Research Task 3:0 Building a tool kit

I am not a stranger to drawing outside, though I do not do it as often as I would like. My tool kit for drawing outside usually consists of:

  • A pencil case with a few thin-tipped pens, and with pencils having different degrees of softness, and of course an eraser

  • A water brush (a brush with water inside of it)

  • A small watercolor set

  • The sketchbook itself

Research Task 3:1 A reportage case study

Veronica Lawlor’s art is colorful and simple form a distance. Just lines and splashes of color. Contours and big shapes. Drawn quickly but maintaining a wonderful sense of balance. The heads are simple, but full of character and distinct. She has created many mundane scenes in cafes and bars and restaurants, parks, views of buildings, but her focus on character and atmosphere makes them come to life.

Lawlor uses various materials: watercolor, pen and ink (sepia or black), colored pencils, pastels. Possibly others as well.

She balances out crowded space with lots of color and line with completely white space. She also uses contrast of texture between clean black on white and messy pastels overlapping each other.

On some of her illustrations, one can tell that she either re-drafted or composed them in a studio, because of steady lettering or because of color added digitally.

While some of her pieces are a faithful representation of the environment, others look like a collage of impressions from around the location or event. She uses fluid, dynamic lines. Caring more about the impression or the feeling of a pose instead of anatomical accuracy.

Research Task 3:2 Reporting and Documenting

Framing the evidence of war

This article presents the journalistic graphic novel created by Didier Lefèvre and Emmanuel Gulibert.

The book was published in French and it follows the journalist’s journey starting with his leaving with doctors without borders from Pakistan, then into the Afghanistan war with Soviet Union. The graphic novel was created with the memories and photographs of Lefèvre, but with Gulibert’s collaboration, they completed “missing” panels with illustrations, thus creating a unique sort of sequential storytelling using both photographs and illustrations.

I personally enjoy graphic novels, so I find the idea of using this medium to tell an important story excellent. Some may believe that a graphic novel format trivializes the story, but I believe it enhances it. Especially if one included both photography and illustration. Then the book both has the concrete reality of the story and the emotion created by the words and the illustrations of the creators.

Ardizzone at peace and in conflict

Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979) was a war artist during the Second World War.
He uses a “deliberate anachronism of style”, choosing a more traditional approach that his contemporaries and encouraging learning from and copying the classics. Ardizzone travelled in the retreat from Belgium and France that ended at Dunkirk, recording what he saw both in text and in image. He also participated in North African and Italian campaigns.  Ardizzone had great strength in depicting the humanity that he saw amid war. He was even slightly comical on occasion, though his critics would say that war should be depicted with the aspect of its horror in the forefront. (the article gives the art of Goya as contrast). Ardizzone completed 400 war paintings, then returned home.

I find Ardizzone’s lighter style of war illustration insightful. The lighter periods between dark horrors and the human moments are perhaps even more important than the grand heroics or the gruesome happenings of war.

Olivier Kugler: bearing witness

“This contemporary illustrator uses his ears eyes, camera, digital voice recorder, sketchbook, pencil, scanner and laptop – to document stories of exile, displacement and complex reality of refugees’ lives.” This direct quote from the article already gives a lot of information as to how Olivier Kugler works and what he chooses to depict.

Kugler doesn’t sketch when conversing with the subjects. Taking notes of surroundings with his eyes and camera. He photographs and records what he sees and hears, then he creates the complete illustrations in the studio.
Using the photographs from the site he drafts his illustration in pencil, scans it, then colors it digitally. The thing that distinguishes him from many other artists is his use of text in the illustrations. This is where those voice recordings come in handy. He writes the conversations in speech bubbles around his characters. The approach is similar to one of a comic, but the illustrations are not necessarily sequential. He may include multiple actions in his work, but they all happen on the same page as a single illustration, not in multiple panels. He used to include more text, but has recently reduced it in favor of a less crowded space.

The inclusion of text in his images creates illustrations which can stand alone as reportage pieces without the aid of a article alongside them. Yes, they can be a bit crowded, and they cannot necessarily be considered artwork in the same way one would consider Ardizzone’s paintings artwork. But it can be argued that Kugler’s illustration do an even better job of informing than a traditional style would.

Research Task 3.3 Reporting and documenting

These images portray the French Police’s destruction of a refugee camp called “the Jungle”. Both show one or more policemen on site surrounded by destruction.

What is each image expressing, describing or communicating? Which image do you think is most memorable? Does one image seem more truthful and why?

I believe that the more memorable image is the illustration by Peter Boldau. It is deliberate in its message. The photograph could be interpreted in many ways, but the obvious interpretation would be the exact opposite of what the reality of the situation had been. In viewing the photograph, one would assume that the police officer in the foreground is pointing at the destruction and ordering someone to help stop it, when the exact opposite was happening. But in the illustration, the men standing, while obviously dressed in official uniforms, are also obviously the evil characters watching over the destruction in the foreground. It makes the first image look like a complete lie.

Which image would you be more likely to notice if it was in a magazine or newspaper and why?

Setting aside the fact that an illustration would always stand out among photographs, which are more commonly used in news, I would most likely notice the illustration, because the camera lens is far too impartial. The photograph is good, it caught a expressive moment and good composition, but Boldau’s illustration transmits an atmosphere and a feeling. It not only reports the of the destruction, but the tragedy.

Research Task 3.4 Creating your own version of reality

Rachel Levit

Levit is a Mexican illustrator who mostly depicts people. Her style is simple and mostly decorative. Her preferred sketching materials are pen, pencil and some color on white and toned paper. She uses Mexican motifs and simplified faces. Her drawings are not very detailed, but they are carefully rendered. The backgrounds ignored in favor of characters, mostly communicating using the characters expressions and clothes.

Jing Wei
Jing Wei’s sketchbooks are schematics for future illustrations. She studied printmaking, so she uses sketchbook to plan and refine. Materials consist solely of mechanical pencil, or at least a very sharp pencil, since the line weight is the same all throughout. Her style is all geometrical shapes and contours and patterns.

Iker Ayestaran

In Iker’s sketchbook, environments are minimal or nonexistent, but characters are plentiful and distinctive in design with small heads and large, geometrical legs. His materials are simple grey graphite and colored pencil. His sketches are quick and clean. The facial features and many of the textures are stylized or just suggested. He mostly focuses on maintaining a clear silhouette. The unfinished parts of the sketches let the geometrical, harsh design of the characters to breathe.

Jim Stoten

Jim’s artwork is elaborate, consisting mostly of overlapping textures and characters. He uses either just a black pen or collage. The sketches are very packed and detailed, contrasting greatly with the style of his finished artwork, which is clean and simple. In his sketches he edits much of the environment away in order to fit more characters, then filling the rest of the space with texture or stylized shapes. The stylization and packed nature of the images creates an overwhelming composition with a Where’s Waldo effect. No part is unfinished or undrawn. The extremely detailed sketches can be very effective.

Rob Dunleavey

Dunleavey’s sketches are many and varied, though I chose to show his crystal city series from among his sketches. His sketchbooks are filled with children’s artwork and stylized buildings, using almost any art supplies. He stylizes buildings until they were something like crystallized outlines in colorful spires. The sketches are sustained, not quick, using stylization and layers to create the crystal city effect. The buildings lack realistic detail and have become more 2 than 3 dimensional, creating images that look playful rather than true to reality.

Research Task 3.5 Visual Research

My thoughts while reading the article can be summed up as: I want to be her when I grow up. And: I want to research like that too.
This article (and this course in general) has helped me visualize in more practical terms what I have been imagining I need to do when researching a topic. The way she and the author exchanged and changed ideas. The way the article lays out how Smy went about building a visual library which she could both add to and subtract from helps tremendously in putting into words and clear actions the abstract word “research”.
Her character, the green man, is a elusive creature. Only seen by some and always intertwined with nature. Smy talks about how her original concepts for the green man were scrapped in the conversation she had with the author. They both decided the character should be ever-changing, so they both agreed on a character that is part of the landscape. Then, Pam Smy went on to research gardens and allotments she could insert her characters into.
I have created illustrations and characters based on stories before, but have not included any in my sketchbook so far. Maybe I should try that.