Week 6 ILLUSTRATION

Illustration

The first day of Illustration week we had a theory lesson looking at what illustration essentially; what makes a good illustrator, the key tools of an illustrator and who an illustrator works for. 

The things we put under illustration was very varied, it came to our attention that Illustration spans across several disciplines and has a wide variety of purposes. 

Our list included things like:

Publishing, comic books + graphic Novels, fashion illustration, editorial, book illustration, products such as designs on stationary, clothing + greetings cards, covers of Cd's, books + magazines, animation, advertising, technical + medical illustration, tattoos, websites and so on. 

We then had a look at what makes a good illustrator in which we listed the following:

Imagination, variation, ambition, good drawing skills; observational drawing skills, communication skills, good interpretations, passion and creativity. 

Experimental Drawing

In the afternoon we had a go at some experimental drawing techniques. We started off with drawing our faces with our eyes closed, using our hand to feel the features on our face and our drawing hand to try and draw what we could feel. It really made you concentrate on what you were feeling and was really hard to translate onto paper what you were feeling without being able to see what you were doing. I think the exercise was very worth while mind, because it really made you concentrate on the subject in a different way, and communicate in a different way. It mean't you were not making up lines that were not there and made you think more about how your face feels, how different features join together and in all gain a greater understanding of what you were drawing. 

After this we did some experimental observational drawing of a selection of random shoes. We used different techniques such as continuous line, left hand drawing, drawing without looking at the paper, we also only had 2-3 minutes to do each drawing and had to concentrate on spending 80% of the time looking at your object and only 20% of the time looking at the actual drawing. This really made you look close at what you were drawing. I think it really makes you realise how you often just think your drawing things right then realise your not looking enough at your subject and the drawing isn't in fact correct observationally. 

 This is an example of these drawings. We overlapped them and used grey fine liner, brown fine liner and graphite pencil. I do quite like the outcome of these, though I wish I thought about the composition a bit more because I just rushed onto the next drawing without thinking how it would look as an entire piece.

The above is basically similar techniques but done with different objects such as skulls, shells and other pieces of nature. I think some of the drawings look nicer than others, but I think I really benefited from the experiments in general because i'm not brilliant at drawing observational things quickly and I think this really helped gain more confidence with that.