Studio Brief 2 - Individual Practice, Community Gardening

I found studio brief 2 more difficult than I first thought I would. In my practice, writing my own briefs works well for me and is something which excites me the most about illustration. I love undertaking projects which call for me to visit a new place, talk to new people and seek out the stories they offer to make work about. However, I think this particular project was a bit of a wake up call in the challenges this kind of work poses, and also in my lack of experience with them. I started off fairly confident with my idea of community gardening, and had the locations to visit to make work from, but having a three week break over easter away from Leeds and these locations was a massive spanner in the works, meaning I made no relevant work over this time which not only set me back but also knocked my confidence. This was fuelled by a few very unfruitful trips to the locations, where none of my drawings worked or turned out how I had hoped, and I disregarded recording the stories I was hearing about and the potential source material that was around me. I struggled with juggling meeting the people, engaging with them and what they were doing, whilst simultaneously making work and recording everything I experienced. This is purely down to inexperience in this kind of work, and will take time to build up a practice which allows a successful balance to ensure I come away with plenty of work and material whilst also having engaged with the subjects.

Another potential difficulty with reportage work is the final illustrations. The very nature of the practice demands observational drawings, which can often end up as scribbles when the people being drawn are constantly moving and life is happening around you. I find this offers a charm to the drawings, and an exciting challenge when creating them. The race of capturing what is seen before it moves makes for very dynamic and exciting images, where the movement and energy of the subject is captured and recorded through multiple lines and versions of the same subject. However, due to their scribbled nature, these drawings do not always lend themselves to final illustrations. The challenge then becomes how to take these drawings and make them final, whether that involves editing them, redrawing them, simplifying them etc whilst maintaining their sensitivity and energetic charm. Through this process the story can get stripped from the images as they become more flat and less energetic, which I think is what happened to the people in my final illustrations. 

Something I really wish to develop more in my observational reportage work is omitting the elements of a scene which are not important. I have a tendency to try and capture everything I can see, which not only takes the fun and flow out of drawing, but also wastes time and causes the images to often appear cluttered and without focus or aim. Again this requires more experience and practice to achieve this successfully. 

Study Task - Industry Research, Editorial & Reportage

My group researched reportage and editorial illustration. I focussed on the reportage side, looking into contextual references and the origins of this field of illustration, from the war drawings of WW1 to the more contemporary trend of urban sketches. 

I found that reportage is quite a hard thing to pin point, with its boundaries blurring. There appears to be no definitive definition of the practice, no line where it starts and ends. At first I deemed urban sketches to not be considered reportage, as they were not so much telling a story, covering an issue or communicating an explicit experience as they were just drawing what is around them. However this can and is still considered reportage, its’ definition can be as simple as capturing life through observational drawing. It seems like that is the thread that ties all the different areas together as reportage, the emphasis on observational drawing and of capturing life. This really appeals to me in a way that I had previously overlooked; the fact that it can be as simple as that, there does not need to be a big story being told or an underlying issue being explored, but instead it can be documenting life and the story comes out of that very simple act. In this way, many illustrators and artists do in fact make reportage work, even if by themselves, as for many observational drawing of life around them is an intrinsic part of their practices. 

When researching reportage I struggled with finding much information about the application of the practice. Newspapers and magazines are the usual context, however to find these resources can be hard to do. There does seem to be a resurgence in reportage illustration in the media though, reflected by the UWE Reportager Award, in conjunction with Moleskin. 

Studio Brief 1 - Live Brief, Reflective Post

Three briefs - Hookworms Poster, Penguin Book Cover, Socio-Political Poster. Each brought their own set of challenges and processes. Juggling three different briefs at once had its challenges also, teaching me that time management and balancing my focus is essential. 

I enjoyed mocking up the Stephen Hawking book cover, playing around with shapes, dissections, simplification, trying to achieve a diagrammatic image that could be universally appreciated, based on the themes of the book, not directly depicting them. I felt engaged being loose with my sketches trying to create something striking and bold that was informed by the book’s content. Sticking to one aspect, black holes, I was able to be exhaustive in my sketches and focus on creating as many relevant possible variations of one idea; with the book being so ‘deep’ and extensive with information, it helped to focus down. However, I found it difficult to then make the final book cover. I was unsure which medium to use and didn't really experiment with this enough, in the end adopting for a cleaner line with a scanned in lino block. By the end I really neglected it, putting in the groundwork at the beginning with the sketching but then not keeping up the momentum. The layout of my final cover is unimaginative and stiff. The subheadings don't fit in the box well and the overall design looks amateur and rushed. Next time I would spend more time on the final layout, and give myself some distance from it to maintain an objective and informed opinion. 

There were a couple potentially successful concepts in the sketches for the socio-political poster, but none that jumped out at first. For this it was a case of forgetting about it for a while and letting it mull over in my mind until an idea came, that of the ‘Return to Sender’. Going typically figurative and ‘accurate’ at first, the initial sketches for this were very stale. Even though the concept was reasonably strong, the drawings being based on photos of my hand were stiff and uninteresting. I then remembered that it doesn't have to be a realistic hand but can be drawn differently to work in the image, so the hand became creepier and more appropriate. I am pleased with the final, the colour being the only real point of contention, being unsure of how effective it is just having the red background.

The Hookworms poster was a good lesson in having free-reign over the ideas and images. I found this harder than expected, having little to go off or pull from for ideas. Although I think some of the house roof ideas could have worked, in practice they didn't feel very ‘me’, causing me to go back to sketching and working a bit looser - When an idea isn't working, don't force it…start over. Layout was again a real struggle and took a while to sort out. Even after many versions I am still unsure at the success of the final layout. Something I really wish to work out throughout level 6 more is composition and layout, as I worry it could let me down in future briefs.