Illustration 1: Key steps in illustration- Part 2: Ideas-Exercise 11: Visual metaphors
Collect as many examples of visual metaphor as you can find. Often metaphors are used within political and issue-based works to give complex or subtle ideas greater clarity. For this reason you are likely to trace them more easily within editorial contexts: newspapers and articles in magazines.
Reaching retirement
Dreams of romance
Broken relationship
Censorship of the press
High achievement
Economic catastrophe
Choose one from the phrases above and create a drawn visual list of objects and subjects which could be used to symbolise them. You may find that it is in the way that the symbol can be modified that you can convey your idea most effectively. Don’t be overly concerned with the aesthetic quality or technical accuracy in the drawing. See this as an extension of your visual shorthand. If you find it useful, make a spider diagram around the phrase to generate other words, which will bring other visual connotations.
I began this task by looking at stills from films that I enjoy/that are rich in metaphors. ‘Joker’ constantly used metaphors throughout the film to represent the characters feelings and foreshadow what was to come. This was similar to ‘Fight Club’ where the characters and the mise en scene throughout the film present different ideas to the viewers and again foreshadow what’s to come.
David Shrigley is known for his satirical metaphors and is an artist I really like. His simple yet interesting style is Occam’s razor at it’s best.
I decided to go with ‘broken relationship’ as I felt it would be interesting/challenging to try and represent in a less obvious way. I began by creating a mind map of related words which helped bring forwards some visual ideas.
I found this a very interesting task. I quite enjoyed the researching of visual metaphors and collating the mood boards. I find creating mind maps very helpful and influential with my work in general and with this task it was key. The words directly influenced my initial ideas and my final 4 which I thought were the ‘best’ or most interesting. The broken chain is a bit literal as it is ‘broken’ but I quite liked the idea of an interconnected chain (a relationship) being broken apart by one link (an issue or on going relationship problem).
Leo Gabin is an artist group based in Berlin. Their work uses various materials and methods including print making and spray paint. The abstract expressionist style and imagery presents interesting metaphors and can be interpreted in multiple ways. The more abstract metaphors could be interesting to explore with this task.
Eleanor Shakespeare is an illustrator based in the UK and produces work for various magazines/newspapers. Her work is rich in metaphors, she uses shapes and expressive elements creating some obvious metaphors and some less obvious.
I also looked at commercial billboard adverts and collated some interesting ones. I found the ones that considered and used their environment particularly interesting. This may not be so useful for this task but it is important to consider the context the imagery would be seen in.
I looked over the mind map and jotted down some initial visual ideas. Some were more obvious and some less so, I went through them and chose my favourites that I felt represented ‘broken relationship’ in an interesting way and expanded upon them.
Creating a mood board of visuals from a phrase or word is something I will continue to implement into my work flow and will continue to expand my ‘bank’ of visual metaphors I can refer to.
The addition of the colour red for this image I think is effective as it exaggerates the meaning of the image. The magnets are repelling each other (not working) and the red colour represents this as it is often used as a negative colour, a colour to ‘stop’ (for example in a traffic light or road signs).
