For this exercise I was considering the world of children's books - how illustrators communicate visually to children, and what choices they make to to that. To start with, I conducted some extensive research in my local library, book shops and on the internet to curate a catalogue of images that I thought represented the age brackets listed in my coursebook. If you want to see all 200+ examples you may need to click the link on the box below:
This was a wonderfully experience. Both inspiring and daunting in equal measure! The exercise then asked me to choose two of the age groups, and brainstorm around at least one of these words:
Festival Scary Wild Growing Journey Sad Family Discovery
I decided to choose Early Reader (5-7) and Older Readers (9+). I split the above words between the two groups, and then set about exploring ideas, images and themes in my sketchbook using mind maps:
The way the exercise instructions were written meant that they were a little confusing. I re-read the text and noticed I also needed to consider animals that might relate to the age groups and themes explored above. So I went on and explored the roles of animals more in my sketchbook, pulling in visual references not only from my research, but also elements from work I'd seen at the World Illustration awards and from cartoons that my son enjoys (he's 6, so was a perfect for bouncing off ideas for the 5-7 bracket).
What is your response to the idea 'all children’s illustration has bright colours’?
As I explored ideas and relationship, I thought about one of the questions posed in the exercise instructions: What is your response to the idea [that] ‘all children’s illustration has bright colours’? Honestly, some of the finest work I have seen lately has used limited or muted palettes, and they create environments that are really engagement. All children want the ability to experience a wide range of emotions, safely. Colour should be a huge part of this, enabling to maximise the effect of the words, and also doing the heavy-lifting in communicating emotional tones visually.
As I went from connection to connection I tried to play with the idea of animal sterotypes and emotions. As I was thinking about rabbits, I got the idea of a Film Noire, and how that idea could be used for younger children. Noir comics have been around for decades but I have never seen that style done for younger audiences. The idea lead me to find a new graphic novel with anthropomorphic animals in a 50's detective setting, but these would only have been suitable for older readers. The idea of the noir bunny cops Warren and Hutch was something that had really inspired me, and it prompted some further exploration:
I really thought that this would be the direction that I would take this exercise. I found a wonderful book called Footpath Flowers [1] that started to explore some ideas close to those I had thought about for a kids noir comic. But something didn't really sit right with me. I got the feeling I was twisting the brief to suit this motivating idea. So I parked it - it's definitely an idea I am excited about but I can come back to it later as personal work, or a future bit of coursework, who knows.
Now a bit frustrated, I started to doodle ideas in my sketchbook to try and fit animals and ideas from the list together. As I did, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the age groups. The Family keyword had been popping out to me during my exploration. My family is very important to me, but my relationship with my mum and sister seems really complicated right now. I ended up remembering what it was like to be close to my sister, and weekend mornings when we would turn our sofa into a den before my parents got up. They were good times, and something that I felt would be relatable. More than that, though, it was an homage to fun my sister and I used to have.
I did a little study in acrylic gouache to play around and refine some of the ideas I had explored in my sketchbook. I liked the idea of trying to replicate texture simply, and decided the best way to play with this idea next would be to move to the iPad and experiment.
In experimenting, I got into a flow of new ideas which I just went with, and I started to think of narrative elements to pull into the picture to tell the story that was forming in my head. I got to a point in the artwork where I was pretty happy, which you can see below:
I really liked the texture, simplicity and palette that I had used. I enjoyed the balance between detailed line work for characters, and simplistic lines and shapes for the other elements. In my last Tutor Feedback, I had noticed that I had not explored lighting enough early in that section. Given my artwork featured a topless floor lamp, it seemed like slight should play an important part of this work. So I added a layer on top of the ones I already had to start exploring how I could use lighting.
Rather than blue tones, I wanted to keep the warm feeling of the piece, and so opted to use brown instead. I think overall it's quite effective. The image does tell a story, but it also feels like it's missing text. I showed the piece to fellow OCA students who were very complimentary, but didn't have much to critique.
After a day or so I really felt that the image was missing text to work with the visual language. So I decided to rectify this. I placed the image into Affinity Publisher, a desktop publishing programme much like Adobe InDesign, and set to working out how best to use text for effect. I decided to go with a nice readable but accessible serif font (Georgia) which is timeless and would aid the young reader. To marry that, I then chose a display font with a hand-drawn effect to really emphasise the onomatopoeic aspect of the children springing into action. This also hopefully helped the overall accessibility for young readers.
I am really pleased with the final result and think it meets the brief well. I would liked to have experimented more with how best to render the rabbits stylistically but I think my choices here work well enough. I thought that the age brackets that I was given for this exercise worked well enough, but I don't think that ability to read and the style of visual communication is as clear cut as those brackets. In Waterstones I noticed that they use slightly different brackets, and my experience with my own son has shown me that, at age six, his tastes straddle three of the brackets depending on context.
There seems to be an assumption that when you are young, visuals are the only way to convey information, then with a few words. As you get older the balance between visuals and words shifts until only words remain. This divergence of art and word has created a world where "fine art" and "fine literature" exist, and look down on those pieces who seek to capture the efficacy of combining words and pictures. Scott McCloud speaks to this in his seminal first book, Understanding Comics [2]. I think we should be pushing the boundaries of what is not only acceptable, but also what is useful where visual communication and visual literacy are concerned.
Lawson, J. and Smith, S. (2016). Footpath flowers. Walker Books.
McCloud, S. and Martin, M. (1994). Understanding comics. New York, NY: William Morrow, HarperCollinsPublishers, pp.140-161.
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