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.