Illustration 1, Assignment 4 - Magazine Illustration

This is the culmination of Section Four - Style. From what I can gather from my research around the web, my conversations with other OCA students on Facebook, Disqus, and Discord, and my own struggles and experience - Style is always a hot topic, and I am thankful that I am not the only one to have struggled (and continue to struggle) with it.

This assignment was to test my ability to work in the editorial space. It would need me to not only combine what I had learned so far in the exercises of this section, but also to work with an ambiguous brief.

The Brief

The brief is to create an illustration from a list of four topics: Lost, Disaster, Discovery and Guilty Secret. Not only this, but the illustration needed to be built upon a still life. Everything else is up to me to decide. That's a good and a bad thing, right?

The assignment itself did have some stipulations about working process. To start, I needed to set up my still life and produce an object drawing of my subject.

I had chosen books, as they have been a central source of discovery for me throughout my life. Whether fiction or non fiction, they guide me to new ideas and new understanding. Whilst I was assembling the still life I found one of my son's Lego minifigures. It had a backback on, and immediately made me thought of an adventurer or explorer. That seemed to fit the brief too so I included it in my setup.

I concentrated a lot on perspective and composition, and less on the colours, decoration or text of the books. I included some other desk items to balance and add interest to the image. I scanned the drawing in so I could include it in my learning log, then processed to start the next stipulated stage: Creating a tonal image. I decided to use charcoal, as I don't get a lot of chance to use it every day, and it would give me a good challenge. It would also keep me from worrying about colour at this stage.

I worked on top of my original drawing and work into it. At first I ended up with more of a general mush of grey, so I working more into it, looking at my still life and trying to get a good representation of the values. I then used various erasers to be more reductive, adding in highlights and lighter tones that had been lost. I did make a mistake towards the end by not thinking about my dirty hand, and smudged things a bit! I also took some time to sketch out other compositions by moving myself around the still life.

In doing these thumbnails I really noticed the gap in between the books, and it made me think of a Odyssey-like adventure. Which got me thinking about the light - what if the light was coming from within the gap, wouldn't that make for an interesting narrative fitting of the brief? So I closed the curtains and turned off the lights, Putting a torch behind the gap, I proceeded to take photos to see what different compositions might look like.

By this point I was really inspired. I had in my head a composition that was a bit of a combination of one of my drawn and photographed compositions. But to pull it off properly I needed to accentuate the height and proportions of the books, which meant that keeping the perspective believable would be tricky.

After a few failed sketches with and without using a ruler I decided t I needed some assistance to progress (and avoid myself getting disheartened). I decided to make myself some scaffolding. So I used Clip Studio Paint so I could benefit from its perspective tool that allow me to do the work of creating vanishing points, horizons and guides like I have in the past, but to then help snap to the perspective lines once you start drawing.

From this place, I was able to create my scaffolding and export it as a plain image that I could import into Affinity Designer:

I then used this scaffolding to start experimenting with where I would add my character, what the lighting might look like, and where the text would best fit. I ended up with the following visuals:

One of the things I paid particular attention to was the figure. I had learnt a lot from the character design exercise, especially when it came to poses having energy or not. This is also something I have been mindful of from the feedback my tutor gave me from my last assignment. I think my visual captures dynamism even in a standing pose. I think my last assignment lost some of its energy because I obsessed about things being anatomically correct, so this time I decided to play more into the action lines of the character, and not worry too much about an anatomically correct character.

Building on top of the visuals, I started by creating shapes and filling them with flat colour.

I rechecked the sense of scale and proportion. The character is a little low in the picture, but I hoped that the lighting would direct the eye to the character as I intended.

The next step was to think of colours. I used a colour wheel (From Adobe Colour) to play around with different options. I wanted something colourful ,but not garish like the random colours in my flat image above. I settled on using an analogous pattern from pink to orange, and then manually selected a light teal as a complementary accent colour. I put these into the artwork, playing with the values a little to help things fits and contrast. I played with different combinations along the way until I was happy. About half way through I messed around with the curves to replicate other colour schemes, but nothing gave me the warmth I was after, the glow. I used some gradients in the gap and background to represent the discovery of knowledge my adventurer was after.

However I did acknowledge that everything was a bit full-on and samey. I had a plan to add in shadow to knock-back the garishness, but needed to add in some visual interest. Given all the exercises I have done this Section, I felt compelled to continue with my experiments using texture. They have been getting more and more successful and I had so much fun experimenting with different colours, layer blends and techniques. They were all different books so I had lots of opportunities to play with different textures to make them feel different but still homogenous. I am really pleased with this work, especially as I have not been reliant on line art this time.

I realised I needed it to be more obvious that these were books. So I also decided to add in text to the spines to make that obvious. I played with different fonts, and altered their perspective to that they fit seamlessly into the perspective of the artwork. I wrote down different potential fake titles, and started to think about the fictitious article this would go with. I had the idea of young people seeing books as trendy again, and going back to paper over screens to get a sense of truth. I chose book titles that I thought reinforced that message.

The only thing left was to add in the shadows. I used a blue layer and cut out the shapes where the light would shine through. My intention was to highlight the explorer, so I used an expanding light coming from the gap in the books, but then created an arrow-like effect with the leg shadows to try and bring the eye back to rest on the figure. I think it's pretty successful.

I also created a mockup with some placeholder text to see how it looked in context:

Background photo created by lifeforstock - www.freepik.com

I leave this section feeling much more confident. There are definite aspect of style coming through my work, and I am winning the battle with my demons. I have resolved to try and experiment by copying and emulating stylistic cues, and I also have taken heart in my character - life drawing is incredibly useful for understanding how bodies work, but when it comes to character design, I need to start trusting how I put characters together and represent people, and realised that there is a place for stylisoc and realistic.