For this exercise the idea is to retrospectively come up with an illustration for an editorial article. My first hurdle was finding time to get into a newsagents to find an article! After four days of not being able to get away from my desk at work I decided to hit the online journalism so I could just make progress.
Sifting through the editorials of the Guardian, there were a lot of pieces about the current political tension arising from the apparently nation-sanctioned murder of a Saudi journalist, critical of the current Saudi Royal Family's leadership. I actually spent a great deal of my childhood in Saudi Arabia, so these stories always pique my interest, as I have a first-hand point of reference of what it's like to be in that country. Time have definitely changed, but yet so much seems to stay the same. The article I found is here.
Reading on a screen is not effectual for the way I needed to understand and dissect the piece. So the first thing I did was to copy the text into a word processor and print it out, so I could follow the directions in the exercise brief.
I found this really useful, not only to be able to re-read the article easily as many times as I needed, but the tactile aspect of highlighting and underlining really helped me to start to make connections in my brain and pull out some key themes.
There is definitely something in the act of using tactile media that engages both sides of my brain and helps the problem-solving process.
Just having words highlighted wasn't enough to help me formulate an idea that could turn into an illustration. I had to build some subtext, and more importantly start to make some connections.
The best way foe me to do that was to use my sketchbook. This is something I do a lot as part of my day job - I have a book much like a sketchbook which I use for explaining and understanding ideas, much more than just simple note-taking.
It's not a mind-map per se, but it's my way of putting connections and order to concepts. For me, at the heart of the article was critical choice that would have to be made. Also, that certain options we convenient, and the other choice was harder. The other choice felt like there was no way from coming back from (even if it might be the 'right' choice).
Originally I thought of the film The Matrix, where the main character has to make a choice to live in ignorance, or know the truth. This was the initial thought, but the more I pondered the analogy the more I thought it was not the same kind of choice in the article.
The article felt more like we "were at a crossroads". Which got me thinking of Faust, and his deal with the demon Mephistopheles at a crossroad. In doing some image research I came across this depiction. The statue's garb really reminded me of traditional Saudi dress.
That's when it really hit me that a Faustian-like pact was a good analogy here. Because it's almost like the soul of the international community is at stake.
I experimented with some thumbnail layouts in my sketchbook, and re-explored the red pill / blue pill analogy from the Matrix. For my the crossroads still seemed the strongest.
I wasn't entirely happy with the composition however, and wanted to explore a more square layout to focus the attention to the conversation between the two figures.
I also wanted to practice drawing the traditional Saudi dress, as I was anxious about all the complex folds of material.
I decided to do the final work digitally, to try and get a different presentation from using traditional media. You can see the roughs below:
After the roughs I struggled - I was really unsure how to render the finished piece. At this point I imagined the comics that appear in the New Yorker, and thought that I could emulate that effect. Honestly, I think this was a safe option. It's good that it allowed me to make progress and not fall into perfectionist analysis paralysis. However, I really with I could have played more with painting digitally to explore different ways of rendering the concept. I want to discover different styles, techniques and approaches to start to work out what fits me.
I think I need to explore some other learning resources to just practice painting digitally. I am particularly thinking about how I can use shape and texture.
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