Collage

I've been thinking a lot recently about what kind of work I would like to produce in the big world of design. I love to draw and make images with pen and ink, but through looking at illustrated design all the time, Im constantly reminded that the standard of illustration out there is extremely high and I wonder whether there is room for me to compete. Last year I was inspired by the work of Daniel Eatock who produced this image by standing felt tips on end and balancing a piece of paper on the nibs. When talking about it he said:
'My best friend from high school is amazing at drawing. We went on holiday to the south of France and at the beach he started to draw the view. I could never compete with my friend at drawing so I had to invent new rules. My solution: I drew two straight lines across the page, I wrote 'sky' in the top part, 'sea' in the middle part and 'sand' in the bottom part. I realised in that instance the craft and skill of drawing can be overcome with an idea.'

This completely enlightened me and my confidence was boosted after discovering so many more who have succeeded through different means of image making. I was interested in a particular edition of the magazine IDN because it was called cut and paste and I thought it might offer more insights into illustration without drawing. It showed work from a number of collage/montage artists who are all very individual and different.


Among these are Julien Pacaud who uses existing digital images to create his collages on a computer. His images are surreal worlds, composing black and white photography and objects with bold colour. He often colourises the black and white images on photoshop to give them an unnatural look. His work and clients have included doing singles covers for the electro alternative band GoodBooks, a front cover for French magazine TGV (about excessive psychotropic drug use in France) as well as continuing to produce personal work. He is also creating a web experiment, Automatic Art, which is an application which randomly creates artworks constituted by various bits of photographs loaded in real time on the internet.








This collage edition of this magazine has informed me that there are countless ways to solve illustrative design problems and I shouldn't worry about pure drawing skill as it is (although considered by many the corner stone of design), not imperative for good work. If we all did things the same way life would be very boring.

Cult Fiction, Comic Art

'Cult fiction, comic art explores the relationship between popular media - specifically comics, cartoons, illustration and contemporary art.'
At this exhibition in Leeds Art Gallery, there were very different artists, illustraters and comic artists who displayed work. Some were fine artists whos images were probably meant to comment on the role of the comic in visual culture, some used only illustrations which showed a narrative without using words. Most were the traditional drawn images teamed with text in a comic book format. A large amount of images were black and white, silhouettes being a well known and powerful tool of the comic artist. I thought a lot of it was a bit rubbish but a few of my favourite ones are these by Travis Millard, Laylah Ali and Killoffer.

LETTERPRESS

In the Letterpress induction on 01 oct we were shown this process which used to be for newspaper press. It involves lose type setting and rolling paper over the inked blocks of text.
Its a shame this craft has declined in use because its so much more interesting to look at than any digitally printed type.