
• Mock-up app that provides information in report

Touchwerks is a digital agency that produces campaigns for various things. This campaign for Disney's Fantasia Live was interesting to look at because it shows a campaign working across multiple formats which is what we want ours to do:

http://www.touchwerks.com/project-DisneyFantasiaLiveinConcert.html

Various Un.titled campaigns which show nicely made leaflets and also some nice illustration on the Busy B products, although we will need our work to be more gender-neutral of course. 

http://un.titled.co.uk/work/busy-b

http://un.titled.co.uk/work/hickling-squires-digital-campaign

http://un.titled.co.uk/work/spark-festival

 

Gilles and Cecilie's Studio are a creative duo who have a lot of experience in campaign design and advertising - They put a bit of text on their site about the idea/concept behind each resolved brief which gives an insight into their thought process.

An annual report from Prometey Bank which has numerous animal illustrations - I figure we could probably do similar looking images?

A more graphic approach to an annual report which is good to look at in terms of its layout

Slightly more specific research into relevant printed products - More illustrated annual reports which I found, illustrated note pads (particularly those with inside pages illustrated) and brochure packaging. I think I want to push the idea of having a brochure with a unique layout/shape, as this seems to be a good way of making a product memorable

Responsive - Secret 7"

My chosen song for Secret 7" is Let Forever Be by The Chemical Brothers. I read the lyrics of the song and thought that it sounds like the singer is communicating what seems to be a psychedelic experience. The music video is also quite similar in nature, but obviously I don't want to derive too much from it.

In light of this, I've decided that I want the image to have a psychedelic nature, using the motif of a hand.

 

I want a trippy looking hand with too many fingers and nice texture, so I did the shape of it in gouache and then scanned it in and added details digitally - but I find it really difficult to get a smooth application of gouache on paper and it just makes the skin look like it's been burnt as can be seen on the above images.

Coloured pencil tests:

Really liked the coloured pencil on paper, especially on the last image, but scanned in it looks too rough and grainy - I don't want to battle with making my work look as nice on screen as it does off, though I think with the last image I have the basis for my digital illustration.

I looked at psychedelic posters from the 60s, particularly those by Victor Moscoso in order to gain inspiration for the colour and motifs of my final design - swirling shapes and more strict colour used encouraged me to make the spiral pattern background design and use the bright colour scheme.

Final illustration:

I think the hand trails are subtle, yet useful enough to give the hand a glow and not make it seem too "plastered" in the image. I also think it was a smart move to not use as many colours for the final design as I did when using coloured pencils. This not only makes the final design neater and more subdued, but also is more inline with actual psychedelic designs which had limited colour palettes. 

OUIL505 Research

My selected catagory is Publishing and Book Design

Influential illustrators:

Tomer Hanuka

I've been a big fan of Tomer Hanuka's work for a long time now - what I find relevant about his practice to mine is a keen interest in the figure. His figures are exaggerated in their proportions and poses, yet still believable in their presentations. A lot of his work is bold and therefore works really well as poster art, but he has adapted this style of imagery into book cover designs and magazines as seen in the examples above. This is what I am particularly interested in with this module

His website Q and A outlines his process which is quite similar to how I like to work - sketching out roughs, inking the best ones and then digitally colouring/finishing work. 

"His work is playfully twisted and carnal, serious and thoughtful. He strikes an incredibly calm balance between the chaotic and the peaceful."

Adrian Tomine

Bill Bragg

Apart from the aesthetic of his work, what I really like about Bragg's book covers is that he seems to strip them back compared to the other illustrators I have posted and chooses to just illustrate motifs relevant to the story. This is an aspect of illustration which I am keenly interested in as I feel I struggle with it - being able to produce an illustration with a very strong but simple concept.
I feel like a lot of the work I do is too literal and analysing Bragg's work would really help me fix this throughout the module.

His figures are a lot more caricature-ish than the ones I tend to draw but I think the simplified aesthetic is what helps his simple motifs become so effective.

Ghostco (Matthew Woodson)

Woodson's delicate line work is probably a result of his background in Natural History Illustration. Similarly to Hanuka and Tomine, his book covers above are subversive in terms of content - they have much more of a poster quality to them than you would otherwise expect. Although his work is very obviously digital, he never neglects to apply a traditional looking texture in order to give his images more warmth, heightened by his pale colour palettes.

The book covers above are poster-like, but more simplistic in their compositions than a lot of his other applied work which is also something to bear in mind when I begin designing my own.

Responsive - Secret 7" Contextual references

Some album artwork that I looked at before getting started on my Secret 7" briefs. While I want to create original designs for this brief, I also want to be inspired by relevant album covers in order to draw inspiration from them, but also know where I need to go in my own direction.

- First page of Motown records show the bold colours and shapes that is associated with the genre
- Second page of Chemical Brothers album art shows the use of quite surreal imagery achieved through collage and juxtaposition. A lot of it feels quite 'dreamy'.

These two pages contain contextual references directly relevant to what I will do - album art for a Chemical Brothers song and a Motown song. The rest are more broad sources of inspiration

- Sebastien Tellier's album artworks are highly illustrative and I really like the simple aesthetic of line work and bold colour, or sometimes simply line work and minimal design around it. The artwork with the piggy is very different, but shows the potential for illustrated album artwork without text, which is what Secret 7" demands for their entries.

- The last page shows illustrated album covers which feature prominent images and I find quite inspiring in terms of the potential and range of artwork that could be featured on albums - no one type of illustration works for album artwork. The last image for the album "After Dark" features various artist names on them, which isn't something I'll be able to replicate, but I feel that as a design, it is strong through the corner artwork and colour choices.

OUIL503 Responsive Studio Brief 2 - Collaborative Practice

I'm working with Astrid

We want to do the WWF Brief.
What we understand from the brief is that they want a campaign to reach the "always on" generation (aged 14-24) that can share the information found in their Living Planet Report 2014 in an effective way. The brief offers a lot of illustrative opportunity, especially in the way of drawing animals, which is something we both enjoy.

http://pushkinpress.com/illustrationaward/#more-14267