Studio Brief 2 - Illumination... INITIAL IDEAS

DECODING LANGUAGE

The most basic function of illustration is to communicate a message and studio brief 2 reflects this through an editorial task. To get us thinking we played of articulate, seeing if we could guess a word from lots of tiny drawings. While I wasn't very happy with my drawings, it was a great exercise in generating lots of simplified images and I learnt from looking at the work of my peers that simplest can be the most powerful.

INITIAL IDEA GENERATION

The paradox of play: Real fun should be terrifying

The article I have been given is not the clearest to understand as the author is in a flux of opinions,  but the general themes of article are that adults have lost the ability to have fun, we should find fun in mundane things and embrace the world as it really is. Working from these starting points I began to think about imagery that is quite satirical of fun, poking fun out of the that fact fun has been lost. Making domestic objects into kites, having a party at the office, and mowing patterns into the lawn were the main ideas I explored in my initial sketchbook work. I decided to take a more satirical approach to the subject matter as I felt that this would be more appealing to a wider audience and the humour would hopefully speak universally. A few of my ideas at this stage seemed a little over complicated and so I opted for the more simplistic images to use as my roughs. I found that I struggled to compose complex images effectively as I struggle to capture proportion. Working with more complex images may require me to explore cut outs as a means of collating multiple images, this is something I could explore as my project develops. 

ROUGHS

Taking these roughs to my tutorial, the discussion opened up new considerations:

-How little information can I get away with?

-Do the figures need faces? Would an anonymous character speak more universally?

-How will you produce these images?

The idea of minimalism is very interesting to me as the success of an illustration relies on it being understood, communicating to its audience. I therefore wonder how much visual information is needed for an idea to be conveyed and understood. Similarly, does a character need a face or could anonymity make the illustration accessible to a wider audience? Perhaps a removal of characters would enable the audience to engage more personally with the text. These ideas will be considered in the development process through further visual research. Echoing the idea of simplicity, the brief states we can use only 2 colours in each image. I intend to explore screen-print mimicking on photoshop to experiment with layering of colour, a process which should hopefully maximise the potential of the palette as well as producing textural details.