Illustration 1: Key steps in illustration- Part 3: Working it out-Exercise 7: Client visuals
This exercise is to help you to edit an image to its main structural form and to practice creating a clear visual.
From the work you have collected pick at least two finished illustrations. These illustrations should contain a range of content. They can be representational, diagrammatic or metaphorical.
Measure the image at the size it was reproduced. Draw a box at least two and half times larger and in proportion to each of the printed illustrations.
Using a form of line which feels comfortable and which you can confidently manage, create a visual for each illustration. You are not tracing from the original nor are you claiming this artwork as your own. Be aware of main shapes and directions; draw the elements of the image with sufficient detail for them to be readable.
Explore how many lines you need to use to describe the content. Try another version of the same image and see how much content you can remove so that the image is distilled to an extremely edited form but still makes sense.
This practice in editing and purposefully using selective line to describe an image will be applied in later images of your own generation. Give yourself space of a couple of days and then refer back to the original illustration and evaluate how honest your visual is to its source.
This exercise may have given you insight into the reverse process where the client edits the visual to get a final image.This is known as art direction. Find some images that made you more aware of the art direction behind them and annotate them to explain the thinking behind them in your learning log.
I looked back through the various illustrayions I had collated by artists/designers and particularly liked the work of Lewis Rosignol and Paul Mendlesund. Both styles are different, yet include similar ‘hand made’ markings. I then compared my 2 favourites from each to decide on which to choose.
I looked into 2 art directors, one of Dutch magazine De Volkstrant (Koos Jeremiasse) and the Guardian (Chris Clarke) both of which I follow on Instagram. I looked through their feeds and screenshotted interesting spreads/illustrations. I then added some notes to them and analysed how they worked/why.
When returning to view these images I feel as if the originals chosen were close to simple line drawings anyway and perhaps my choice of example was flawed and should’ve been more complicated in order to distill into a more simple image. The idea of the task to choose the most important content and use Occam’s Razor method to create a simple yet impactful final image I feel was lost a bit with the final results.
Nevertheless I found that analysing the Illustrations by Lewis Rossignol was very helpful and the art directors for different magazines. As my tutor mentioned in my previous feedback, the importance of keeping the audience/context of the illustration in mind whilst designing is imperative to a functional outcome.
