Assignment 2: Reportage
The brief:
“Your local tourist board has commissioned you to produce a series of reportage illustrations that celebrates aspects of local culture.”
Targu Mures is on the smaller side as cities go, but it still has some wonderful sites to choose from. I chose to focus on buildings rather than events or people, as I was very inspired by the architecture exercise while completing the projects for this chapter. I wanted to capture Targu Mures through three different illustrations of iconic buildings.
I planned on making some pretty detailed and atmospheric images, which is why I preferred to only do three as more illustrations would mean having to rush which would detract from quality. The locations were easy to choose. I had already been drawing the fortress and one of the large churches and I saw no reason not to use that preparation for the assignment. The last building I chose was the Administrative Palace. It is a striking building in the Secessionist style and its addition in the lineup was perfect for completing the presentation in three images of my city.
Despite having already sketched the fortress from multiple angles, I decided to go back because I had not captured it from a more distant angle. As in, I only had details or more personal snapshots rather than a overall image. I took several photographs, including a panoramic one which was the most useful.
Using both the photographs and the sketches I had made previously, I started to block in a drawing, taking care to eliminate unnecessary details such as the tree right in the middle or the speeding cars. I also did my best to change things to the advantage of the main focus, the fortress, such as exaggerating the curve of the road or minimizing the buildings on the left in order to give the structure a greater sense of grandeur. The objective was to create a slightly fantastical medieval atmosphere. But not too fantastical. I still drew the buildings on the far left with the pipes and a little man walking on the sidewalk. I just exaggerated the size of the fortress and eliminated the cars. The composition was planned in pencil then carefully inked with dip pen.
Digital coloring allows for a lot of experimentation without having to worry about the image being ruined, and I am always happy to take advantage of this. Lately I have been loving to play around with the filters and different options the digital medium can offer.
Unlike before, I did not need to take another trip to the church to get a better angle. I already had plenty of both sketches and photographs, even more than for the fortress, so I just went right ahead and worked on the final composition.
I was rather relieved to not have to focus on the “old vs. new” theme I had used this building for in the fist exercise. It is a rather beautiful building all on its own, without bringing forward the very shabby mall found in the background. In this composition it has thankfully remained in the background. I did many of the same things I had in the first illustration, eliminating unnecessary details and trying to bring as much focus to the main subject as possible. I did not feel the need to eliminate the cars this time, I thought it was a good moment to bring the “story” of the illustrations into the modern world, especially since there is a glass building on the left, and also plenty of road signs and stoplights.
There are two people in this illustration who are very important to the atmosphere. In the previous illustration I wanted to establish a sense of age and people in modern clothes were not necessarily an aid to that. Here, however, the image enters not only the modern day but the mundane day. The people are just going about their regular business. They don’t even necessarily notice the church. I think a lot of people who pass it don’t, mostly because the Palace of Culture and the Administrative Palace, which are both very impressive and much more optimally positioned, are literally just across the street. I was standing to my back to them as I was drawing this church.
The realization process itself was much the same: sketching, drawing, inking, then experimentation with color. The only different thing I did was trying out the design below, which I thought was very fun, but ultimately didn’t choose.
This is the Administrative Palace itself. It was impossible to do this project without attempting either this building or the Palace of Culture. Ultimately, I chose this one because it has a more striking silhouette, even though the Palace of Culture is obviously the more important building if the point is to depict the culture in my city. You can still see the corner of it on the right of the illustration though. Both buildings were designed in the same period in the Secessionist (Austro-Hungarian Art Nouveau) style.
Honestly, the scene was picturesque enough that I did not need to do much planning ahead. I knew that I wanted to capture the rich details and the variation in colors, especially on the tiled roof. I went and sketched the building and of course took a few photographs from different angles until I was satisficed I had enough details, then I went home and started the composition.
Initially I was going to keep the perspective in two points, but changed it to three later. Inking this one took a little longer, and I was a little more imaginative when it came to the people, because I wanted to include more in order to make the scene more lived in or more tangible. This approach gives the images a story book quality, which is what I want, but these are still images of a real place and I hope showing people hurrying to get somewhere, or someone with a stroller helps convey that.
After I had all the illustrations both inked and colored, I needed to choose three which not only conveyed that real-life storybook town look, but also looked good together. I ended up with three illustrations in warm, but not overly saturated colors. I ended up discarding anything too unrealistic or stylized because I wanted to keep a sliver of reality among all the idealization of the buildings I had achieved in the drawing stage.
I had to do some adjusting to the colors and the shadows to make the three illustrations either pop more or match better together, but nothing too substantial.
