Skip to main content

illustration evaluation

For my illustration unit this year i decided to go down a different route than last year in idea rather than media. The story this year was about a man named Donald, a fisherman, on a boat when him and his crew see a mermaid, they all proceed to throw herrings at it until it swims away. Knowing mermaids are bad luck a person at the docks later tells Donald not to return to sea again as it is an omen of death. Donald does not return to sea until a year later when he is approached by a merchant with a good deal. They sail away and are never seen again.

 This story made me think of the current Brexit, US and UK trade deals and obviously the Donald i thought of as Trump. I thought this would be a funny and different approach to the unit and it felt more up my street than what i had done before.













After looking at a verity of illustrators i was drawn to the work of Geoff Grandfield and Shepard Fairey. I loved the cinematography / film noir 'style' of Grandfield with the satire of Fairey. After i experimented with a few different ideas i came up with these two final images.




With these, i have obviously annotated the development in my sketch book, i tried to use the USA, UK colours, i tried to use line to separate scenes, imply divide and also to mimic the lines of white in the UK flag.

I used found free imagery and just block colour and shapes i made on Photoshop. I picked the two scenes of Donald throwing the (red) herring at the mermaid and the scene of talking about a deal between himself and the merchant.

I wanted them to be very simple and bold. I liked the idea, as i usually do in my work, of using imagery as strong symbolism.

Obviously i was set back in this unit, as with a few others, because of personal circumstances and i did take me a while to get back on track with it. I felt like i has stepped away from this unit just as i was making my final two images and i had lost a connection with it.

If i could do it again i would have taken more time to get back into my connection and i would have explored a few different ways to execute my final images.

Overall i enjoyed it very much and i liked adding my own spin to the unit. I loved challenging myself to make it political and satirical and i enjoyed making the final images as i love to use photoshop. Overall again, i am happy and obviously i wish i hadn't had to take time away from it but i think it also goes to show myself how much i value my education as well as how much i can achieve in a short space of time with everything going on. I feel a sense of pride in myself even if the end result isnt as polished as i would like it to be.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Alice Potter

. Digital Media . Illustration . Surface Pattern . Alice Potter   I decided to start my research with Alice Potter. I was interested in Alice Potter's work because it is very different to what i usually look at.  Potter is a London based freelance illustrator and children's wear print designer. Design is something i am not sure i have an eye for, i do appreciate it but i don't tend to find myself attracted to it, or give it as much thought as i probably should. http://alicepotter.co.uk https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/AlicePotter I love the colours in this one above, i like how simple it is, but it still translates as an apple. I like the dot print i think it adds a kind of sweetness to the design as well as add something to the flatness of it. I really like these, i love how happy they look because of the use of colour.  Potter draws her work out in her sketch book and then moves onto illustrator where she uses the pen ...

Photography : Rommert Boonstra & Laurie Simmons

For photography i wanted to look at artists who use models or staged worlds for their photography because its not something i looked into previous years. From moodel i came across Rommert Boonstra. He is a photographer, poet and theater director. He also taught photography at several art academies.He is well known for his Staged photography and he has Four books are published about his photo works. He uses everyday objects to create these worlds... I am pretty taken aback with these photographs and i am surprised there is not a lot about these images online. The only words i can find to describe them is other worldly. They look like completely different words, like something you would find in science fiction comic. They are just amazing. What i liked about these is the way he has used light and shadows to create the illusion of above and below, in the first 2. He has also used composition and perspective to make you feel like you are inside the world its self. I like...

Typography Investagation.

We have started a new unit, typeface and letterforms. I found this very daunting, because, it is a completely new, huge world to me that i have never explored... We watched a film about Helvetica and it was very interesting but like i said i feel really overwhelmed. I wanted to know what happened before more in depth and really look into it as best i could. I decided to calm my nerves by looking into the history of type face, and to, i guess start at the beginning... for myself. while researching i found out that a lot of people agree that the creator of typography was a German man named Johannes Gutenberg. But before he came along books needed to be scribed, by hand. Obviously this was very time consuming, So Guttenberg created Blackletter. I think this was modeled after the scribe's. It has thick vertical lines, and thin horizontal connectors. This was hard for printing, as it looked very dense and squished together. So then came Roman Type, the first roman type was cr...