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.