Part 2: Making a Moodboard

Exercise details

For this exercise I will choose the word exotic.  A few years ago I went on holiday to Morocco and throughout I was struck by the sense of how exotic the culture is compared to our western culture. 

The word exotic could bring to mind an extremely wide variety of visual stimulus and associations. However, for this exercise, I wish to limit the scope my "exotic" to specifically "Moroccan exotic". This will still provide me with wide scope for my moodboarding, yet focus my mind onto something I'm captivated by.

Also, it would be easy just to create a digital moodboard of found images, and it appears that some other Illustration 1 students have done digital only moodboards.  However, I have the intention of adding in a few of my own drawings to supplement the found images.

Final moodboard

Below is a picture of my finished moodboard.  I added in my sketches of the veiled woman and the mosque:


 This was certainly an interesting and rewarding exercise.  I see great benefit in moodboarding (and use the technique in my day job), and I fully agree with the Illustration 1 handbook that a moodboard can stimulate surprising visual associations and bring to mind surprising thoughts. For instance, in the moodboard above I realised that the blue skies, with the sandy and ochre colours of the Sahara mimic a lot of the colour in moroccan/North African culture.

Drawings used in the moodboard

I wanted to draw a mosque for this moodboard, and certainly there is no better choice than the wonderful architecture of the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem:


The drawing (above) also gave me opportunity to try out using my new Derwent Inktense ink pencils. I haven't had much experience with watercolour drawing, and the technique with these pencils was surprisingly rewarding. I liked being able to take pencil lines and brush them out (with water) into a wash effect.  I liked the combination of using coloured pencil with watercolour effect.  The sketch above was produced fairly quickly.  I tried to be fairly expressionistic rather than produce specific detail of the fascias and columns.

However, I'm not particularly pleased with the dome in my drawing; is too squashed compared to the source photo I used. Overall, this was a fairly tricky drawing from a perspective point of view, I had to be particularly mindful of the vanishing points.  The mosque has an hexagonal layout, and the sketch shows three sides (one full face).

I also quickly sketched a veiled woman.  I view a veiled woman as extraordinarily "exotic":
  


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