Quentin Blake

I found this really meaty interview from the very succesful british illustrator, Quentin Blake. He's been busy promoting himself like this since he started working for the NHS making murals for children's wards and showing off his visual world. Blake believes that the young illustrator should do their very best to draw as much as they can in order to be succesful. The interview is on The Guardian's website here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/sep/28/art.booksforchildrenandteenagers

There's another link from that page to this: http://www.campaignfordrawing.org/home/index.aspx

An Eye for Character and a Love for Batman

Everything seems to be going by in a blur recently and I really got to keep up with these blogs, Since I've been spending most of last week just being outside in the wintery cold and soaking up some things whilst preparing for my essay I decided to show some character designs I made a good while back. I'm a Batman fan, not so much a fan of movies and videogames but in the fact that I love to draw Batman, it may seem unusual to some but I never draw the comic book hero as most others.

I find the characters endearing in that it's easily open to reinterpretation, If you think about why Batman has so sucessful a legacy it is because he is actually easy to draw in a archetypal sense, I suppose the same goes for the villians The Joker and The Catwoman. So far I only started to do full colour studies of two of his villians that I deem worthy enough to show off. I've been busy so these studies always take second place above my college work.

Collaboration and Completion of the Wellspring Leaflets

My collaboration project for designing leaflets/flyers for the Wellspring center in Stockport gained a succesful mark. The experience has taught me to have trust in others and to be more lenient about work processes, creating these was very much a gamble and in retrospect there was no real way to change that so it very much demands adaptability, just like Darwin's ideas, strength lies in the power to adapt.

The next step of this is to refine the illustrations, since I wasn't aware of how they would look finished, such as the hatching looking bad when you blow up the image, things like that need to be changed. Five more leaflets have to be made around other topics and the idea that was recenlty given to me has to be explored. The idea was that the back of the leaflets can have an alternate version of the illustration instead of the same on the otherside. something like one illustration conveys the problem and on the back is the solution.

The Mind of a Manga Artist (Takehiko Inoue)

An interview by Takehiko Inoue which focuses more on his daily and momentary feelings and thoughts towards his craft. He is known for his basketball drama 'Slam Dunk' and his samurai drama 'Vagabond'. Another Manga he started to make in 2001 called 'Real' is about wheelchair basketball players that highlights the psychology and mental struggles that the characters face. Another thing to note is how he uses a brush in his art, I've tried to use a black pencil in the past because it gives me the control like a pen but fades like a brush, and by looking at Masamune Shirow's work I can only pontificate that he does that. Yoji Shinkawa uses ink washes and goes over it with white correction fluid, not really the kind I find honestly suitable for manga comics but I find it a beautiful use of black and white media.

See Takehiko Inoue's interview here: http://edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2012/11/29/human-to-hero-takehiko-inoue-manga.cnn

Making leaflets For The WellSpring Center

Devising leaflet designs for the WellSpring resource Ccnter in Manchester, Stockport. Not everyone who attends this place is homeless and it's much more than the usual stereotype of a soup kitchen, instead it's a place that helps people who are at risk of being homeless. The leaflets that I have to make within a group, consisting of four (two illustrators and two graphic designers), are going to be designed to advertise the services of the place. They are divided into the following topics:

Alcoholism Advice

Housing Advice

Health Care

Narcotics Advice

Employment Advice

Debt Advice

I made some rough sketches (bit too rough, in retrospect should have cleaned it and used ink) that will be the basis of the illustrations, the whole idea of hands just seems to have evolved naturally, I don’t know how the graphics students will accommodate these into the leaflet designs at this moment but I found these to be the best idea in my sketchbook and so I hope they can think of something to make it work. There are ten in total that will be needed if the WellSpring does decide to pick it up. By working in a group I think it's going to involve some give and take, like the 'pass the parcel' game, only with a piece of art and instead of unwrapping it you just add or erase a mark so it looks good in the end, Showing them the above sketches was my turn, so now I'm waiting for my next turn and keeping myself occupied in the meantime.

http://www.thewellspring.btck.co.uk/MembersArtGallery

Something to think about during the project was the stories of the people who attend the place, some are very talented and their art proved inspiring for us as you can see in these links:

http://btckstorage.blob.core.windows.net/site1528/Street%20Stories.pdf

Art of Protest

Sadly it's been a slow week that's passed me but I'm gonna make a promise to show more of my art work in my next post, meanwhile I've been wanting to make something political for sometime now:

http://www.noisefestival.com/protest

The Noise Festival is giving us the chance to make and show protest art, the deadline for submission is the 14th of December, there's a lot of info on it found in the above link.

I think the best protest art has a look and feel of parody and propaganda, it has that connection that it needs in order to establish breaking an audience's apathy. However, it still needs to have the purpose of inspiring people and I can't help but see protest and art having a viral function that is created in order to be adopted by others. Memes seem to be a good way of doing this since their is no real authorship, it's for people by people. I remember as a child how people would draw the stuzzy or batman, they became memetic because they were so easy to draw and that's one fundamental rule of creating an icon. The trick is what every advertiser knows, be memetic and memorable. At this moment I've got a sketchbook at the ready so that I can be responsive to what's going on. Next post, promise.

The Importance of Dialouge

I found this very enlightening and analytical essay by Greg Smith that talks about Final Fantasy VII and how that videogame used dialouge within the story. (found here: http://www2.gsu.edu/~jougms/Ffantasy.htm )

I know my peers and writer friends will be interested and this post is more for them. The way information and exposition can come to us as an audience without us even thinking about, the implied meaning of words the way people address one and another all adds to the bigger picture. I take it for granted since Final Fantasy is a part of my childhood, it's hard to analyze but because of its influence I should. Thanks to the essay it shown that the first scenes in that game demonstate how one character is a guide and informant to another only for the roles to reverse later in the story just so that we, the audience can get our head around what's going on. You see it all the time in cop shows, the detective arrives late on the scene and his friend is telling him what happened, it's a dialouge and narrative convention, the author is telling us what's happened from the point of view of those yet to solve the crime.

This interests me greatly as I always wonder how audiences and we as humans decide what counts as a voice of authority and its intended audience or who it addresses. I've got a "dialouge ignites change" project coming up so it's something I'll be reading into this month, possibly I'll look at 'Breaking The Glass Armor' that Smith referenced.