The primer work was do draw objects in our world over the holidays- technically one a day or so, but this ended up being a few hours worth every few days or so. I should probably criticise myself for not having dedication to illustration but this would be wrong since I essentially did not stop drawing throughout the whole break. I learnt a lot on Photoshop mostly, after being dissatisfied with my Great Expectations piece, though it did mean some of this work got pushed aside.
I went to Bath and stayed overnight with a friend, so I drew yet more food items while I was there. While they are adequate illustrations, they lack the interest of some of the more colourful ones, but I feel since I was travelling, I was constricted to what I carry round in my pencil case.
I then returned home and drew, spending my time alone since everyone was away for the holidays, so a lot of my drawings seem quite cold and lifeless and don't reflect much. I wonder if I'd have done more if some of these drawings would have been more interesting. The bottom one above, even though there are quite a few mistakes, is quite nice compositionally, and it would make a nice repeating pattern.
A lot of these drawings I did with a brush pen because I was recommended the Pentel Pocket Brushes and since they were on sale I ended up getting one and trying it out. It's a lot more fluid than my current one and you can get the bristle effects with it such as on the straw above from the milk tea I bought on the same day, but this also makes it harder to control. I felt using black so much made the sketchbook as a while uvaried and didn't reflect what I can do with different media.
I therefore decided to use more colour, and also still not entirely abandon using a brush pen. Drawing the dessert above was particularly a challenge as the sorbet had strange reflections on it and the details of the sago pearls were also hard to get across. I do like these drawings far more than the monochrome ones, and I also put the dessert through Photoshop to make it look a little less bland.
After using too many lines, I then went on to produce a lineless drawing, and I had planned to do more but I was running out of both time and inspiration. Hence, the sketchbook isn't nearly as colourful as I'd have liked it to be.
I think this sketchbook would have been better represented as a series of objects done each at a time rather than what seems like a series of collections (even for drawings not paired together- eg, there is a lot of tea).
However, I ended up not particularly referring to my primer work during the project itself as much of it was irrelevant- my chosen articles were very serious and some of them would have been difficult to handle (for example, one was about an actress who'd had a sex scene written into a script of a film she was working on overnight from her 16th birthday). I chose my article based on a quote rather than a headline, which Katherina wasn't too pleased with, but I'd had no idea what we were going to use the headlines for. It was easy to find the original article though- "Star Wars: why London actor John Boyega's casting in The Force Awakens is dominating the conversation", an exploratory piece into the treatment of Boyega and similar black actors in both Hollywood and with "fans". What I found most interesting about the article is that it was a break from the norm- a story of triumph in race arguments rather than the same old story of black actors who'd been continuously ignored in favour of their often far less talented white counterparts. That said, I'm aware of my status as a white illustrator, so illustrating just the triumphs of this argument seems wrong and ignores the larger scale of the issue, that Boyega is one success story in millions of black wannabe creatives who are overlooked because of the colour of their skin.
I was therefore caught between being an information poster and a protest poster- I felt an information poster was to relaxed on such an issue I feel very strongly about, while aslo I thought it was important to stay in focus with the article and especially Boyega- I don't know him but I get the feeling he'd rather his race be overlooked, unlike actors such as Amadla Stenberg who actively use their fame to talk about the biases against black and mixed race actors and colourism.
I mostly started out properly researching my chosen topic, thought the Boyega drawing was very quick and I think a bad likeness, with the pen added in later during a lecture looking a little out of place.
Some brief lecture notes and digitally retouched doodles, as well as a continuation of my visual research. I briefly wondered if an infographic would best portray the line between information and protest but I don't think it would have best answered the brief. I was also caught between looking at the Peckham aspect of the story, and what Boyega's role means to people, particularly young black creatives living so close to a very white art school and struggling with the same issues as Boyega.
I also studied a preexisting poster in order to get more to grips with poster illustration as a genre. This poster, as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, is really effective use of lino-print as it has a sense of being abused about the textures of the lino, as well as being an effectively illustrated and presented poster- I particularly like how the text runs through and either side of the images, as it shows a real awareness of how the eye moves across an image.
The top drawings were some line drawings where I wasn't really sure what I should be drawing but that I felt it should be something. I then took a trip to the Museum of London where I thought I remembered there was an exhibit on the London Riots in order to look at the Peckham aspect of the story and race relations here in the UK, but the exhibit was actually on the Brixton Riots in 1981. All the same, the exhibit was really good and even though I already knew most of the stuff there, there were some interesting exhibits of magazines and pamphlets on black rights and black British culture (if that can even be defined). There was also a photograph collection by Neil Kenlock and some others of what it was like to be Black in Britain at the time of the riots, putting context into what many people still portray as mindless, unprovoked violence. I drew a peaceful protest of the Black Panthers a decade before the riots- the man in the picture looked very thoughtful despite being at a protest for his own human rights, and I thought it was a good composition.
I also got to see a piece of artwork I like a lot- Mike Hawthorne's "Brixton Riots", done over almost a decade using sketches produced during the riots themselves. It's a really interesting piece with incredible use of simple lines and only a few colours of ink, and reads very much like a dystopic version of epic Renaissance arts.
However, the day spent at the Museum of London was mostly a waste given I don't think it gave me much beyond a bit of background knowledge to the wider issue of race relations in the UK. I therefore researched further into the Peckham Peace Wall- a piece (pun intended) by Garudio Studiage that aims to immortalise the fact people covered the outisde of Peckham's Poundland with sticky notes on why Peckham was important to them and why the modern London Riots didn't reflect the feelings of the wider community. I think the piece is really smart- it's participatory, crowd art, the best reflection of community. However, I feel a piece like this is a little self-apologetic- sure, rioting is bad, but it feels like Peckham felt it had to apologise for acts it didn't really commit, and the original point of what started as protests- the police shooting of Mark Duggan- is lost.
We then did a poster exercise using cut-out shapes. I don't think I was very good at this at all- my theme was still not quite sorted out and therefore the work I produced was substandard and fell a little flat. However, it helped in that later considering how to reduce colours down meant my poster designs were stronger, though I didn't use the idea on all of them. Mostly, seeing other people's designs at the crit helped me identify what was going wrong with my own designs and how I could improve them once I'd thought properly about the message i wanted to get across.
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I also looked back at the idea of the Peckham Peace Wall, digitally colouring some of my sketchbook sketches and looking at the "community" that already existed, and should have more attention paid to it.
These posters were a good start but the colour scheme of pink and yellow didn't have enough impact as a poster, in the same way my other poster using peach and brown didn't work either. The font is also not quite loud enough, and while the bobble heads is a nice idea, the fact I ran out of faces and tried to indicate the potential for more black actors with only a face and a question mark doesn't really get my point across.
I think at this point, a typography exercise was a good chance to loosen up and mess about with how type is used. The way I see it, and many others too, posters should generally only use two fonts, preferably a serif and a sans serif or a sans serif and a handwriting/decorative font, never Papyrus or Comic Sans or similar, and attention should be paid to line breaks and the sizing of words. Using these rules and my own judgement, I messed around with the fonts on my computer using a single quote, in order to get a feel for how words and voices work. I also finally learnt how to do a fake 3D effect on PS Elements (it's different to how it's done on Photoshop) which I'm quite pleased with.
Once I had done this, and reconsidered colours, I returned to one of my original posters and made improvements to it, so it now looked more like a final piece. Red has much more impact and black and white not only fit a simple colour scheme, but are more metaphorical and the point therefore seems smarter. The top font is much improved but I feel the bottom one was still lacking as well as slightly misplaced. Johanna also felt there wasn't enough room round the edges- I wanted to create a crowded effect but I think she was right. I also wonder if adding a shadow to some of the boxes again would have been more impactful but I think the simple design might work better.
My other final was based loosely on an idea by Ed Piskor. Complete the bobble heads reminds me of seeing his double-page illustration in underground comics publication "OFF LIFE", featuring a lot of rappers, which I spent a long time trying to name all of them. I can't find the illustration because Piskor hasn't updated his website since 2006 but here is the issue of OFF LIFE, it's short enough to find the illustration if you're interested.
I thought making the poster look a little like a movie poster bus with different words would be quite interesting, as movie posters always have impact and it fits really well with the theme. It was challenging composing all the actors, and due to time constraints I don't think there are enough of them there to quite get across how much black talent already exists. Illustrating all the heads was also a challenge and it took a long time, with some of them not quite a good likeness as I would have liked and some badly proportioned. However, I was told the colouring style was professional and the poster very much announced itself, even though it was misprinted for the crit.
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