Studio Brief 2: Individual Practice

Overall I’m really pleased with studio brief 2. I ended up using my research and topic that I was initially going to use for studio brief 1 because it was better suited. My plan was to produce a series of editorial illustrations for a newspaper article about the rise of right wing politics. After reviewing my research, I settled on an article by The Independent and decided to produce my illustrations for that article.

While this is a topic I am really interested in, I initially found it quite difficult to produce ideas for it. My first few ideas were either very literal, or I tried too hard to make them conceptual like other political illustrations I had seen and it just didn’t really work. After this, I just focused on drawing some of the main politicians mentioned in the article and trying to get their likeness. After this, I experimented a lot with gifs and made one of Theresa May with a snake tongue and this ended up leading me to producing the rest of the illustrations.

After feedback on this gif, I worked on giving my other characters mythical features and building my illustrations around this – just trying to make them look evil. This seemed to be the best way to simply show the rise of right wing politics and that it’s a bad thing. I think this also worked better with my tone of voice, because I usually try and make most of my work quite humorous, which might be why I was initially struggling with this brief.

I learnt from studio brief 1 that I find it easiest to develop work within my sketchbook so aside from the tester gifs I made, all of my development work was done in my sketchbook until it came to cutting the linos. I’m pretty happy with my outcomes, and I’m glad I made a variety of sizes so they can be applied in different parts of a newspaper article or across different media (such as on phones, laptops etc.)

I’m really pleased that I managed to incorporate colour into these final images too. I’ve used linoprint a lot in previous projects during second year, but they’ve mostly just been one or two colour images and it was fun to have the chance to get more colour into my linoprints. I painted some pages in my sketchbook and then scanned them in to add colour to my images, and I think doing this added some more texture which is what I wanted – I’d tried digitally colouring but I felt like that it just made the images look flat, so this was much more effective.

Another thing I’m really pleased about from this project was the gifs I made. They’re just really simple gifs but I think this was more appropriate for editorial illustrations. They were a lot of fun to make, and I think this is something I’d definitely like to explore further in future modules.

Study Task - Industry Research

Although I ended up switching to editorial illustrations for this module, I initially joined the adult publishing group so this is what I researched.

Some of the trends I learnt about were generally about the stories – there are a lot of books with themes of diversity running through them such as gender, race, sexual orientation etc, and a lot of stories written with multiple points of view and narratives.

A big trend within adult publishing at the moment is rebranding older books with more modern covers and sleeves and making collectable hardback versions. This makes them an object that people really want to own and have in their homes.

I also learnt about the different types of publishing. This includes traditional publishing, self-publishing and hybrid publishing.

My part of the study task was to look at case studies. I tried to find a variety of examples. The first was books by Murakami – the illustrations on the front of his books are all in a very similar style. They are all quite minimalist images, with a limited colour scheme. This allows people to quickly glance at a book and know that it is by that author.

Another case study I found was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This is one of few adult books that has illustrations within the book. While this is rare, they’re effective in this case because they are all quite chaotic and surreal, which reflects the narrative of the book.

Studio Brief 1: Live Brief

Overall, I think I could have been happier with how studio brief 1 went. I chose to answer two live briefs – the Hookworms poster brief and the socio-political poster brief.

I found the Hookworms brief quite challenging because although I liked the thought of producing a poster for a band, it was difficult to think of imagery for music. For research I looked at previous posters of theirs and listened to their music, but I didn’t want to make anything that was based too much off any of their older posters.

I think another reason I found this quite difficult was because I ended up doing most of my development on photoshop, and I am usually a lot more comfortable working in a sketchbook. I ended up producing two final posters, which were made from scanned in paintings and textures from my sketchbook and then edited on photoshop. While they’re similar images (the same hand motif in both), with the first one I tried to replicate the feel of old DIY punk gig posters, and in the second I went for something a bit more friendly, using a similar colour scheme as their new album.

This hasn’t put me off attempting a band poster again in the future, as I think it would be good practice for combining text and images anyway. However, if I do a similar brief in the future I think I will have to make sure to work more in my sketchbook because this is obviously the process that works best for me.

The other live brief I chose was the socio-political poster. I initially did a lot of research into the rise of right wing politics, because this is a topic I had a lot of interest in. However, after a tutorial I decided to save this subject for studio brief 2, and instead I decided to produce a fake newspaper front page for The Sun. I tried to make it as ridiculous as I could think of to highlight how absurd sensationalist headlines are, and how easily the public can be swayed.

I’m relatively happy with the outcome for this brief. I think I probably could have made it more compositionally interesting, and definitely registered the linoprint with the screenprint a bit better. Despite this though, I think it works quite well as an image and I really enjoyed the opportunity to combine different printing processes since this is something I’ve never done before. I especially like the really bright colours that can be achieved through printing.

From studio brief 1 I think I have learnt that I work best in a sketchbook when developing my ideas, so this is definitely something I should take forward from now on. I also want to experiment more with combining print processes in the future because I think this could give some very interesting results and give more depth to images.

Goals for 504

One thing I would like to take forward into 504 is the linocutting I have been doing recently. I would really like to improve my linocutting skills throughout this module.

In order to push myself outside of my comfort zone, I would like to incorporate more colour within my linoprint illustrations because up until now they have all been either black and white or just two colours, with the second colour being a bit of an afterthought. I’d like to produce linocuts where the other colours used play a key part in the illustration.

By May, I would really like to have sold a piece of work.

Project Proposal - Moving Pictures

I intend to produce ……

A 15 second sting based off George Orwell’s book, Animal Farm. I want to relate it to one of my images from the editorial illustrations brief – the chess board. Hopefully I’ll be able to animate the different chess pieces moving about with farm animal sounds in the background.

The content will focus on (identify 3 specific themes, texts or concepts)

1.     The chess board from a previous part of the module 2.     The various animals and their role on the farm 3.    The linocut components

I will be aiming to communicate (identify 3 specific messages, ideas, moods etc.)

1.     The theme of politics that runs through Animal Farm 2.     The hierarchy of the animals on the farm 3.    A playful mood to try and capture the essence of the story

To an audience of ….. (name 3 characteristics)

1.     Young adults who are interested in Orwell’s books, particularly Animal Farm 2.     People who like print processes (particularly lino prints) 3.    People who like chess