Functions of Illustration - Idea Generation

Functions of Illustration

Our Brief was to chose our own topic and produce 3 illustrations falling under the categories, commentable, decorative and informative. I was spoilt for choice and found it difficult in the beginning picking a topic that i was happy with, here is are some of my ideas which didn't get chosen..

Iceland - volcanic eruption, monumental downfall (picture of Iceland with a sad face)

The great Spring gamble - the long, cold Winter hasn't necessarily been bad news for all out flora and fauna.

Social Issues - Survailance, Social Paranoia, Mental Health (statistics)

Free Parties and the War on Drugs - making a guide to partying (hard)

Home Surgery Parties - looking at people that like to inject themselves a lot with plastic and the people just at just a little bit gross, cutting open their heads when drunk for a laugh... (that was my very close second)

However all of this didn't attract me as much as an article i read in meat magazine and in the Vice magazine about Urban Foxes. There were 2 very different sides to each article - one a story about how London had benifited from have urban foxes and how people were letting them into their houses and feeding them by hand.

Whereas in the other magazine the article titled kill the foxes was about how some young boys in London were hunting the disease ridden foxes, (whose piss causes blindness and saliva that carries e-colia and meningitis) Not just hunting, but had dedicated their lives to torturing and killing urban foxes with cricket bats, pellet guns and snooker cues.

So how can this topic be translated into image - complying to my brief functions of illustration?? I began by producing a mind-map of all the ways i could do this:

Keeping a scrap book full of inspirational images (related to theme)

Do an animation on the wall (using Photoshop)

Spray paint my bin/ wall or floor

Photocopy one image in one colour and then put it back through and photocopy another image in another colour

Henna Tattoo

Make Stamps

Installation

Draw on /shave on an animal

Prints - screen, lino, mono

T-shirt designs - print on tees or just draw straight onto them

Draw using toothpaste

Draw on stickers and badges

Scarification/ Body Modification

Spinning disks,

Zoetrope

Leave your work black and white and get someone else to colour it in

double expose film in a darkroom

Pinhole camera

etc......

And it doesn't end there... I then went on to linking these ways of making images to ideas related to Urban foxes...

Spinning disk - Foxes like to eat cheese, peanuts, rice pudding, grapes, cat and dog food.

Zeotrope - Animals morphing

Word and Image Research

I've been researching 50's advert's and typography as a reference to my word and image project, i this will help me when I write text to form objects that signify Frank Sinatra such as hats, microphones etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFbCGT_AWBI

Word and Image

To better understand the time Frank Sinatra was in I've been watching these 50's and 60's tv adverts. It's been visually helpful, seeing the style and design and how idealistic they are. The advertising techniques are simplistic and very amusing.

Digital Image Final Piece

Corporate Sponsorship of Conflict.

For the Digital Image project we had to produce a series of 4 images representing a part of 'the noughties' I chose to look at globalization.

The Life and Music of Frank Sinatra

The new brief at AUCB is word and image. we were split into groups and given a famous musician to research into and illustrate their life or songs. We were given Frank Sinatra, which I am thrilled about because he's just amazing, I love both his music and films and thinks he had just the most amazing life.We found out quite a few interesting facts about him already, such as, There's a fan group in Bournemouth that make their other magazine called "perfectly frank" and we've gotten our grubby student hands on a few back issues.His alleged organized crime links led to him being under the surveillance of the FBI for almost 5 decades starting in the 1940's. Sinatra suffered from senile dementia in his final years and had a heart attack in Jan 97, he died from another heart attack on May 4th 1998.Throughout his life Frank Sinatra had mood swings, bouts of depression and symptoms of bi-polar.I find his life so fascinating and it's been easy finding out information about him because he is a well loved icon. We have come to a point now in our group that we've done a lot of research and need to start developing initial ideas. We were taught today how to make a stop-motion animation using Photoshop, and so we just set up an area and started painting away anything that came into our heads basing it on the life of Sinatra. It's a bit random, but it was so much fun to make, we all took it in turns drawing and moving bits and taking the photos so it was a really speedy process. We haven't done any editing on it yet, but i like how it looks at the moment, just really rough and fun with our hands coming in and out of shot. The drawings were really quick so it looks almost childlike - but I think that's what makes it work and makes it look really homemade.

Take this waltz with the clamp on it's jaw

Our new brief is word and image, today's task was to pick out song lyrics from the tombola and illustrate them. The song is called 'This Waltz' by Leonard Cohen.

My response to this song at the time was just to write on these post-its and stick them up around uni, but seeing as we learnt all about stop-motion animation today I thought I'd test it out. I'm pleased with the end result even though its rough and very jumpy, it would have been nice if I had more time to have the post-its coming down above her head and crawling over her head and face, hopefully this is something I'll be able to do next week. In hindsight I didn't really consider the very depressing spirit of the song, with its slow beat and dreary voice and didnt't take into much consideration of the letterforms but I enjoy it none the less.

Another Poster

Best of Biro Tonight!!!!