Illustration 1: Key steps in illustration- Part 3: Working it out-Exercise 3: Image development
Cut two ‘L’ shapes of card or stiff paper. You are going to use them to explore formats, to zoom in and out of compositions
Take an image which has a range of content – a family photo, and interior from a magazine or another artist’s work – and enlarge it to A4 and make ten copies. Scenes with action with a background and foreground can be most useful for this kind of exercise.
Use the ‘L’s to create edited versions of each image. Retain the content but try presenting it in different ways in different formats. Repeat this using all of your photocopies. Do some images seem to have more drama because of the way you have cropped them? Has the focus changed – have you made the original subject of the image seem more or less important?
Choose a word for each image that relates in some way to the content. It may contradict the image and show an alternative interpretation or may extend the narrative by describing the content in a slightly different way.
Using one of the images as a basis for an illustration, draw up your artwork to make a poster. Add colours and textures to emphasise your message.
Use the word you selected as the title and reproduce it in a typeface you feel suggests or reflects the meaning of the word itself. Position the text alongside the image.
Dan Parry-Jones is a Bristol based artist who again uses various materials to create his work. The way he breaks up the landscapes throughout his work is what came to mind when reading this exercise. If you zoom in/crop his images they become ‘new’ images themselves, the colours and mark making used creates a very interesting composition. Each of these crops would allow the work to take on new meaning.
I began this task by collating some artists/designers work that I felt related to the exercise and could help inform my decisions on choice of image and later my drawing of that image. The first artist that came to mind was K.T. Kobel who uses various materials such as screen printing and airbrushes to create his visuals. Kobel’s work feels as if you are looking at something you shouldn’t or something you would have missed. The images appear like scenes from a film, or cropped from a larger photo themselves- similar to this exercise.
I was initially drawn to the idea of an image of a film scene, when considering the artists I had looked into their work had a film noir feel. I looked through old ‘Movie’ magazines from the 1930-70’s and collated some potentially interesting images. I decided to move forwards with a still from the film ‘Double Indemnity’. This included many interesting shadows and other elements that had potential to become a scene of their own when cropped.
I started by using the L shapes but found an interesting method of creating varied sizes of canvas in Photoshop and pasting the scene randomly into them.
This created varied results and allowed me to challenge the areas that I initially could see would work when cropped. I then cleaned up the images to make them more aesthetically pleasing. Despite the quality of the images being very poor when cropped they still held the idea for the visual itself and worked well as inspiration for my own illustration.
The cropped images I feel have more drama and are more ambiguous than the original still. The more zoomed in the crop was the more ambiguous and abstract they became. Each image developed their own meaning, different to the original still. I tried to represent this through their titles, I wanted to use words that added a narrative to the image and hinted at potential meaning behind them.
Image titles in order from left to right:
Who?
Surrender
Limbo
Unknown
Speculation
Beacon
Meeting
Help
Cope
Past
I wanted to keep the meaning of the titles specific to each cropped image as opposed to having an overarching narrative over all of the images.
I found this section of the task to be very informative, in particular only having one word to title each cropped photo. This allowed me to think of the meaning the cropped image presented to me and to Occam’s razor-style boil the sentences or words down that came to mind into a singular word.
There were 2 ‘new’ images that I was particularly drawn to, one being a crop of the mans face with one half of his glasses being brighter or having a reflection in them and the other half being darker. The other being the mans shadow being cast across a wall with a painting of a mountain/landscape on it. For me both these cropped images presented various meanings.
The one on the left I titled ‘Limbo’ as I felt the light and dark sides of his glasses along with the shadows on the wall and his facial represented
a feeling of concern and confusion a feeling of inbetween- ‘limbo’. An internal battle between good and evil, innate feelings or the characters previous actions.
The second was titled ‘past’ because to me it represented a shadow of the past. The characters shadow cast onto a painting or image of previous good times, something that may’ve now left the character, or a forgotten memory/feeling.
I moved forwards with ‘past’ and took it into illustrator. Inspired by Geoff Grandfield, a previously researched designer I began to create a silhouette of the image. I then went over to Photoshop and added other elements such as the image in the background. I then tested with different methods of shadow, one using a straight obvious line, and the other a custom brush, blurred and then darkened. I referred to Grandfield’s work for inspiration especially when looking at textures.
I haven’t previously experimented with this more digital style of illustration and it was interesting to try. My end image is simple but I feel that it presents the message I aimed for (past) fairly well but less sophisticated than Grandfield for example.
Looking at my final image next to one image that I used for inspirartion I immediately notice a difference in line and texture. The work by Grandfield has more interesting and intricate lines, in particular the typography which adds a nice visual reference point to the illustration. I feel as if I should of hand drawn my image perhaps as a black and white line image and then digitised it to add texture/colour. This could’ve allowed for more ‘happy accidents’ or more interesting line work etc.
I aimed to keep to a quite muted colour palette and for the main visual to be the painting representing the past- happy memories, a better time etc. When comparing I feel as if the colours in the painting could have been slightly bolder making them more impactful.
