Prison Visit

As part of the prison group project we visited HMP Manchester (formally known as Strangeways) to present our ideas to the client. After planning out my poster ideas and the potential style in which I would produce them I felt that my design would be strong when completed. The Prison service client, Rick Plant, reacted positively to my three designs and liked the idea of using the polish poster style for them. He did bring up the idea to the whole group that some of the posters could show a more positive view for the prisoners. As we had all used the negative representations of the health issues he felt that we should show them the positive effects on their health the changes would make. I will attempt to show these positive sides in the text I use with my images.

Illustration That Moves

Now that we have moved to the second year of the course the group will start taking it in turns to host a monthly discussion forum. This will give us all a chance to talk about current issues and topics in our chosen subject. These talks will allow us to voice our own opinions and listen to others point of view.  The first of these discussion forums was about Illustration That Moves.

We were shown examples of animated/moving illustrations such as Christoph Niemann's Petting Zoo app, which allows you to interact with the hand drawn illustrations and dictate the story. With digital sales climbing and print sales down this new media could feature a lot more in our jobs in illustration that it would have before now.

 

Christoph Niemann - Petting Zoo

What does this mean for illustrators?  Is print dead? Will it ever be?

• There'll be more jobs in digital in the future - skills in digital will be more important/wanted in future jobs in illustration.
• People will still want to feel the printed work rather then just on a screen - print will never fully die out (may become a niche market)
•   It's a new market - it will open new doors for illustrators - can include the interactive elements but still keep the beautiful illustrations, this will need to be done by an illustrator.
• Will have a more online portfolio (blog/website) - will be accessed/seen by more people, don't even need an agent.
• Gives us a different way of getting work - Illustrator does work on their own, art directors sees this online (illustrator becomes the creative one, initiating the work)

Is this a gimmick or here to stay? Is it important we move with it?

• The way things are going in digital media this is just the start, things will move on even more while we are working as illustrators.
• This new media can only help in the future - will add a new layer to industry
• It should be used to heighten communication in design not just for the hell of it.
• Important to remember that it's the illustrator/designer who provides the creativity and thought behind the designs not the new technology.

Mark Hearld

I really love the work of illustrator Mark Hearld. He studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art then completed an MA in Natural History Illustration at the Royal College of Art. He creates bright, imaginative and unique pieces, working in a range of mediums using nature as his source of inspiration.

Health Promotion in Prison

For the Prisoners health promotion brief I need to create 3 poster designs which could be used to convey a 'healthy living' message in Manchester Prison. The prison's representative gave detailed instructions on what these posters needed to include. This message has to encourage the prisoners to change their damaging health habits while in custody and how to continue without them when they re-enter the wider community.

As with most successful posters the message/slogan will need to be short and simple. The prisoners viewing the final design will have to understand the message quickly, meaning there can be no blocks of text and the imagery has to be bold. The prison wants professional looking designs with impact, they want to get the prisoners to notice these posters among the many they will see throughout the prison area.

The messages I have chosen to use will be eating healthy, dealing with stress/anxiety and stopping smoking. I will need to show them what is negative about these areas in an eye-catching and simple way and to show them what they can do to change to a better, healthier style of living.

MASi

After researching the Manchester made inventions I wanted to make into my illustrations, I started to draw them out in the simple line style of this project's influence, Roderick Mills. These drawings were done from existing images of the sometimes very old inventions, I had to improvise on some details as the photographs were either poor or didn't exist. I tried to make it so these drawings were clear and obviously that invention, making it easy for people to recognise each one and therefore its connection to Manchester.

 

These are two of my line drawings which I used in my final Manchester piece. I think the simple lines work well with the images and I that everything isn't neat and joined up. This looser, rougher look is similar to Roderick Mills' work with his free hand drawings.

Next I wanted to add a little colour to the images as the idea was to create work with commercial appeal I think they would be drawn to it more if I added interest through colour. At first I wanted to add the colour through Photoshop but was advised of a different way by tutors which I thought would work well with my style of drawing. By making blocks of colour roughly in the shape of my drawings it give it a more hand made feel and in the end set of the black lines of the drawing well.

 

I was advised to find a way of joining up each drawing as they seemed to be floating on the page with no link to each other. I fixed this by adding the dotted line and the hand drawn text, in a similar style to Roderick Mills' work. I feel that my piece turned out well in the end but would have tried to improve the drawings and the colours if I had more time to do it over. 

Roderick Mills

Roderick Mills

For the MASi project I am drawing inspiration from the illustrator Roderick Mills. His work involves line drawings in pen and biro, many of which are then layered with other drawings and with block coloured stencil drawings which come together to make varied and interesting pieces.
I have been looking at Roderick Mills' work since the first year of the course and feel that I could draw links between my work and his. I am very much inspired by his work with both images and with text, which he also sometimes adds to his pieces.
I love the way his work seems to all link together so well. Even though his multiple drawings are normal of things which wouldn't first go together, he arranges them into a composition which works. The drawings seem to me to now belong together in some way and nothing is left just floating, as if it doesn't belong. This skill is something which I need to work on as when doing the MASi project I had problems with my line drawings, which seemed to not link together in the way I wanted them to. They seemed to be just placed on the page in no particular way.
Roderick Mills' work influences my work greatly at the moment and looking at his work has helped me a lot, not just in the MASi project but in past project as well.

 

 

MASi : Research

As this brief was about what I personally loved about Manchester but also had to be commercially appealing, I thought about doing my piece on Manchester's History. I have always known that Manchester had a interesting and varied past and that the city had a lot to be proud of. After looking at past entries for the MASi competition I felt that this theme would be good to work with.
At first I wanted to do a piece featuring the key points in Manchester's history. Events that affected the people and changed something about the city. When I began researching this I found that there was almost to much material to work with when doing this idea and I got a little flustered. I knew from the start that I wanted to do a series of line drawings and have them all together as the piece, similar to the artist Roderick Mills.
This initial research led me to cutting down my history idea to just one area of Manchester's past, the inventions and discoveries in science and engineering made by people born, living or educated in Manchester. I think this was a good theme to have and would be different from many of the other entries but would also appeal to the public.

Manchester & Salford Illustrated

For this brief we had a real client to consider. The charity Wood Street Mission wanted work from artists living or working in Manchester or Salford which showed what they personal loved about the area. The theme of the piece was just Manchester and Salford and could be about anything connected to it that I felt deserved to be shown.
As for media, it could be presented in any way we chose to do it. Although we could decide what we made the piece about and what with the work was being submitted to a client which wanted work to be sold. This meant that the work had to have commercial appeal, it had to be about something others would care about enough to buy.

1 Day Editorial

After reading through the text we were given 2 hours to come up with an initial layout for our own op-ed illustration. After feedback from tutors I then made changes which I felt improved this design. This quick way of working was different to how I would have usually gone about doing this brief and at first I struggled to create a layout which I felt would work in a op-ed form. As I hadn't done work which had to get across a specific message in a simple way, I found it hard to think of how I could show this information in an interesting and bold design.

The two images in the article which kept repeating for me were people and bats (bats having a flu which could pass to humans). I tried to show this idea using these two basic elements and sketched a very rough layout of how I felt this could work.

 

After getting feedback on this idea I tried to edit the layout more and was given the artist Noma Bar as a possible influence when doing this. His work features simple designs and colours when bringing together few key elements of the subject he is working with. This makes bold and thought provoking pieces, which I tried to achieve by changing my original idea.

 

Noma Bar

 

In the end I feel that my final image wouldn't be suitable for an op-ed page. The key points of the article, that this flu would spread and affect the world was not shown. The image is simple but without strongly putting across a clear message like Noma Bar's work. After tutor feedback I could see that it didn't have the main theme of the article (effecting the world) but just showed a connection with bats and people. It needed to be clearer and have more information but still in the simple, subtle way it would have to be in a real op-ed piece. 

 

 

1 Day Editorial Brief

NYT Op-Ed

For this one day project I had to create an illustration which could be used alongside a provided article from the New York Times' Op-Ed page.
This would be a piece which could fit in with the article and summarise the ideas at the heart of the story. It should work with the article and the headline to get the readers attention.

This brief involved working quickly, coming up with ideas from a given text and making illustrations which were simple, cleaver and bold enough to catch a reader attention, while still putting across the point of the article.