Wednesday 18 January 2012

Age UK Brief : Life Stories

[Faces pixelated for privacy reasons]

The deadline for the Age Uk brief: Life Stories is this coming Friday, I was never happy with my original submission so I've been reworking it. The whole collage technique was new to me as I usually prefer to work digitally and so my previous submission lacked composition and a strong focal point. I had tried to show all aspects of Cheryl's life with the intention to portray it as meaningful and full, but it ended up looking to cluttered and weak. 

During my chats with Cheryl I had learnt that she used to be an artist - and that she had several pieces within her home. However unfortunately due to the nature of her condition she couldn't recall what the works actually were of nor the medium she had used, so I was never able to portray this within my collage.

It was only when I was able to meet with the clients and hear their feedback on my piece that I learnt that those works Cheryl had produced were of Egyptian hieroglyphics and pieces. I wanted to incorporate the theme of these paintings into my own collage since they were a large part of Cheryl's life. I started by attempting to mask Egyptian markings over my initial piece. 

This really didn't work out well and I disliked it straight off the bat.


With my tutors suggestion I attempted a full mask, this worked better, but I was still unsure about the overall look. So I attempted my original idea to recreate the collage around the new elements I'd found.


During my rearrangement I came up with this example which I felt worked fairly nicely, it lacks the Egyptian influence however, although it felt like the pieces were laid out similarly to that of hieroglyphics.


This was my final outcome, a piece that uses the Egyptian eye as the centre piece including the patchwork quilt of Cheryl's close family and Scottish ties, the heart locket depicting her and husband, an ariel view and photo of the Eiffel tower, music scores, the knotted string depicting her marriage and the lipstick.
I choose to paint the eye in red as Cheryl had mentioned red was a favourite shade of hers. 

I intend to display all of the above examples and allow the clients and my tutors to pick the one that works best in their eyes. But for myself the final is the one I am most satisfied with. 


 I kept my vignette simple, again making use of the mini patchwork quilt and the heart locket and chain to create a natural and personal feeling. The vignette focuses mostly on Cheryl's family.


My transcript focused on informing the viewer about Cheryl, her likes, experiences and current lifestyle. Which I'm hoping will allow them to use this knowledge, not only to get a better understanding of Cheryl herself but also, to further understand the reasons for certain elements within my collage. I refrained from adding the Egyptian paintings into my transcript because it wasn't something I was able to learn from Cheryl herself and thus would rather allow them to sit within the collage more as a mystery than another piece of standard information. 

Tuesday 17 January 2012

Illustrative storyboard examples

My last post was getting really long so I decided to post these two examples separately, I originally found them on a tumblr feed, but I love the styles and layout of both. I'll start with my favourite of the two - The Shut-in Princess. It's a modern day illustrative series that I believe many people can relate to fairly easily in this day and age. I love the drawing and colouring style and the use of hand drawn font that interacts with each frame ties each image together really effectively.







The second example uses a limited colour pallet and a more simplistic style but the overall effect works well in my opinion. It has a childish appeal and innocence again it features a hand drawn font but it remains consistent throughout - the way the pages are set up reminds me of a diary of some sort. 











Children's book illustration


We visited the special collections library today owned by Manchester Metropolitan University. The vast collection of books of all ages, styles and sizes was amazing and I really enjoyed browsing the shelves. 
I started looking into examples of children's book illustrations to gain some inspiration for my own book design after the visit. I'm aiming to enter the Macmillan book prize this year so I require my own story and illustrative book concept. 


I stumbled across Wouter Tulp's portfolio of children book illustrations. His pieces are full of life and animation despite their 2D appearance. He makes use of space and composition effectively. 




I also found some really vivid examples by Brooke Cummings, the images appear to glow in colour. She manipulates shading in a unique way and makes a cluttered scene draw your eye.



I found some work by a book illustrator called Czes Pachela, whose imagery is brightly textured and full of detail. 




I fell in love with the work by Stephanie Kunze. Her imagery has a gritty, noisy textured appeal about it while remaining colourful. She has a considerable amount of imagination as each piece is as weirdly wonderful as the last without going over the top. Her composition appears to be carefully planned out and integrated into the subject matter of each piece. 








Some other examples I found using the google image search are displayed below. 
I have saved them for various reasons, mostly focusing on composition, presentation of text, style and use of colour.