ITAP:4 Utilize your creative brain and develop visual language

Our brain is split into two parts, one side is for organizer, it evaluates everything that we do and make the logical decision and evaluations. The right side is rather like a child, it wants to play and be creative not sit around filing things the illustration below shows this well.

When we are being creative say trying new things and or completing a brief we have been set we have to be very careful not to let the organizer to critique too early. Doing so would be like telling a 5 year old that the picture they drew of their mummy looked rubbish and was nothing like her at all, that child would sit in the corner of the room crying and probably would draw for quite some time. You have to learn when to let the child play and when to let the organizer make decisions, that way you wont get and tantrums and you'll end up with a well thought out and successfully creative outcome.

Thinking and working visually is completely different to thinking and working with words and text. When you are working with words you are restricted for example a brainstorm as shown by one of my own below;

When you are working with a brainstorm you only write down words this its self is very draining and not inspirational at all and it is a lot harder for other people to interpret what you are thinking. Working visually not only makes it easier for people understand your thinking methods but it also helps you work smoother and more easily too.

A storyboard as shown above is a great example of working visually, there is still text to help describe things in greater detail than these storyboards can explain but the main focus of it is the images rather then the words whereas its the opposite with brainstorms.

ITAP:6 Testing and Interpretation

 Being illustrators we have to make sure we are constantly testing our work and getting it out to the audience but how do we do that? One way is blogging our work but you can't just make a blog and expect it to be an instant hit, you have to circulate it and get people to look at it. To do this you also need to be looking at other artists blogs and leaving feedback in doing so you'll be leaving your mark on there page and hopefully they will look at yours also leaving feedback. Choosing which website to blog on is very important as some are better than others. Look at the site out there and what people are blogging about you don't want to put your work up on a site it 90% of the people just use it for venting, you need ones with other artists on as well. When posting up on your blog you need to know whats popular and whats not and what's going on in the world as when people are searching through blogs the thing that makes them stop is something they can relate too. This doesn't mean that you have to post illustrations up of the recent news (unless that's what you do) you just need to make sure your work reflects what is going on around you. A good example of this would be Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

 

As you can see the images are very dark and Alice isn't portrayed as a young sweet girl as it is in Disneys 1951 version as shown below.

 

And then again with Tim Burton's 2010 version.

 

They all portray the same story but they are different because they reflect the era they were created in. Lewis Carroll was around from 1832 –1898 which was quite a dark era as we can see in his style. When creating this he was also under the influence of opium which again is reflect in the story line.

Then We look at the Disney verion and suddenly everything is bright and happy, Alice is now the happy young girl that we all know just by looking at it it's clear to see how the "hippie era" influences this. We then look at Tim Burton's 2010 version , This movie has be grately affected by the technology that surrounds us today.

If someone was to try and publish some illustration in Lewis Carroll's style today it most likely wouldn't go very far as it not what the generation today can relate with. All the factors above are something to think about when creating your illustrations and trying to get them to your audience.

ITAP:5 Three act structure and the heros journey

“Every movie needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” This quote is by a famous film maker called Jean-Luc Godard, he believed that every film has a structure: BEGINNING : MIDDLE : END or you could call it ESTABLISH : CRISIS : RESOLVE. In the first ACT we establish what is happening around us. We get placed into the scene and find out who we are, where we are and what are we doing. This act would usually last around 30 minutes say for a typical two hour movie. In Louis Leterriers unleashed the first ACT introduces us to the main character Danny (played by Jet Li) who has been held captive since he was young to use his martial art skills to beat up/kill those who have wronged the boss. 


You could argue that there are two points in this movie that lead to the start of Act 2 being;
When he first runs away after a car accident in which he thinks that the boss dies.
When they find him after becoming part of another family they capture him again.
I prefer to think of the second crisis as the start of ACT 2 because I believe that the end of ACT 1 occurs when the protagonist makes a commitment and or decision that leads into the main action of the movie ACTS 2 and 3. The second crisis follows this theory well whereas the first leads us into more character development and not the main action.


ACT 3 is how you resolve the crisis, in this case is when Danny decides he has to fight to protect his family. In a 3-ACT movie, the external changes are often accompanied by an "inner story" in which the protagonist being Danny changes or grows emotionally. The "inner story" of unleashed is about Danny becoming human because, all his life he was treated like a dog and trained to kill so at the end when he has the choice to kill the boss or leave him knowingly that he killed his mother he is really choosing whether to carry on living the way he has been or becoming human.

ITAP 3:legibility and visual hierarchy

What makes a communication legible?
Whether something is legible depends on what the object in question is, who it is for and what is its purpose. For example the legibility on an iphone app is going to be different from the legibility on.. say an information leaflet.
On an iphone you need the type to be readable and because of the screen size you don't want chunks of text where as on a leaflet you need chunks of texts because that is what they are used for. WHEN CREATING A LEAFLET YOU HAVE TO MAKE SURE THAT LARGE BODIES OF TEXT ARE NOT ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS. As you can see it does not work, it confuses the document making the it illegible.
An example of a good leaflet is http://www.jakespens.net/leaflet.JPG  not only is the type legible but it is well thought out in terms of its visual hierarchy, the below is a diagram of where I looked and in what order:

The first thing that I looked at was the picture of the fountain pens which instantly drew my attention to the title.
They were put together like this for the purpose to draw you attention to one another, therefore leading you from one aspect of the leaflet to another working your way to the end.
When making this document they would have thought about: Colour,line, weight, scale, composition and images all of these things play a big part in visual hierarchy. A big heavy title will draw your attention straight away typically newspapers do this for example the times. http://www.oldspotinn.co.uk/graphics/News_Times-150208.jpg but a bold title is not the only way to draw in your attention, others use images over title as you can see by the sun http://mr-mercury.co.uk/Images/Sunfid.jpg

legibility and visual hierarchy work together to make a successful leaflet, poster, app, advertisement ect my point is that everything uses this for anything to be successful you have to consider how to make it legible and draw people in.

ITAP 2:Practice and Inspiration

"Note book after note book after note book because I feel sick when I forget potentially good ideas. I don't slack, I take photographs, I draw, I scan, I photoshop." Paul Davis makes a very good point here, if you wake up in the morning after an inspiring dream and don't write/draw it down you are going to forget it, what a waste. That's why as artists we have sketchbooks for collecting images, quotations, leaves, flowers, interesting crisp packets even over herd conversations that we feel could make an amusing illustration. Not only are they used for collecting but just simply for doodling as well.

An interesting sketch book to look at is one by Akino Yoko http://www.flickr.com/photos/stellaimhultberg/sets/72157619755892466/ She has many sketchbooks which she carries around with her as you can see from the link. They are only small pocket sized book because that's all they need to be, you can not critique a sketch book because it is just for personal inspiration, the images in there are meant to be judged. They are not pieces of art, they are the sketches which leads to the piece of art.

"If you start with nothing you have to invent everything from scratch." This would be like being handed a brief which is blank, how are you supposed to create something from nothing? The sketchbooks leak into our work a clear example of this would be http://stellaimhultberg.com/Sketchbook_set.html again from Akino Yoko you can clearly see how this small sketch has worked its way into http://www.flickr.com/photos/24949554@N07/5062780476 even as you go through her sketch book more you can see the Idea adapting, changing colour, media and becoming a different idea to how it started. It is important to practice different medias because if you don't experiment you can not progress. I will finish by saying that if you don't collect it, you wont understand it and it will never become part of your research.

ITAP 1 (work in progress)

Notions of originality is a topic which got discussed in a lecture we had, which I though made a very good point because when creating a painting, photograph or even a commercial your idea generates from somewhere. To be able to create any of the above you need to be inspired, when you are inspired you take an element of that inspiration into your own work some people would call this stealing. Where do you draw the line when "stealing" someones ideas?