Part Two Exercises

Exercise 1: Getting Into ‘The Zones’

Take an A1 (59 x 84cm) sheet of paper and draw a circle about 30cm in the middle of the sheet. Write inside the circle a list of things you like, experiences you enjoy or feel comfortable with. For example, these could be ‘sunshine’, ‘cities’, ‘lying in bed’ or ‘green salads’. Now draw two larger circles 40cm and 50cm diameter around the first circle, as if you are drawing a dartboard. Now in the large circle write things you don’t like and that stress you. These might be the opposites (or ‘antonyms’) of the things in the centre like ‘moonlight’, ‘the countryside’, ‘exercise’ or ‘bacon sandwiches’, but they also might be completely different things. Try to be as expansive as possible, so name experiences, objects, cultural phenomena, etc. Do you dislike all the things in the outer circle, or are they simply the opposites of the things in the centre?

Completed from most comfortable concepts, mediums, themes, and actions (middle) to least comfortable concepts, mediums, themes, and actions (periphery)

Prompts

● What do you feel comfortable doing?

I feel very comfortable with drawing as opposed to painting or collage. Ink is my favorite medium, but I also like to work digitally. Theme-wise I almost always include fantastical or mythological elements, even if they would not typically fit. I like working with storytelling and feel generally comfortable with making characters and developing a history for an image, even if it isn’t part of a larger narrative originally. I am inspired by cinema more than anything else and like to employ similar visual principles to my own work. On the opposite spectrum, I also enjoy working with ink in a fairly old-fashioned way. My style inspiration for inks is generally from before the 20th century, not including some comic book artists.

● What do you feel uncomfortable doing?

Gratuitously dark, gory, or shocking art is not for me. I also don’t gravitate towards immature humor. Work that requires extreme precision (I’m a messy artist and generally like imperfections in my work) is also not for me. Minimalism is also uncomfortable, I can’t say I understand it very well, or enjoy looking at it very much. I am also uncomfortable with working on very large pieces, the largest I’m used to working with is about 50×70 cm. Stepping outside my comfort zone in itself is something I find difficult doing.

● What areas would you like to develop further?

I would like to feel more comfortable with painting, whether digitally or in gouache. I would also like to try bigger dimensions sometime. Printmaking is also something I have not tried. Stylistically, I have not branched out all that much, so trying some new styles could be very interesting and useful.

● What thoughts do you have about your work and where it might develop?

Truthfully, I don’t have much of a direction in mind beyond “making books” with my images. I have been exploring ideas around digital media and how the digital space affects storytelling and illustration. Telling stories using both words and pictures and using the full potential of both in a digital environment is a topic I am interested in and one I hope to implement in my own work. This means getting better at both typography and sequential image making. Graphic novels are similar in concept with what I have in mind, but the visual language is not precisely what I picture when I think of what I would like my work to look like. They are a good starting point, however.

● Where would you like to begin?

Sequential storytelling would be the best place to start. Though some experimentation with style could be fun as well. I am most interested in the ways both text and image can be used in harmony in order to tell stories. Text can do things image cannot and image does things text can never do. The use of both to their full potential is something I like to observe in the work of others and something I would like to explore myself.

● How can you develop ways of working that allows for the new to emerge?

I imagine learning from the styles of others and combining them with my own way of working is a good place to start. Using the world I see around me and personal experiences to make my work more unique is another way of creating things that are “new”. Idea generation techniques like word trees, flipping premises, and actual randomness generators are also a few options. I like to work from fairytales and myths, so making a retelling unique can be challenging, but not impossible. The easiest way to make an old story new is by changing the genera (the Arthurian Knights could be space warriors, for example). Changing the character Point of View can also have a huge impact (Tolkien’s The Hobbit is Beowulf told from the perspective of the burglar).

● How are you going to document and reflect on your progress?

Documenting my personal process was never something I did before starting OCA. Journaling is the traditional method (Da Vinci’s journals as the most well-known example). Blogging (the modern journal), as I do now is obviously one option for documentation and reflection. Another, far more popular, method is with video logs, such as can be seen on both YouTube and Tick Tock. Artists use social media both to document their process and educate/entertain their audiences. I am personally wary of this method, not because of the medium of film itself (which I am very appreciative of) but because using social media is a bit outside of my comfort zone.

Reflection on my progress for my own sake (as opposed to reflecting/recording for the sake of a client) can be done easily via sketchbooks. There, I can write down thoughts regarding my process and decide how I want to change or improve it. Keeping record of a project for a client can be done more easily via digital tools like Google Drive.

Exercise 2: Multi-Dimensional Thinking

This exercise should take you a couple of hours to complete. As with Assignment One ‘Flow & Play’, begin with a blank sheet of A2 paper Start by making random dots across the paper with the point of a pen or pencil, as if you are creating an elaborate dot-to-dot picture. Once you have filled the page with a couple of hundred dots, begin to connect them to make shapes and forms like squares, triangles and rectangles. As you begin to fill the page, think of how to connect these shapes to each other. Start to think three-dimensionally and in round and non-linear shapes, as if you are designing a landscape, or a city or park. Slowly start to think visually’ perhaps a cluster of dots resemble a tree, or a building, or a person. From your map of points, try to create the territory within that map.

To create a cleaner and more time-efficient result, I opted for a digital image. Technically, the image is still A2 in size if printed. I worked exactly as outlined above and was very surprised by the coherence of the end result. I expected to end up with something a far more abstract. The dots were placed entirely randomly, and I tried not to start on one side of the page and then work my way to the other side, but zoom in and out, placing dots wherever by pencil landed.

The shapes were made entirely without regard for composition or form in mind. At first, I limited myself to tiny triangles but I then upgraded to larger polygons and connected shapes. At this stage, I erased nothing and only added more lines. As a side note, the digital brush is one with pencil-like texture because I wanted a hand-drawn effect. I often like to use it because it is imperfect and gives the work a more traditional feeling.

After I was satisfied with the number of random shapes, I started adding form to the image by extending them into elongated, diamond-like structures vaguely resembling buildings. The lines extending from the original shapes are drawn by connecting the dots which are most likely to make a convincing drawing of a building. Obviously, the exercise does not lend itself to creating an image with proper perspective, so I didn’t aim for realism at all. Instead, I tried to maintain a coherent visual language within the image in regard to how the buildings exist on the page. The result is somewhat like fisheye perspective and somewhat like a clip from Inception, especially in the way the buildings in the back seem to curve over the horizon.

Cities have roundabouts, parks, bridges and so on. Adding some organic shapes really helped pull the strange perspective together. The river and the park flank the strange complex of buildings in the middle and create a context for them to exist in, regardless of their extremely improbable architecture. The river-like roads also help with the general composition, though they would be any real-life city planner’s worst nightmare. Physics and safe construction are entirely out the window in this Dr. Seuss-esque metropolis.

The image is shaded lightly, just enough to create the impression of form and sunlight. The addition of windows, trees, cars and other details helps give the composition more personality and movement. Precision was not my priority, given the relaxed overall style, so I kept the marks loose and textured.

The brief states to make marks with pen or pencil, so I assumed the limited materials would apply to the rest of the image as well. I did not add extra color and kept things simple. I am very surprised by the overall result, given that it was created by connecting entirely random dots. Perhaps I could have gotten a little more creative at the beginning by making bigger triangles, but that might have also made my job harder than it would have needed to be. I like how the image mostly makes sense, even if some of the buildings might be leaning a little too far, even for the dubious internal logic of the work.

Exercise 3: Words to Pictures

Here are some keywords describing concepts:

● PAINTING
● WRITING
● SOUND
● DESIGNING
● MAKING

Choose one of these words and make a written list of the different manifestations that the word can take.

For graphic designers and illustrators, you can approach the assignment by drawing thumbnail sketches of each of the words and phrases of your own list. For example, ‘Drawing a crowd’ could be a sketch of a street mime artist surrounded by people, while ‘Drawing a bath’ might be a picture of a flowing bath tap with a cloud of steam billowing from it. The sketches could be illustrative or iconic; if you are more interested in illustration, your drawings can be observational studies of objects or people. If you are engaged with graphic design, you can focus on making the drawings iconic or emblems of the objects or people.

Once you have made your collection of sketches, designs or photographs, incorporate some or all of them into one A2-size image. You could redraw or collage copies of your drawings, or organise your icons into a design, or cut up and combine copies of your photographs.

Pinterest Board

Diagram

“Making” was the word of choice for this exercise.

The phrases I thought of containing the word are: “long time in the making”; “decision making”; “history in the making”; “of one’s own making”; “making noise”; “making a face”; “making fun of something”; “making light of something”; “making something new”; “making bank”.  I gathered a myriad of images as inspiration which can be seen in this Pinterest board, then I made sketches with each phrase and selected the ones I liked best.

Thumbnails

Experimentation with composition

Attempts to use all the images together in a coherent fashion were scrapped very quickly. There simply isn’t a way to do that, so I basically have two sorts of compositions: ones where all of the images are used together, and therefore are not strictly figurative, and those which only have two or three of the sketches combined, thus making a more traditional illustration. The first category is more abstract and the second more literal.

Chaos Curtain

Slightly adjusted composition, and therefore no longer accidental

At this point, I was no longer thinking of the original prompt “making” at all. The task was just making sure that the images make sense and/or are compositionally viable. Some of the images can easily refer back to the original prompt, while others have deviated. Interestingly, “making a face” seems to be the image that most pulls away from the theme, though “of one’s own making” and “making light” are also close contenders. In combination, “‘Peril!’/Disbelief” is an image wholly deviant from the original prompt, whilst “Routine” is easy to derive because one of the characters is literally making something. “Buskers” is also fairly logical as a derivate because “making fun” and “making noise” are more likely to be identified visually than “making light”.

These are important notes to make because sometimes I might want to use a prompt until the images no longer connect to it literally and other times I might want the viewer to read my picture the way I intended it to be read. Not all of my generated ideas might be easy to read, and that might be useful in certain cases but counter-productive in others.

Nightmare

The first and last compositions are both sort of abstract. I prefer the “Chaos Curtain”, stylistically, but I tried my had at something a little more mixed-media like for a bit of experimentation on the “Nightmare”. It’s supposed to look like a combination of ink washes and charcoal. I’m not entirely happy with the overall mood of it. It looks a bit melodramatic and incoherent. The first composition is chaotic and illegible, but the few elements that are easy to identify make a mass of texture into an illustration. In the last image, “Nightmare” the images are still visible, and so the mark making between them is not really enough to make the illustration harmonious.

Exercise 4: Word Associations

Undertake a series of mind-maps or spider diagrams to generate associations based on a single concept. Try and develop a process that moves your thinking through the obvious, to find more subtle, subjective, specific, or unusual motifs.

1. Use a mind-map or spider diagram to generate associations based on one of the following concepts:

● CUTTING
● HIDE
● WOBBLE
● GROW
● SEED

or another concept that relates to your current practice: Place the word in the centre and radiate your ideas outwards.

2. Try introducing images to your map or diagram as a way of offering new possibilities and ideas. Use quick drawings or snapshots as a way to do this on your spider-diagram, or move to your sketchbook to develop ideas further.

3. Introduce new ideas to your map or diagram to help broaden your associations, for example, thinking about the sound, smell, touch, or movement of your concept/ideas as much as their image. Think about how you can use lateral thinking techniques as further prompts.

4. Identify concepts/ideas in your spider diagram that you feel are the furthest or most divergent from your starting point. Amend or start a new diagram that aims to find connections between these divergent ideas and your original starting point. Alternatively, add new words or ideas, alongside your original and start to develop a more complex, rhizomatic set of connections. New words could include:

● HISTORIC
● MUNDANE
● OVERLOOKED
● EXTRAORDINARY

5. Identify which single idea/concept or lines of connections you feel have possibilities or are the richest in terms of how you might start developing a visual piece of work in response.

1. The concept I chose to develop is “Seed”. The spider diagram below is similar to what I use when I start a new project. It’s fairly simple, and without images. This is usually enough to get me started on thumbnails, but the next images helped me expand on the initial ideas.

2. Using small sketches to expand on the words brings the ideas to more unexpected places. The bird imagery is not one I would have included otherwise. The top sketch of a growing plant is better for conveying the idea of “growth” than the word is, and helped me start generating more ideas in the same vein as “growth”. The idea of “seed” as a pattern is also better conveyed by simply drawing it than writing it down. The dark bottom sketch is the one which inspired the direction of the following diagrams and sketches. The high contrast between the dark earth and the small, light seed intrigued me.

3. In the following image, I expanded the map by building on the thumbnails. The concept I found most interesting is written out at the bottom of the page: “The seed dies and makes a new life.” I like how “seed” links the contrasting concepts of Life/Death and Darkness/Light. The seed in planted in Darkness and must Die, then by feeding on the darkness it rises to the Light, where it transforms what it took from the darkness into something new and Life-giving. Taking agricultural concepts and applying them to more profound ideas is a method of telling stories as old as humans have been around. It’s been done a million times over, but that’s the reason why it’s effective.

4. The idea of Regeneration or Rebirth is abstract and removed from the original prompt, but is still perfectly tied to “seed”. The new words I used to expand from Regeneration were a bit abstract at first. I was trying to think of new words solely in connection with “Regeneration” but by the second image, I started to connect the key words from the original spider diagram and make more interesting connections. Instead of imagery, the words growing naturally from the diagram were colors. White stands for light, Red for life, Black for earth and Green for Seed.

5. The key words derived from “Seed” are: “Rebirth/Potential”, “Light/Dark”, “Life/Death”. I also wrote “Growth” below, but it might be a bit redundant. The possibilities for creation are endless. The idea of Rebirth has always been a popular one in art, whether it’s just a landscape of a springtime view or religious/spiritual art. My first instinct, as always, was to approach the concept in a representational way. Drawing a literal image of a seed growing into a plant would be within my comfort zone. However, I was not interested in the botanical approach or in a more colorful, inspirational-poster-like approach (both suitable for the themes of “Growth”). I chose to skew a little more conceptual, with extremely simple shapes.

As can be seen in the thumbnails below, I tried my hand at something minimalistic. This isn’t something I’m used to at all. I generally prefer using line to create my drawings and occasionally play with texture. These, I kept simple, with just shapes and colors. I used three colors, or perhaps four. White represents the Light, Green the life or the Seed, and Brown Darkness. The seed is cracked in all the images because the central theme is that the seed must die, or at least change, in order for something new to be made. I liked the images which do not show a plant at all. The moment represented is the razor’s edge between Death and Life. It’s meant to be peaceful and anticipatory. My two favorite compositions are cropped below.

The first is a little more “cosmic”. The concentric circles sort of hint at a planetoid, as if it’s a representation of Earth. That was not actually the intention, but it’s right on the money, thematically. Darkness surrounds the Seed, and Light surrounds the Darkness. It also looks like the Earth, surrounded by its atmosphere and containing the seed of life. It also looks like an egg that’s about to crack open.

The second drawing is a little more dynamic because the tall composition gives it an upward movement. The asymmetric placement of the white dot also makes it look anticipatory rather than entirely static. If the white dot were placed in the middle, it would make a cross with the line of the earth, which is a very stable shape. Placing the dot on the left gives the impression of dynamism because we read from left to right and we subconsciously assume that it’s just about to move from left to right and from up to down. The white dot could be the sun, but when I drew it, it was simply a representation of Light or the atmosphere that can be seen in the first drawing with the circles.

I personally like the second option better, because it implies more of a struggle. The seed is cracked, pointed upwards and the Light is very far away. The whole business of Rebirth, of getting to that light in the first place is not easy. The circles in the first image give an impression of safety, like a cocoon, which wasn’t what I was thinking of.

I imagine both these images could work well both as smaller illustrations and larger paintings. If done in paint, one could play with the bland backgrounds and add texture with both brushstrokes and variety of tone and hue within the bigger colors. The images could also work as collages or more involved digital illustrations. I have never made prints, but I imagine the simple design would lend itself well to that as well.

Exercise 5: Word Processing

For this exercise you need to have access to a computer with Microsoft Word or a similar word processing programme with a thesaurus (if not you could use a standard dictionary for this exercise but it will take longer). In Word the Thesaurus is the second option in the ‘Tools’ drop-down box. The starting point for this exercise is an automated word association game.

● Choose a word to examine – the example here is the word ‘grass’ as a starting point. Type the word ‘grass’ in a new Word document.

● When you highlight and look up ‘grass’ in the thesaurus you are given the alternative words ‘sward’, ‘grassland’, and then the third definition of grass which is the word ‘meadow’. Now type that word in after ‘grass’: grass meadow

● If you then look up ‘meadow’ on the thesaurus then ‘lea’ is the third alternative word, making: grass meadow lea

● After continuing this process of looking up and adding the third alternative word for a while, you will eventually develop a word poem like this: grass meadow lea grassland heath hill mountain elevation boost lift buzz tinkle phone headset phone mobile transportable travel collapsible foldaway folding foldaway 

● After a while you will reach a point where the alternative word begins to loop and repeat and you can’t take the exercise further. In this case you could switch to the fourth alternative word, or the fifth if you then start repeating again.

Now think of your own word and try the experiment. Sometimes you might begin to repeat very quickly, but experiment with a few words until you achieve a list you find interesting.

Once you have reached a 20-30 word text or ‘poem’, draw pictures or take photographs of each of the words in the sequence. These can be quick sketches or snapshots, but keep the order the same as the ‘poem’. These don’t have to be perfect drawings or photographs, more a visual record of the text, maybe structured as a comic strip or storyboard.

Lastly, combine all the single images into one composite picture.

Word experiments:

Rock, stalwart, committed, devoted, dedicated, keen, acute, critical, grave, weighty, substantial, extensive, wide-ranging, comprehensive, full, complete, wide-ranging, comprehensive.

Lamp, spot, ad, trailer, preview, broadcast, show, expression, countenance, mien, expression, countenance.

Glass, flute, indentation, depression, sadness, despondency, misery, desolation, despair, hopelessness, fruitlessness, ineffectuality, futility, ineffectiveness, futility

Dragon, Tartar, residue, deposit, sum, entirety, whole, full, complete, wide-ranging.

White, silvery, gray, ashen, wan, ashen, pasty, pastry, quiche, tartlet, flan.

Road, throughfare, way, technique, practice, exercise, isometrics, bodybuilding, muscle building.

Chocolate, sweety, chew, wad, portion, slice, cut, bowdlerized, edited, revised, reviewed, revised.

Magic, fairy-tale, paranormal, mystical, numinous, magic.

Cloud, haze, miasma, haze, murk, dark, shadowy, ethereal, unearthly, outrageous, shocking, scandalous, wicked, cool, nonchalant, blasé, unmoved, unyielding, stiff, inflexible, obstinate, adamant, unbending.

Purple, florid, elaborate, extravagant, overgenerous, wasteful, uneconomical, extravagant, overdone, burnt, blistered, erupted, vented, uttered, articulated, modular, prefabricated, assembled, convened, summoned, activated, triggered, tripped, danced, frolicked, played, teased, pestered, bedeviled, foxed, outwitted, beat, rhythm, pattern.

Lamp, streetlight, lantern, hurricane lantern, streetlight, light, sunlit, bright, clever, crafty, devious, circuitous, twisting, spin, run, ride, journey, voyage, flight, escape, leak, ooze, radiate, exude, show, play, act, law, theory.

For the first few setions, I abided by the three-word-rule from the brief above, but I eventually abandoned it beause the words would start repeating too soon. I started selecting the word that seemed most interesting instead.

For efficiency’s sake, I wrote the words of a flash card and kept them next to me, crossing out the ones that I used and grouping together/eliminating those which were too similar like “exude” and “radiate”. Materials used: India ink, oil pastel, chalk pastel, black paper, white paper, book pages.

The black paper is an unconventional choice (for me), but is one that perfectly suits the theme, considering the many “light” themed words in the prompt list. Drawing with light color on a dark surface made it easier to focus on the lighting instead of the outlines, which is what I usually do.

For the ink drawings, I used one of my largest brushes to avoid getting bogged down in details.

I tried more abstract approaches as well, as in “sunlight” above or “bright” below.

Crafty

Words like “crafty” or “devious” are best represented with figures or characters. In the case of “crafty”, I selected an animal which often symbolizes craftiness or deviousness.

Ride

Run

Both in the interest of adding texture and of using up the paper I had been keeping around for a while, I chose to draw on book pages for some of the prompts. I picked the book up at a used bookstore a while ago, so the words are not at all connected to the drawings.

(A side note: The book is an Official Guide for educators published before the Revolution of ’89. I did not actually notice this myself, but it was pointed out to me that the image below has “Ceausescu, Nicolae” written out several times as part of the bibliography. The superposition was not intentional, but I still think it’s funny.)

Ride

Voyage

Flight

The images I chose for the prompts are generally self-explanatory, but the ones for “theory” might be a little confusing. The image of the planet with the net-looking thing is supposed to be a representation of how time and gravity bend around the earth a la “theory of relativity”. Further below, I also have a drawing with “E=mc²”, but that is a little more self-explanatory.

Ooze

The next step after sketching the prompts was narrowing things down to create something that could work in a composition or in a sequence. Working things out in Photoshop is easiest for me because the image can be edited quickly and because I could keep my references at hand (in this case, the references are photographs of my own work). I tried out some more static compositions, but I then elected to continue with something a little closer to a sequential illustration. Since the main prompt was “light”, and I liked the idea of playing around with light sources, I selected the words and images that were closest to the prompt and worked from there.

Main words: Lamp, streetlight, lantern, hurricane lantern, streetlight, light, sunlit, bright, radiate.

Digital comics are something I am trying to experiment with more, so the format is tall and continuous, meant for ease of scrolling.

Stages of drawing, all digital. I did some shifting around with the elements until I found an order that seemed at least halfway harmonious.

The initial phase of this idea generation exercise was a good starting point on its own, but I don’t think I will be using Microsoft Word to generate ideas anytime soon. For brainstorming, I think exercises like the mind map from the previous project are much more preferable. Using a thesaurus might only be useful if I’m afraid of not including the obvious in a project when I have a broad brief. However, I did like the variety of images generated and how the medium and styles influenced the final product. In the future, it may be useful proceed similarly with the words/prompts I come up with in the initial brainstorming phase.

Exercise 6: ‘Cut-Ups’

Take a recent copy of a newspaper. If you want to experiment with cut-up images then a daily tabloid with lots of pictures like ‘The Mirror’ or ‘Metro’ might be best, but if you want to experiment with text then a broadsheet like ‘The Guardian’ or ‘The Times’ might work better.

● Using a pair of scissors or a craft knife, start to cut up some newspaper pages in various ways. For example, cut one page in half horizontally, one vertically and another page into four quarters.

● Continue until you have a number of differently-sized squares and rectangles of paper.

● Now simply begin to place them next to each other, in columns or in strips. If they are pictures, try out how they sit above or below each other. Are there light or dark areas that meet, or two landscapes that overlap to create a new hybrid picture? Perhaps photographs of two people can be put next to each other to create a new face or body. Take some time to experiment; perhaps two headlines cut in half can be combined to create a new story.

● Keep experimenting until you have 5 cut-up collages that either spell out new phrases and texts or new composite images.

Because I currently live in Germany, the newspaper I picked up from the bookstore is in German. I chose a publication with a good balance between text and images because I wanted to incorporate both in the collages. To start, I just flipped through it and noted which titles and images most stood out to me.

My German isn’t very good yet, so for the google translate app was useful for words I did not know.

Picking my favorite images helped me get started, and so did cutting pages at random. It made the project feel a little less precious, so I could get a bit more creative.

The collages are made up of a combination of text and image. I liked taking titles and placing them with new images in order to create a new story, or to give the same story a little more drama. In the image above, I cut the image of a man saving a boy and pasted it with an image of a tank in order to make the picture more dramatic. The tank is actually from an article about a different war. The title means “Radical solutions solve nothing”, again, from an entirely different article.

I do not really know who any of the people in the images I picked are. I think this man is some sort of public servant for the national bank. Desecrating his portrait isn’t any sort of statement, I just needed a face to paste silliness onto. The electronic cigarette is from an article about their pros and cons, the strange face is from an article about museum ethics and the words themselves are from an article about the “life coach boom” and the many charlatans it breeds. It says: “the wondrous boom of life coaches”. It’s tiny, but the goose image has “we keep our word” written in white text.

Here, we have an article about airplanes and an article about Mark Hamill lending his voice to an air raid app for Ukrainians combined with a short quote from an article about post-Covid tyrannical bosses. It essentially says: “Luke Skywalker warns about air raids”, and the quote says that bosses without empathy create toxic environments. I think it’s funny if one assumes Darth Vader is the boss in question.

This image was created more as a series of unlikely and rather thin mental associations. Again, I have no idea who the people in this picture are, I think they were from the article about life coaches. I connected this image with the title simple because it says “the difference between” and the image had two portraits. The text in the middle was a random cut up which happens to say “The crimes, especially the number of violent crimes”. This is supposed to be in answer to the title. Below, it just days “Here are the facts” and “narcissists are attractive”. I am not sure this image makes sense to anyone but myself, but I laughed.

Lastly, I just pasted some titles and a mental health helpline box to this big photo. The photo is from the tyrannical boss article and it has combined images of an oppressive-looking office and a painting of a bloody Biblical scene, possibly from Revelations. There was another similar image with Munch’s “The Scream”, but it got cut up for the other projects. The text says “The mistrust is greater than ever”, “A land of the misunderstood”, “furthers murder”. I’m not sure this would encourage anyone to go get mental help, but it might encourage some to feel less judgmental or mistrustful about it, or perhaps understand the urgency of the problem.

Exercise 7: Composing Pictures

This exercise builds on the previous ‘Cut Ups’ exercise, but instead of using found material from newspapers or magazines, you will need to generate your own visual material, either by drawing, designing or photographing your own images.

First you will need to create the following ‘pool’ of images from coloured paper and your own drawings, designs or photographs.

● A group of coloured shapes, like a yellow circle, green triangle, black square etc.

● Images of 5-10 figures; these could be ordinary people, superheroes, characters from history or celebrities, depending on the sort of images you want to create.

● A group of 5-10 background landscapes, for example a city street, country road, mountain-scape, famous landmarks or the surface of the moon.

● A group of other random visual elements like objects (a bus, a building, dinner table, a bunch of flowers, etc).

Photocopy these at different scales and sizes so that you have several versions of each image. Cut them into individual items with which to work. These will all then be separate pieces of paper or cut-outs that you can incorporate into a single image space.

Working with an A3 format, arrange some of your cut-outs to create 10 composite images. These could be either representational or fantastical, they could be single images or they could form a visual narrative. You could make your images physically by sticking them on sheets of paper or card or scan them and make digital collages. You can be implausible, satirical, political, comical, horrific or polemical, or all of these approaches together!

Since the previous exercise was entirely analogue, this one was an opportunity to experiment with digital collages.  I decided to use both new and old images for the compositions. I selected some old sketches and drawings from my portfolio, but also created some new images to build a library I could play around with.

I spent some time browsing through my Pinterest account and selected a series of images to form a new inspiration board. I used the references to make quick digital paintings. They are not detailed enough to be technically “finished”, but they are good if used as a base.

Initial Images

Collages

I elected to make single images, not worrying too much about narrative, but simply experimenting with the idea of a digital collage.

Bard and Captive Audience

This is the image with most “story” to it. With the others I focused less on staging the image and more on composition. It kind of shows. For all that the characters “fit” together in a believable manner on the page, the composition suffers. It looks a bit awkward. I managed to cut and resize the characters until they sort of seemed to interact, but I don’t think it’s a successful image. The pomegranate still life is actually incorporated into the image as well, though it isn’t obvious. It’s subtle where the characters are clunky and therefore it is the most successful part of the image.

Cross-Examination

The Bard image was mostly made by cutting and resizing, with a little bit of drawing to create the “cloud” around the “story”, but in this image, I employed transparency and filters as well. I basically grouped all the characters that looked thoughtful together and played around with the composition until it felt coherent, cutting, painting over, adding texture and messing around with the layer styles.

Lots of collage-making seems to rely on “intuition”. I can’t really explain most of the decisions I made along the way. I just moved things around until I liked what I saw.

“A sailor ain’t a sailor, ain’t a sailor anymore”

The collage above is my favorite one. It’s made up of anatomy studies with a still life color study as a background. I like how the negative coloring reminds one of x-rays and how it complements the anatomy drawings.

In this composition, shapes contribute to the drawing by framing or strategically covering. The shapes were made by hand with he lasso tool instead of using the shape tool. The perfectly made shapes looked too harsh against the chaotic, painterly illustration, in my opinion.

In this composition, I made the shapes a little more gestural. In the last one, I also experimented with the Photoshop filters until I obtained a different sort of painterly result.

More organic shapes suited this drawing better, though not all the experiments turned out very well. The darker ones don’t really work, but I do like the gradient effect in the third one, even if the original drawing is entirely lost.

The hand needed redrawing, but otherwise this collage is one of the simplest and most effective of the set. The elements fit together fairly naturally, with only a little bit of editing. I feel like those are the collages I like the most. While adding more shapes and overlapping seemingly unrelated images can look interesting, I think I like collages best when they are more minimal. I like the collages which are most harmonious, if not necessarily seamless.

These last two are collages of collages. I basically took the images which had repeating themes or focal points and combined them to form completely new images. Or as in the case of the last one, a more complete-looking image.

Tale of the Lost Sailor

I’ve never made artwork in this way before, and I am not sure what to think of the technique yet. I like the results more than I thought I would, and I think I managed to create images that have a great deal of potential. The digital collage technique could be very useful for both recycling images and idea generation.  “Study” looks like nothing I would have ever thought to make from the outset, but it’s the image I like the most. At the very least, this is an excellent exercise for art block. It only requires some old artwork and a bit of willingness to play.

Critical Review: Thoughts

The last critical review took much longer to write than I had intended because of my indecisiveness regarding subject matter. This time, however, I have done my best to narrow down some ideas early.

My main interest is illustration, specifically book illustration. Recently, I have been thinking about digital media and the ways to use it in combination with illustration. The book-as-object affects much of the process of illustration. How does the digital medium change the way we interact with illustrations? How does it change the way we illustrate? The mechanics of reading on a screen, of flipping digital pages or scrolling, change the rules for making “good” images. Good images being images which are optimized to the experience of the reader. The way one combines text and image could also differ, especially if the story is scrolled through instead of flipped through.

If one were to search for the most popular form of visual storytelling in digital form, there is no need to look further than webcomics. According to Forbes the Webtoon platform alone there are 72 million monthly active users. They are known for popularizing the scrolling method for comic book style storytelling. Considering their resounding success, one can assume their model is very effective and user-friendly.

I am not sure comics or webcomics are something I would like to get into. I have always shied away from making them, despite being an avid reader. I do think that there are many things to learn about sequential storytelling and combining techniques and mediums, however.

To get a more precise critical review idea, I must first throw a wide research net from which I can narrow things down. Here are some of the resources I plan on exploring:

“Enhanced Webcomics1”: An Exploration of the Hybrid Form of Comics on the Digital Medium (Josip Batinić)

Digital comics – new tools and tropes (Daniel Merlin Goodbrey)

The brave new world of webcomics (Anissa Rawani)

Comics for a Mobile Generation (Rob Salkowitz)

Scott Pilgrim vs the future of comics publishing (Padmini Ray Murray)

Conclusion

● What have you enjoyed doing the most, or the least, and why?

The most enjoyable exercise was the fifth (word processing). I liked using all the different materials, and then combining the images into something vaguely story-like. The first collage exercise was the one I enjoyed the least. Collages of that type simply do not align with my area of interest. I prefer more fantastical or storybook generas, so while I can find the exercise itself fun as a brain-teaser, I’m not eager to implement newspapers in my own practice.

● Which pieces of work do you feel have been most successful and why?

Some of the digital collages look the most “finished”, and the second exercise ended up looking fairly nice, but again, I like the word processing exercise most. I like the concept of it and the way the elements connect, creating something like a narrative.

● Have the exercises helped you to think about things in new ways or try out new ways of working? What have they been and how has your viewpoint changed?

Exercise two will be very good for instances when I’m stuck in artist’s block. It’s an intuitive sort of process as opposed to the more detailed approach I usually take. The mind-mapping exercise was basically an improvement on what I already do when I brainstorm, and I fully intend to apply the technique. Also, for certain projects I will apply word-sketching technique from project five. I usually prefer not to mess around with mediums I know I won’t use for the final product/illustration. However, I did find that the different mediums of the sketches influenced the final product very positively. A different medium means making different decisions with shapes and colors than usual, giving the eventual final product a more individual look.

● What area(s) would you like to develop further?

I would like to further explore digital collages and will continue to use rhizomatic mind maps in my own work. I hope to apply this expanded toolkit to my next project.