Exercise: Drawing Comparisons

Brief

Select at least three metaphors and similes from the lists below (or find some of your own). Make some quick sketches which describe them visually in a simple but effective way. Be imaginative with your interpretations. 

Now combine some of these sketches into a single image to create a narrative. Again, be imaginative with your composition. Think of ways you can combine the phrases and make visual sense of the image as a whole.

My sketching

I have chosen the following sayings:

• Stick out like a sore thumb

• Slept like a log

• Mind like a sieve

• Time is a thief

• Couch potato

• Cold feet

For the planning, I drew the first thing that came to mind as my own interpreation of that saying, then tweaking it to better suit what the iconography could look like.

Planning

For this I was planning how the final illustration could look like, so I figured out what icons I was going to use for each saying and tried to figure out the best way to display them; I ended up with a little character I doodled on the first page below to use as an anchor for the illustration and using speech bubbles to represent what she's saying (the similes and metaphors).

Colour Varitions

Final Piece

Evaluation

This exercise was fun to do, I really enjoyed coming up with icons for different metaphors and similes. I tested it with my dad to see if he understood the icons, and he got half right which is pretty good!

I feel like the composition works well and the colour compliments well- thankfully, with the testing I was able to achieve a coherent colour scheme. The most effective iconography is cold feet, couch potato and time is a thief; they're easy to understand and they're fun.

The least effective icons are mind like a sieve and stick out like a sore thumb-- they're harder to deciper since the thumb could be misconceived as something else. This exercise made me think about composition, playing with different ideas then putting them all together at once and also allowed me brush up on my watercolour skills.