BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

First task – “Brief Encounters”

The first task we were set was a task called “brief encounters” where we had to create four illustrations inspired by encounters that we faced throughout the week, before handing them in at the end. The illustrations could be in any medium that we were comfortable with, and did not have to look a certain way, encouraging us to work in a way that would show off our individuality.  Each encounter had to come from / be inspired by the following four sources :

• A real life situation
• A UAL library book
• A free newspaper / magazine
• An Online source – eg social media / an article etc

These sources were the only limitations we had, the rest of what was created was up to us. My four illustrations included use of ink, pencil, watercolour and collage elements.

• Illustration 1 – inspired from an online source, this illustration was inspired from “an online source”. I found an article online about research that had been done on a dwarf planet that orbited outside of our solar system, the article also looked into a study into a possible new “giant planet” that was yet to be discovered, due to how certain objects were being affected. This article sparked a conversation between me and one of my friends about how much we don’t know about our universe, and if we would ever be able to find out. This inspired my first illustration, I wanted to include elements of the text conversation and also wanted to document the feeling of how “lost” we are because of how little we know about our universe.
• Illustration 2 – inspired from a UAL library book. When looking into a UAL library book I chose to look at the comic book and graphic novels section, I was interested in being inspired by the art styles of different illustrators to somehow mimic in an illustration of my own. I found three different books from which the styles were quite different,  Lighter Than My Shadow – Katie Green, Ojingogo – Matthew Forsythe, Lost At Sea – Byran Lee O’Malley. I chose to create a series of illustrations that showed my “encounter” with the books as I entered the library, documenting this by creating a series of small comic strips inspired by the work of each artist from each book.
• Illustration 3 – Inspired from a real life situation. The night we got set this task, I was encountered by a sunset while sitting at home, the colours of this sunset were enough to change the atmosphere I was in, and also the mood I felt. I documented this sunset and then wanted to find a similar encounter closer to UAL, I wanted to find something that I again encounter unexpectedly that changes the atmosphere and the mood of my surroundings. This happened while travelling home on the Northern Line, I heard someone playing the saxophone, which instantly changed the mood of the busy underground, and changed how I felt. In this illustration therefore I decided to document both encounters, the colours of the sunset and the music of the saxophone, the music notes being replace with the stops of the Northern Line, to document where the music came from.
• Illustration 4 – Inspired from a newspaper. This illustration was inspired by me reading an article about the tsunami that took place in Indonesia, that I found in a free newspaper. I wanted to document this as my encounter, as I wanted to show the difference between my encounter with the tsunami vs the encounter of the people experiencing it. I decided to use collage elements from the article to have in the image that included both image and typography, to show the severity of the situation, even if I wasn’t the one experiencing it.

I tried to make each encounter different, and explored what concept I could create from each encounter I experienced, two of them being more literal, from the UAL book and the newspaper, and two of them being more abstract, from the online source and the real life encounter. I found this task successful as it allowed me to explore the term “encounter” and what I could take from it, and also was a good starting point as it was something to get me started in a way that was independent.

Below are the four illustrations I created from this task and also some research notes.