Printing my books

With the constant work of making the studios exhibition ready, finishing my work and setting up my exhibition space I've realised that I completely forgot to blog about printing out my two books for said exhibition.
The first I printed out was 'Absolution' my comic book. This one was relatively it is only 44 pages so I did a standard saddle-stitch binding that the printer can do automatically. I printed it on paper bigger than the book size, because bleed and then cut it down and the book was done. I actually had to add in pages to give myself a number divisible by 4 that is needed to print a book this way. Also the first one I printed I noticed a lot of my blacks weren't that black so I had to alter the files and reprint it.

My style art book, titled 'Drawing Style' was more complicated. For one thing there were 80 pages, this meant it was too thick to saddle stitch so I would have to perfect bind it. I was told this could be done using a strip at the side or with a wraparound cover. The cover way seemed nicer so I chose that way. This meant I had to print out the inside pages first, measure how thick they were together (on silk coated paper) and add that to the cover size so it could wrap around all of the book. Like before I had to print all the pages on bigger paper, (because bleed) this meant A4 in this case and then cut them down. I then got a binding strip and used a perfect binding machine to glue the inside pages together, then later do the same with the inside and the cover/back cover page. I'm really pleased with how both books turned out, they are different but think they both work best for what they are, a comic book and a what is essentially a fashion catalogue that is purely illustrated.

   

Recently I've been putting up my work for the degree show. I have quite a bit of space so am presenting quite a bit of work. I'm starting by putting my main series of work that I made specifically with this exhibition in mind in the centre of the space. This is 45 drawings in a 9x5 grid, each pinned up in each corner. This is influenced by the way Zak Smith presents his series of work such as A Drawing for Every Page of Gravity's Rainbow and Girls and Octopuses where he grids and pins large series of work simply with pins. I used very small thin dress pins to pin this series up to keep focus on the drawings, this lead to a lot of the pins bending but this actually fitted with the sketchy crude aesthetic of my drawing style.
Next, 180 pins later, I set to composing the work around it. This was hard especially as I couldn't try to many visually without covering my walls with various marks. I was attempting to get a balance of colour and size on either side but not being overly symmetrical because that's boring  and doesn't suit my sketchy rough style. After playing around a bit and discussing various compositions with my course mates I settled on the one that sounded best and doable. I pinned in my 'neater' work that was A6 or over with the same pins as my main series. For my smaller work I used double sided sticky tabs as they were so small that a pin or nail could ruin the tiny image. For the series of work you can see on the right I used larger nails to attach them to the wall. This is because these works are a lot rougher and more chaotic (hence the scattered layout), using delicate little pins didn't seem right while larger (only slightly) nails have more of a rougher affect that suits the aesthetic of the series.


The last pieces I put up were the A8 series of work I had made. I put them along the bottom of all my space with a large spacing between each of the 14 images to try and bring all these separate series of my works together. On the shelf bellow my work are my two books. Hopefully this is only temporary though as I plan to put a shelf/ledge in to hold them. This would hopefully bring more gravitas to my books, especially my comic which may otherwise be overlooked or overwhelmed by my other works.

Silence and east meets west

When the direction of my comic changed from a more typical comic to more of a montage of large landscapes with suggestions of what is going on I though about a quote from 'Understanding Comics' by Scott McCloud. I don't have the book with me but the gist is that in Japan and Eastern cultures art is is about what isn't there as much as it is about what is. This comes from Scott McCloud talking about the amount of aspect to aspect transitions in manga compared to western comics. These are panels used to establish mood and sense of place, they are usually quiet and contemplative. McCloud puts this down to Eastern cultures having an emphasis over being there rather than getting there while Western art doesn't like to wander and is more goal orientated so lingers less and is less committed to scenes that purely create atmosphere.
This is interesting in the context of my comic since moving to doing a montage story. I'm actually skipping over a lot of the action, showing the prelude and aftermath only to most events. My images have a lot of emptiness about them and are trying to create an atmosphere, they emphasise being there. At the same time changing to a montage of images for the entire narrative leads to the story being told a lot quicker, kind of goal orientated. My comic is a nice mash up of eastern and western values.

My comic is more east meets west than just that though. As much as my comic is ultimately a western it is also riddled with samurai film nods. This makes sense as most Westerns are effectively Samurai films set in the wild west instead of Japan and with guns instead of swords. I have referenced this via some clothing codes of certain characters, some settings and one character at the end becomes an eastern style monk. This also worked out well as Samurai films generally take place in green hilly mountainous landscapes not completely unlike those of Scotland that I've been being influenced by. I looked mainly at Akira Kurosawa films to inform me during the later stages of this project.

Because of how Western films are strongly influence by Samurai films they actually already had a lot of silence and emptiness to create a sense of atmosphere more so than most western media. This meant that the way my comic had been going before this change to montage and eastern influence was already perfectly situated for this change and makes the changes happening to the project and narrative now, pretty natural.

I'm going to talk more about my eastern influences in this project a bit more in later posts.

Sources

http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/seven_samurai_movie_image_01.jpg
http://blog.ricecracker.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Picture-11.png
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4LcVQJ4IBtM/maxresdefault.jpg

Every Frame a Painting

One resource I've used this project for my narrative work is  the youtube channel every frame a painting. This channel analyses certain elements in film in depth in ways you wouldn't usually think of, looking at the composition of individual frames and what the positioning and such of certain elements means. He also looks at the changes in scenes and shots and looks at why these changes are made and what they're used for. Obviously as the channel is looking at films not everything is relevant to my project, such as anything involving sound, or camera movement. Things to do with screen composition, mise-en-scene, iconography, colour, lighting etc are all appropriate to being transferred to a single illustration. Even editing and certain change of shots can be used when dealing with series of images. Also looking at film resources helps give my narrative a cinematic feel that I'm going for.

Arizona and Scotland and Work

Dimitar Marinski

Dimitar Marinski affected my work in a very similar way to Pablo Carpio. He draws big sprawling landscapes, good for atmosphere with some suggestion of people and things going on.
Unlike Carpio though a lot of Marinski's work deals with greener more nordic sorts of landscapes, Carpio, did a lot of desert and plains. A lot of his imagery reminded me of Scotland, conveniently the place I had lived last year. I looked over photos I took over that year and decided to use them in this new type of work I was doing. I also realised that my friend is currently doing a year of uni in Arizona, where many classic Westerns are filmed (monument valley and such). I had him send me photos he'd taken and using a combination of his Arizonan desert photos and my Scottish mountainous photos started creating more composed, big, montage landscape work for my comic.
I'll do a bigger post about these photos and work next.



Sources
https://cdn2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/001/308/214/large/dimitar-marinski-onemore.jpg?1444080864
https://cdn3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/001/286/675/large/dimitar-marinski-thewall.jpg?1443649349

The Dark Tower

 A big influence for my western comic project was the book series The Dark Tower by Stephen King.  The book is a sort of post apocalyptic western with sci-fi elements as well as things going on in the real world. I was most interested in the western elements and the post apocalyptic elements and decide to start storyboarding it. This was partly down to me having very clear imagery in my head of what the beginning scenes would look like.

Eventually I took the setting and applied it to my own story and that's where the bulk of my current comic project has come from. Also drawing the initial scenes for the opening of the storyboard made me really like drawing single cinematic style scenes, well composed and a little bit epic. These sorts of scenes are what my comic evolved into interestingly enough making it more like a storyboard than a comic by the end of the project.

Comic inspiration

 I've already talked about a few comics that influenced my comic project but now I'm going to talk about a few that influenced me in unique ways, be it a none typical layout, different materials or a non traditional style.

Low, Reminber, Tocchini

Low is interesting because of Tocchini's loose art style. Visually the work is striking and very interesting but the looseness, almost ethereal quality of the line work can make the comic not as clear as it could be at time. I think the uniqueness of the style is worth this though as it has such a strong aesthetic quality

Sculptor, McCloud
I have talked about Scott McCloud in a few posts, mainly about his comic understanding comics, in which he looks in depth at the history and structure of comics. Sculptor is his latest comic and I had to read it as he is such a knowledgable guy when it comes to comics. The first thing I noticed about Sculptor that is different to most comics is that it is all black white and blue, the blue being uses as shading. This gives the comic depth and variety that can be hard to achieve with just black and white but maintains the strong, clear, graphic quality generally best encapsulated by pure black and white work. The use of blue also gives the comic a sort of subtle sadness or melancholy atmosphere throughout that fits it's tone.
Also notable is the variety of paneling. McCloud often uses lots of little panels, sometimes this is to work as a sort of montage but also can be used to create tension or slow down important moments. Essentially it comes down to controlling time. This is something Scott McCloud is very good at as he understands every panel effects how the viewer reads time as well as the type of panel transition being used.


Snowblind, Masters, Jenkins

I haven't actually read Snowblind I've just seen it around and because of it's unique, strong style it stuck in my mind. The art style looks very traditional for this day and age, I don't know how the illustrations are actually done but it looks like it's coloured with water colour or something similar. More importantly to my project the line-work looks like ink, what I use, this is because there is an inconsistency of the line thickness and that the lines seem a bit insecure, loose but in a different way to Tocchini's style. It gives a kind of sketchiness to his work which I really like, to me this line-work is more visually interesting than the normal well defined but plain line-work found in most comics. I don't really like the colour work though as I find it too weak and wishy-washy, it's not intense or bold enough.


Mirror, Rios, Hwei Lim

I have never seen a comic anything like Mirror before, and I doubt there is one. Everything about it is unique. The panel shapes, page layouts, colouring and line-work are all unlike most other comics. Panels are cut up without any structural reason to separate elements, act as windows and certain ways of framing. Elements are constantly breaking out of the confines of the panels, characters appear multiple times in panels showing movement and time progression, their is also a large amount of imagery outside the panels completely. The line work is very sketchy a lot like a pencil drawing and the colouring is very like Snowblind in it's water colour like paintly style. All these elements together make it truly a unique experience, even if one aspect doesn't work all that well it still sort of fits with the style because their isn't anything else like it. This comic is good proof that there doesn't have to be any rules when making a comic, you can be as experimental as possible.

Sources
https://imagecomics.com/uploads/news/0809_LOW03_COLORS.jpghttps://imagecomics.com/uploads/releases/spotlight-intvw-mirror-01-03.jpg
http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/0/40/4903618-2+snowblind_001_06.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO8y0Tn5ig5K74PjAvtHVPgoD6rjTJhyphenhyphennyUcVk8U3Wu6KBIfFzyR8FLJLfjSZCayOzjP2LdJiUqL5u_VlkA9g0b2x4fnm60SxtvX0e3bfnxBJ7MilcQ438Z9UyBMKCcgEToXk06fa3gnm1/s1600/panels1.png

I follow a guy on instagram who goes by Sunflowerman. He describes himself as a 'Menswear artist, so his work focuses on fashion and style like mine does but on a different section of that area.

     


















 He recently posted two pictures that caught my eye because they are series of works similar to what I'm going for. One is a purely black and white series of very fashion like illustrations (focusing on clothes, a little more gestural) the other a series of more typical portraits coloured in a sort of normal watercolour style. I've been exploring work as series all year through my style work and it's interesting to see two series of work by the same artist dealing with similar subject matter to me. For my series to be exhibited I want to do a series that is linked together somehow like the series that Sunflowerman has done via his use of materials. Out of the two series (both of which I love) I find his black and white one more interesting, this might be because there are more pieces in the series (more is always better) but I also think it may be down to the unity given by only using black and white, each piece works with each other and the monochrome nature lets the work both flow while being intense (both things I want in the series I'm doing).

Maps Project

The website The Big Blue Swim wanted illustrators to design maps for their routes which are currently just depicted through google maps. Me and two of my friends decided to give it a go. We were ultimately unsuccessful at designing anything the website wanted to use but I'll write about the process anyway.

I decided I would draw the map in my usual way and then tweak it to their needs from there depending on what they say. I drew one map in fine liner pen then scanned it in and coloured it in photoshop before adding the route line and labels. I coloured the map relatively simply, a few shades of green for the land to give it a little three dimensionality with a bit of browny grey here and their to show changes in land style and white yellow for beeches, where appropriate. The sea I coloured a deep blue and then a lighter blue surf around the land. I thought the map looked very flat, sort of graphic designy so I added a slight old map parchment texture to the piece to make it interesting and bring the map alive, but still clear as to what was what.
After this I drew a map in ink and went through a similar process, this time making the colours a bit bolder and simpler as the suggestive nature of the ink isn't as clear or defines as my pen work.

I sent these pictures with a bit of writing about what I've done to the website. They replied that my line work needed to be a lot clearer, solid and more defined, they said the same about my two friend's maps as well but said mine was the furthest from what they were looking for. They also wanted simpler, clearer, bolder colouring. The colouring stuff was fine with me (though to be honest it seems a lot more boring) but I had already reigned in my sketchy line work a lot for the map drawing and while I could do more to get the style they want, because it's so against how I usually do work it would have took me a long time to draw the map and a lot of concentration and effort while doing so. It just didn't seem feasible for me to continue this project while also making all my work for my degree show.
It seemed like they wanted something very graphic design, and there's a reason I do illustration and not graphic design.

Pablo Carpio

 Pablo Carpio is a concept artist I came across via tumblr. This was around the time I was thinking of taking my comic in a new direction. I wanted to work on larger more complete that I could take my time composing and colouring rather than having to deal with all the restrictions of a standard comic layout. Carpio's work is more of an example of the sort of work I wanted to make. I altered my comic to be more of a montage of full complete digital paintings showing the narrative I had planned in a looser sense.
Carpio's work is an example of what I'm going for with vast strong landscapes with figures more subtly put in, small and over-scaled by the immense epic landscapes that take the forefront of his illustrations.






















sources:

http://imgs.abduzeedo.com/files/articles/dazzling-artworks-pablo-carpio/pablo-carpio-maraver-zanastudy2.jpg
http://41.media.tumblr.com/93bd0f48216be257447afe43b9123d7a/tumblr_npin5dsp6p1unb4zyo2_1280.jpg
http://41.media.tumblr.com/efb9a78eea70c007df68b889574ade72/tumblr_o45m1yTZjf1qhttpto4_1280.jpg

Demons project

Just before Easter a graphic design student needed an illustrators help for the drawings in a book she was making. The graphic design student had seen my Corridor exhibition work and thought my style would work well with the typeface she had created for her book and the subject matter of the book, which was demons. I talked to the graphic designer and her tutor about what they wanted and since it seemed simple enough I agreed to do it. They wanted a series of seven drawing each of a different sort of demon. They wanted me to use the style I had used in my style series with sharpies. These sharpie drawings I actually do very quickly and find really easy to create, so in theory the project should be easy to do.

The size of the images were 170mm by 200mm which was the size of the book. I scaled this up to a size close to A2 to do the actual work though as the student wanted me to work on a bigger scale so I could get the detail and intensity I got in my series of works. I found it awkward as even though A2-ish is a lot bigger than the A6 series the stye is inspired by, the fact that I'm drawing entire creatures rather than just bits (like the majority of my work) and filling in a background in that area to which meant the actual body of a lot of the demons was smaller than I'm used to drawing in sharpie.

Drawing the demons was also an interesting challenge. The style work that influenced the pieces were all drawn from photographs, obviously this can't be the case with demons. On top of this the demons included in the book are all rather odd ones that I've never heard of and that only come up with a few results in google images. The graphic design student sent me a list of the demons with a brief description and what needed to be included in the drawing. She also sent a few reference images of each, although nothing too clear. It was enough to work from though.

I drew up initial designs of the demons and the compositions of the pieces in my sketchbook first, then drew them in the page layout I had on A2 paper. I then sent these to the student and sorted any issues either on photoshop or by placing a piece of tracing paper over the initial drawing and tracing over it making adjustments where needed. The sorts of things that generally needed changing were like, these lips should be different or the lines here need to be thicker, so nothing too hard to change in these ways.

Style block

After Christmas I went through a period where I really had no idea where to go with my style project. I had been making various series of work based on style for a while and got in the habit of working on a smaller and smaller scale, I was taking my own model photos but didn't really know what to do with them. I was continuing making series of work but it felt very repetitive, like I was just repeating what I did earlier in the year. I started to focus more on my narrative work while I kept the direction of my style project in the back of my mind. One day I realised a simple solution to do something different would be to make some big work based around style. This lead to me just doing some relatively quick A1 drawings of a few of my photos in various different ways. I didn't really know where the work was going but it was enough to get me out of my rut. The work I made was alright but a little boring, there wasn't much to them. The works were too big to work in a series, and as I always mention work always works better in a series. Anyway this work was different enough to allow me to think of other possibilities I could take with this project. This includes ideas similar to ones I've already done which I was avoiding at first because of repetitiveness, I now feel I can go back to these ideas and feel like I'm developing them rather than repeating them.

The Art Walk/ T1 corridor exhibition

This post is coming a bit late (about 4-5 months late). Just before Christmas some of our course, including me set up an exhibition in the T1 corridor of our building. I was the curator for the Illustration side of our course. The whole event served as like a mini practice session for our final degree show (in which I'm one of two curators for illustration). I submitted two pieces of mine for the exhibition.

 Thinking about how to present my work was pretty useful, both in how to present the piece itself, how to make use of the space and having it go with the flow of the other pieces in the exhibition. Obviously this involved thinking about everyones work together rather than just my own and this is what a big part of being a curator for the degree show will be as well.

In the end everything was pretty simple and the exhibition went smoothly though it was quite a bit of work making the area ready to exhibit and putting up all the work.

Fashion illustrators continued

Richard Kilroy

I find Kilroy's style pretty boring... incredibly boring. I really hate this style of clean photorealistic realistic black and white work. It always seems kind of plasticky and unless the lighting is incredibly dramatic it will always appear flat; and not in the good way. In an uninteresting, nothing to elevate from the page and actually make make the viewer look or think about the work kind of way. Luckily as you can see in the photos Kilroy only uses this style on some of the figure, leaving the rest of the figure to be drawn with limited basic line work. While I don't like the style of his detailed areas I do think the contrast between the detailed and empty areas of his work is very interesting and could work well if applied in some way to my own work with my more interesting sketchy linear style.


Julie Verhoeven 

Verhoeven's work is very different to mine. It is pretty abstract and loose in a grotesque sort of way and colour is in general used in a much greater way than in my work. She kind of reminds me of Egon Schiele except her work is a bit more expressive and loose, in a grotesque way. While their is a lot of looseness in Schiele's work it is a controlled purposeful looseness while Verhoeven's comes across as more wild and thus the end result appears warped and grotesque as apposed to Schiele who's work I find visually appealing. I'm sure that's not what Verhoeven's work is going for but it is what my work is aiming for, our styles are simply very different.

There are some things I can take from her work however. These are things like her use of different coloured line work, as apposed to just black, and the strength of her lines as well as the loose way she uses ink sometimes being pretty interesting and not jus unappealing. She also deals with interesting poses, something I'm also working with except she exaggerates and warps her poses past a point of aesthetic pleasantness.



Antonio Lopez



I really Lopez's work. He has a strong intense graphic style and uses a range of marks and tones throughout his work. It has that flatness that I've been talking about but the dynamic brush work and marks bring the work of the page and make the work not only visually interesting but aesthetically appealing as well. While his work deviates a bit (though not that much) from my own the end result is pretty much what I'm going for, Something that shows of the aesthetic quality and style of the model themselves while  also bringing attention to the fact that it is still a drawing and presenting these two aspect in tandem.  An interesting thing about his work that I really like is how he keeps the skin of his models clear, not doing any tone work. I've looked at artists who do similar techniques, usually to separate the clothes from the model themselves. This doesn't happen with Lopez's work however the model and their clothing, and their hair are blended seamlessly to be one being (exactly what I'm going for in my own work). I put the reason that these elements work together in his work down to using a strong use of line for the skin areas of the model and the same sort of line for the clothing as well, connecting the drawing by having the same basic structure throughout despite different marks and shades being used within to present the differences in texture and material.

Image sources:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/39/44/19/39441980b72554d854c82a5875501ed8.jpg
http://lfwdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Julie-David-610x769.jpg
http://www.jujuchan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/PlasticDreams2JulieVerhoeven.jpg
http://www.fashionillustrationgallery.com/wp-content/uploads/02390_AL_il_figsite.jpg
http://www.bklynlibrary.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/exhibition_large/images/events/exhibitions/2012/Antonio%20Lopez_BROOKLYN__1_300dpi._H-7_%5B1%5D.jpg

Fashion artists

Even though I don't consider my Style based work fashion illustration there are still obvious overlaps between the two. This means I have looked at quite a few fashion illustrators and artists over this project, though many only in passing.

Rene Gruau

Gruau has a very flat style in a lot of his work (at least the work of his that interests me) that I find visually striking and impactful at first but capture my attention for long. This may be fine for work in magazines and such to initially get the viewers attention but I feel like if the work was a little less simplistic but still maintained its flatness  then it could be more visually interesting, maybe if some hints of texture were added (which he admittedly he does do every now and again).

I feel like this would be sort of similar to my sharpie work which is pretty flat but still interesting due to the sketchy nature of my work.
In general my drawings have a lot more going on than his which isn't necessarily a good thing but in this case I think it makes my work more visually captivating and interesting although the simplicity and graphic quality of his work may be more impactful initially.




Rene Bouche

Apparently Rene is the name to have if you want to be a fashion illustrator. Bouche's work is rather linear, with strong varied lines, kind of scribbly and used well with great effect to convey differences in material and texture. The way he uses differing lines and techniques to illustrate these differences is what interests me most about his work and is something I'm trying to achieve with greater clarity on my own work.
For example in his ink work he  leaves the skin plain tonally  while detailing the clothing with a wide spectrum of tones and washes. The hair is similar but less detailed than the clothing. Also while the hair and skin of the model is drawn rather definitively the clothing is a little more loose and gestural, while still having some intensity. In my ink work I use a similar disparity of marks and gestures to get a similar effect but unlike Bouche I don't put any emphasis on making the clothes stand out so draw every aspect of the model in the same sort of detail. This difference in Bouche's and I's work is due to how he is a fashion illustrator so his work is all about the clothing at the core; my work is more about the identity of the model as a whole so as much emphasis is put on the model themselves as the clothes they wear. While I do use different techniques and marks to show different materials and textures I also keep some similarities running through a piece to present each aspect as a whole unified being.


I'll write about other fashion illustrators in upcoming posts.

Image sources:
 http://www.palaisgalliera.paris.fr/sites/galliera/files/styles/cloud_zoom/public/oeuvre/visuels_principaux/77439-26_1.jpg?itok=N55FiNtg  
http://archdezart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/gruau2.jpg
https://thewitcontinuum.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/33524-rene-bouche-1955-p2-christian-dior-jacques-heim-evening-gown-hprints-com.jpg
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/07/05/65/070565d965d62a623cb6599fe32d81c4.jpg