Research Task: Visual Research

Visual research is a great way to build up a better illustration, and as I go through this part of the course-- and with the previous exercise, taking inspiration from around you and sketching, collecting, you build up a self-made mood board. With this detailed and diverse mood board, you find yourself looking back at what you've created as inspiration, combining small sketches or picking out a certain colour to fit a brief or drafting for an illustration.

Going back to my last exercise quickly, I was able to filter through my work and draw inspiration on a variety of different work ranging from painting studies, values exercises, daily life sketching and simple small doodles. The point of this research task is to realise how important a sketchbook is when you're an illustrator, and how to utilize it...

Therefore, I took a look into an article by Pam Smy, 'Searching for the Green man: a sketchbook quest' and gathered how she came into he illustration work on Linda Newbery's novel.

I wanted to see how she approached he illustration/character designs for Lob with the use of her sketchbook, and when reading through the article I found that she observed people working on their crops, gathering small sketches of little things that caught her eye. She would observe and draw big landscapes of a the gardens with people working away- observing the way they work, where they rested; then what I noticed the most was her concentration on the mark-making in the landscape around the gardeners, they big sketches were overwhelmed with foliage and shrubbery that caught Pam's eye.

How these sketches collate into the final illustration is with the overwhelming mark-making, the is an attention to detail with the landscape, and our eyes hook onto the people walking/standing. Our eyes wander around the page afterwards, looking for Lob, sometimes finding him- other times not; just like it suggested in their meetings, discussing what Lob should look like "we discussed how inappropriate it would be to try and pin Lob down to one identity as this shifts and changes throughout the book." (pg.153)

We can see that she uses her mark-making techniques to express Lob presence on the page, when we can see him, he is a stark contrast to the landscape around him (fig 8, pg.163); whereas with when it's harder to see him, the marks are tighter together, darker (fig 7, pg. 162) Making it that little bit harder to see him, but reflective to Lob's character.

There are some text that stood out to me as I read through this article that I found I related to, I wanted to highlight them to reflect on my ability as an illustrator and what it means to me.

"I was able to look at how gardeners had organized spaces and how objects within them relate to each other" (pg.154), it isn't something that deep, but reading that made me think about how I approaching drawing in public, how I think. Observing a subject (like people) seeing how they are with each other and their surroundings, helps ground your characters out for future designs since you seeing how people hold themselves, how they interact in a certain way. Like designing a character who is a Lawyer, for example, I imagine that they stand up straight, composed, smartly dressed and always with their head up-- standing strong. Whereas a criminal would slouch slightly, grimacing a lot, head down to avoid suspicion. Generalizing, of course, for exaggerated character designs purposes.

Another quote that resonated with me was, "Richard Seymour describes the process of drawing as ‘A complex ballet of information processing, two-way non-verbal dialogue and extreme fine motor controls allows us to process emotion, space, reality and imagination and offer it up to ourselves and others in a form that is instantly understandable’ (Holder and Hodgkinson 2012: 16)" (pg.160). I've bolded the parts that stuck with me as I read this, since when we are designing, creating and exploring, we are able to create anything an everything in our imagination, simply by observing what's around us; in turn we take what we sketch/draw/paint from our sketchbooks and push them further than we can imagine, creating stories and powerful pieces of artwork that stick with others.

On a personal note, I hope that one day I could create artworks and illustrations that resonate with people, and inspire them.

1 Pam Smy, Apr 2014, Journal of Illustration 'Searching for the Green Man: A sketchbook quest. (Volume 1, Issue 1)', pages 151-166.