Illustration1

Exercise details The purpose of this exercise is to produce a mock-up (alternative) book cover for an existing publication.  I chose Iain Banks' The Crow Road as I read it fairly recently. The real cover is rather striking and I was intrigued by the notion of how I could do it differently. My final mock-up cover below: Developing the mock-up Visual Research I started off by finding different covers for the same book.  I felt it was important to see the range of ideas that had been chosen for real covers.  These are the notable covers used for this title: Cover 1  - I find the complexity of this cover pleasing.  It is interesting how an illustration has been framed inside the shape of the crow.  The cover is stark and rather unforgiving in style (much in tune with the content of the novel).   However, my criticism is that it looks a little too much like a sci-fi, whereas the novel itself has a contemporary setting. Cover 2 - Photography as opposed to Illustra

Exercise details In this exercise I will be taking two finished illustrations and creating the line visual for each one. Visual for Illustration 1  I've chosen a children's book called,  Recipe for Bedtime,  illustrated by Sarah Massini.  I chose the artwork on the cover of the book because I felt it was charming and had a sufficient range of content for me to work with. Initial line visual: I found this exercise to be rather curious. It felt like a no creativity exercise; merely basic observation and drawing skills.  The line drawing was quite straightforward to produce, and reducing down the visual detail into a simple drawing was fairly straightforward.   I think I've been very tight and controlled in this drawing, there is no looseness and expressiveness to the line.  I was constantly mindful of having to create an accurate and sharp line drawing of the original image. I feel that the drawing is fairly successful it is faithfulness to the original imag

Exercise details: In this exercise I'm choosing the theme of workshop .  In particular the theme of my particular "workshop" is my garden shed.  It is a working place for me and my garden, and it feels like a natural choice for this assignment.  I've grabbed some of my common tools that I use for my garden work for the still life. Exploring with photos: I took a variety of pictures of the still life at different angles.  I then spent some time cropping down digitally and experimenting/refining the framing and composition.  For each picture I created an alternative with colour and filter effects applied in Photoshop.  I was going to present all of them in sequence on this blog page but I felt that would look rather dull, so instead I thought it more interesting to put them together into a messy composition: I found those images where the objects are at a diagonal had more energy, whilst those pictures where the objects are horizontally positioned crea

Exercise details I felt inspired to do two of the illustrations stated in the handbook. First I attempted Getting to my house .  The second illustration, Making a cup of tea , was a more substantial investment in time and effort.  Illustration 1 - Getting to my house The final illustration is below.  The artwork is produced in Photoshop from a digital composition/manipulation of 2 of my drawings. Overall, the illustration is an abstract representation of an aerial view of the area from Polegate to north Eastbourne, covering part of the South Downs on the edge of town.    The instructions for getting to my house are straight from www.bing.com/maps route directions (from Polegate to Brodrick Road). Process of producing the artwork I started by doing some visual research and I wasn't feeling particularly inspired by what I was finding.  It was mainly cutesy little drawings and images surrounding a windy path to a destination. I then reviewed other student work from

I liked this exercise! It was fun listening to a piece of music to create an abstract drawing.  The music I chose to listen to was a George Gershwin compilation. The image I made (whilst listening to this music) is below: To produce this drawing I used watercolour sticks and pulled the ink out into a wash using a brush.  I then applied coloured ink washes to deepen and enhance the colours in different areas.  I chose watercolour and coloured ink because I felt that this would (somehow) suit the 1930s style/mood of the music. What adjective or word describes the the tone of the piece?   This is a fascinating question because it is entirely subjective, and will probably be skewed on the state of mind of the viewer at the given point of reflection.  Perhaps the interpretation and feelings invoked from abstract art are always transient depending on the current mood/state of mind of the viewer?  For instance, a short while ago I looked at the image and thought "confus

Exercise details: In this exercise I will be taking an image and trying to focus in on different areas of the image; presenting the image in different ways, and in different aspect formats.   Key questions (from the handbook) : 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? The image that I've chosen to focus on is an Asian street market photo.  I chose this image because it is quite busy and offers potential for a varied range of crops: The 10 (cropped) images: UNFRIENDLY This man stood out in the original picture.  The gaze is rather unfriendly and unwelcoming. The stare and the body language screams, "go away!"  Overall I find this crop - and the resulting image - to be quite powerful.  I like the directness and intensity of the emotion.  I think this would make quite an interesting portrait illustration. Strip aw