DECONSTRUCTION
This workshop encouraged us to become a bit freer with our illustrations, and to begin breaking down the different elements that make up an illustration to get us thinking about the individual parts of illustration rather than final, solid products. We used our illustrations from our Brief Encounters task to create imagery that focussed on the line, shape, colour and tone of our illustrations and to focus on the individual factors and break down what we had previously created.
The first part of the workshop was focussing on line, using charcoal and continuous line drawing we had to create imagery focussing on only the line used in our original drawings, taking it apart and creating more of an abstract response. This allowed us to look at what lines we had created, were they sketchy ? Did they flow? Or were they strong and sharp? The continual line element of this task helped us to work only with line and to not create shapes or shadows.
Once we had focussed on the line element of our original drawings, we moved onto what shapes we could see. This was focussing more on the geometric parts of our illustrations and how to pull them apart from the overall image. For example one of my illustrations has text bubbles as part of it, so I took their curved shape and made them into more of an abstract pattern. While generating a more abstract piece out of our original shapes, it also created new shapes as we put both our line work and geometric work together, it was interesting to see how a new series of shapes had been created from breaking down our original ones. We again used charcoal for this, and included more colour and tone, to make some of the shapes stand out.
The next element of breaking down our illustrations was to focus on the tonal elements of the image, the shadows, highlights and mid tones, and use charcoal to blow up a section of a drawing using only the tone, no line or shape. This was getting us to look at the different shades in an image there is, that give it it’s shape and form. For this part I chose to focus on the section of my illustration where I had drawn a planet in space, the dark tones of the sky contrasted with the softer and lighter tones of the planet’s surface were effective when completing this task. To follow onward from this task, we had to write down a scenario that happened that inspired one of the four of our Brief Encounters illustrations and create an image that showed this story. I chose to document a sunset that had inspired my first illustration as that was the one that I remember the most vividly and could create strong imagery out of. We then had to turn our drawing around and add on this image to our previous tonal drawing. Because I had already drawn a sky from my previous drawing, I decided to use the dark tones of the sky to create the dark tones of my new sunset drawing, and have them link directly to each other.
This workshop was an effective way to get us thinking about all the different stages an illustration can go through, and how they are made, they are never fully finished products and can be taken and turned into something new. I think this is an important thing to think about following the discussion of What Is Illustration? as it shows that illustration is constantly developing and changing.
LUCIE LOCK - UNI BLOG 