Wrapping up the Guardian Brief

Originally I had intended to carry the guardian brief on as a 30min per day ongoing exercise. The only problem is I can't work that quickly and to achieve this goal would mean simplifying my illustrations down to line drawings. I didn't feel as if such imagery would be suitable for a newspaper and besides it would proberly take me longer than 30-mins to do even a simple line drawing considering the research and formulation of an idea that would be required.

I started to feel like the Guardian Brief was going on too long and that I should move on to something new. To round all my work for this brief together nicely I decided to put my illustrations in context and mock up a copy of the guardian. These images you see above will be printed onto paper at the true dimensions of the guardian and photographed.

New Guardian Illustration

Once I had drawn this illustration in my sketchbook I had an idea for it that couldn't really be achieved using paper so I put it up on Photoshop and got to work. I have to admit that I really enjoyed the freedom that computers give you and have missed that while working with paper.
Being able to re-do elements that arn't working and test out different compositions is a joy and I think the final result was more successful than my other work of late. That said, you can't beat that handmade look and feel achieved by paper.

Sketchbook Figures & Faces Continued

I wanted to try using some thinner pens so I invested 25p in a finewriter. I liked the effect of the pen and tried a different kind of cross hatch technique whereby the 'hatch' follows the contours of the face more closely. The only problem with he finewriter was it was way too scratchy and got on my nerves after a while. I switched it up for a biro to great effect. Now, I was gliding across the page in fluid motions (top) and felt I was able to draw more freely and intiuitivly.

For a while now I've been having something of a debate with myself about the idea of tracing. Is it legitimate or is it cheating? On the one hand I can see that tracing can provide an acurate structure to an image and capture some level of realism. I have heard the argument that 'its all just image making, it dosnt matter how you get there' many times and to a certain extent I agree. But somehow I still feel guilty doing it. So throughout this project I have made sure that most of my drawings are just from eye and I have to say that creating imagrey this way adds something extra in my opinion. When I trace an image, the result is somewhat 'generic' whereas drawing it from eye adds a certain level of character. The mistakes are often what makes something look better- more organic.

New Guardian Illustration

This one started off pretty well, but like police illustration I messed it up. First I drew onto the paper by adding some little screw details but I feel like there's too many and the pen outline around the 'breasts' ruins it aswell. Then, to cap it off I thought it would be a good idea to do a similar thing to my Obama illustration and draw some pencil lettering over the top to give it some depth. It wasn't, and ruined it. The blocky, 'robot' typeface didn't work for this.

New Guardian Illustration

At first I wasn't too happy with this one but it has grown on me a little bit. I think it communicates the message well and its simple design means it scales well. Perhaps the biggest thing I took away from this piece was to never again try and cut out lots of small lettering with a scapel unless you want to go mad.

Sketchbook Figures & Faces

I wanted to move away from just relying on pen and pencil and experiment with some different qualities of line. Most of my illustrations up till now have been using just one thickness of line so I thought i should start to look at putting some variation into my pieces. I got out the paint brush and gave it a go but it didn't really work too well. I thought I'd try and recreate the effect you might expect to get from a paintbrush with pen by drawing into the original line and making it thicker in various places. I was really pleased with how this worked out and found I was able to keep an extra level of control over the quality of line. What I did find, however was this style only really works when you have a face with lots of detail in it- In this case an elderly face means lots of wrinkles and more detail whereas the skateboarder Stevie Williams (top) has a smooth face and it dosn't look so good.

New Guardian Illustration

Here's my latest illustration for The Guardian. Using an isometric grid as the basis for the visual aesthetic, I illustrated over the top of the cut-out paper. It did start off reasonably well but then I started the car in the completely wrong place and drew it too big. Unfortunately there is no undo button with pen on paper so I tried to compensate for the mistake by drawing the gun in the top right. This messed it up further still when I drew the barrell too long. Even though I really don't like the piece, part of the reason for attempting these paper cutout illustrations was to test myself and enhance my ability to make things by hand. With every mistake you learn something.

New Brief: Guardian Illustrations

I've started a new brief- To illustrate articles from Sunday Newspapers such as The Guardian. My aim is to complete one a day and focus on using mixed media and the handmade. Here's the first one, commenting on the article "Obama's inauguration was the most inspiring thing we've seen in years and the most terrifying, too" by Charlie Brooker

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/26/charlie-brooker-obama-inauguration