Illustration 1: Key steps in illustration- Part 2: Ideas-Exercise 8: A subjective drawing
Take another object and write a list of a series of words to describe it. In this drawing you are not describing its function or purpose but its particular qualities. Is it shiny, hard, soft, fluffy, delicious or antique? These adjectives are subjective – there is no wrong or right – whichever words you select will be appropriate because they reflect your interpretation and understanding of the object.
Choose one word from your list as the basis of your idea. You don’t need to look at your object; at this stage you are exploring your idea visually. Make a moodboard and include collage and found materials. Cut images from magazines based on their visual properties. Be exhaustive.
Photocopy, trace or scan and print your line drawing. Choose a paper with a texture or surface which best relates to the idea you had about your object
Use colours, textures and materials identified during your exploration with your moodboard to translate the line drawing into an image which communicates the adjective which you associated with your object.
Use them to colour, or fill your line drawing. You are still attempting to describe the object but focussing and exaggerating the quality that you have selected to communicate.
I began this task by choosing the word ‘hat’ from the list. I then went onto finding a specific image of a hat that I felt held a lot of potential meaning to create a subjective piece of work of.
Lune’s work reminded me of Villegle a French artist who combines found posters with imagery. Again his use of colour and texture is great to reference for this task. The incorporation of typography with imagery is really interesting and perhaps something I can test with.
I collated a mood board of work by the artist Oliver Lune who I have come across recently. The relationship between colour and texture in his work is something to reference when considering a response to this task.
Moving forwards I decided to focus on the word ‘rugged’. I feel that to me this word best describes the hat and is good to focus on for subjectively portraying it.
I tested with various found materials; packaging, old books, posters, imagery and created a few mood boards/collages. My inspiration for the 5th collage was Oliver Lune and Jacques De La Villegle. I wanted to see how I could present ‘rugged’ through materials that were previously used, and to add extra texture by ripping parts using tape or a scalpel. I used a inkjet printing method layering the typography onto acetate and printing it onto the collage. I included imagery from the film ‘The Last Wagon’- 1956 a film that I had recently re-watched due to the last task on the 1950’s. Some aspects of the film to me represented ‘hat/rugged’ as it includes cowboys/ this style of hat and is set in sandy/rugged ‘Wild West’ America.
Through this I developed a better idea of which materials I felt worked best together and represented ‘rugged’. I then produced my line drawing, keeping it as simple as possible with the details/shadows being created with collage later.
I gathered the materials with the colours and textures I felt best represented ‘rugged’ which were mainly used in my last mood board/collage. I began with small elements initially trying to show the shadows/different colours of the hat and as a result being less ‘subjective’. This outcome didn’t turn out very well, but I continued with another.
This time I layered the materials on top of each other on an A4 sheet caring less about being specific with their placement. I then cut out the shape of the hat/the banding in the middle and continued to add layers on top of others to create a more interesting/balanced image that best represented ‘rugged’.
I used tape and water to distress the materials further, aiming to make them look more ‘rugged’. I used various brown papers, some taken from the back of cardboard which included faint lines down them, a texture I felt worked well.
I added a layer of pencil and wrote ‘rugged’ very roughly at the bottom of the hat but made sure it was virtually illegible along with some mark making. The colour used was an illuminous yellow/green which I felt worked well with the more muted colours. I wanted this to represent the cowboy/feeling of the hat exploring/being alone travelling.
Looking back at this task I feel that I could’ve experimented further with my use of textures and tones to represent the highlights and shadows of the hat. I quite like the combinations of imagery and mark marking to represent the hat and would love to explore the combination of these techniques with future tasks.
I feel as if there is potential for this style of work to have a strong illustrative voice with using these techniques. This will take a lot of practise and experimenting to expand upon but is something I will work on in future tasks. I will be researching further artists and designers who work in this style and document this using visual mood boards and note taking to refer to when designing for myself.
