Exercise: Client visuals

For this exercise I had to chose two illustrations by other illustrators and edit it down to its main structural form as a way to create a clear visual.

So I chose two images of finished illustrations from things I had collected and seen that had a good range of content. I really love underwater scenes and Sarah Wilkins has a great style so I borrowed her illustration preview she shared on a book she is currently working to illustrate. I also found really cute images from the illustrator Aeppol. It’s hard to find lots of information on this person as a lot of it is in the Korean language but there is a facebook page at least. I decided on the one of a sleeping girl on the couch given it has her, photos on the wall and an interesting shadow feature on the wall from the sun shining through the window.

I decided to use hard, medium and soft charcoal pencils to get a clean but textured line to create a visual for both illustrations. I couldn’t find information on the actual original size but based on the size in the image when downloaded, I made it 2.5times bigger to about 75cm2 (both images were square) as instructed. They turned out as per the below!

I then had to redo the image but try to remove as much content as possible to that the image is distilled to an extremely edited form but still makes sense. It was helpful to have done the normal visual first as having gone through the process it was easier to identify where I could distill further and they turned out like the below. 

For ease of comparison, see below all three images next to each other for both illustrations:

I actually found that forcing myself to be even more succinct with the images was actually useful and even easier to actually get the right proportions and positions of the main shapes in the image instead of getting lost in trying to get the detail first – which I recognise I often do! It reminded me of the processes of doing heads and bodies that I tried out where we had to create the main shapes and angles first and then fill in the detail.

This was also useful to help me get more loose with thumbnailing without trying to get too perfect but working in flow of ideas and quickly so that I could capture my thoughts.

This exercise also really served to give me insight into the reverse process where the client edits the visual to get a final image – a process known as art direction. I look into what this meant online and found some images that made me more aware of the art direction behind them and made some notes as per the below.

Victoria Semykina’s the Real Boat https://www.semykina.com/boat

I love how the boats have been made very simple and the seagulls in particular have been made almost in one or two strokes or in an outline only, making them transparent. I think it works really well with birds since they are in flight and so suggests movement and the confusion you see when birds fly together and is almost ‘lighter’ than in real life/form.

Fran Labuschagne’s https://franlabuschagne.com/ illustrations of people at the beach in summer https://franlabuschagne.com/summer are also really simplified and geometrical. Elongating the legs of the bodies to give a particular style that is also very surreal, making shadows into surreal parallelograms, using curvy shapes for the sunset on the water. 

Francesca di Chiara’s https://www.directoryofillustration.com/artist.aspx?AID=10949 polar bears are stunningly cute. From a polar bear’s real form and potentially perceived aggressive nature to something that looks cute, round and cuddly – that’s brilliant! From making the claws tiny little lines and making giving them cute big noses and little cheeks –  this goes very far from the original form and gives a great friendliness to otherwise what is a scary animal.

Finally, Jeremy Booth’s https://www.artistique-int.com/jeremy-booth gorgeous swiss alps scene of a village nestled in valley and a ski lift en route really made an impression on me. Not least because I love to ski and I love the simple and reduced colour palette. All the chalets have been given the same shape and the two-tone simple mountain in the background rally catches your eye. Since its digitally made but kept in monotones with no texture and repetitive shapes, it has a great modern yet retro style that mimics the old 50s and 60s posters you can now pay a fortune for on the same subject. 

Final reflections:

This exercise really helped me think about this styles and work of other illustrators and reflect on my own. Finding my own style is something I am really working towards developing and so it is helpful to reflect on how illustrations are pieced together and styles used from the simplest forms. I often want to stick to more objective drawing as that is what I am used to but analysing the beautiful and more subjective shapes and styles is inspiring me to break away from objective and really try to be more spontaneous and align style also to the messaging desired.

This was also really useful to think about composition as when I was sketching the illustrations above, I really had to think about where the elements were, how big compared to others, the space and distance between them, the emphasis and where the eye was drawn to, which I am not used to analysing when I look at illustrations. I hope this helps me be more analytical.