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Writer's pictureDan Woodward

Illustration Sketchbooks - Exercise 2.5: Drawing with objects: A journey scrapbook

This exercise has taken me a while - I have been out on many journeys, collected many bits and bobs and for one reason or another, all of the ephemera got lost or thrown away! So I was resolute that when we recently went on a family trip to the cinema, that I would keep things from the day.


There were a number of items that we collected that day, but when I reviewed them, not all of them were suitable for somehow turning them into an illustration. I took photos on the day, so I used these in my sketchbook to try and come up with some ideas.

Everything was a little pedestrian, to be honest, and I was losing a bit of hope of doing this exercise fully.

"Consider the physical properties of the objects which you have collected - their structure, design, how they are used ..."

There were some ok ideas, but nothing stood out. In re-reading the exercise instructions it asked me to "Consider the physical properties of the objects which you have collected - their structure, design, how they are used ..." As I was playing around with the pick-'n-mix box in my hands I noticed how the bottom was created from folded overlapping leaves of card. This made me think about pouches, hides and flaps from section one of this unit. My mind started to make connections looking back at my ideas page and an idea was bord, could I somehow make a pop-up cinema lobby? You can see the results below.

To add on top of that I then did a simple illustration using the cinema tickets themselves. Rather than use them whole I repurposed different parts of them to represent different things and then used a pen to create the rest of the illustration around them. I am really pleased with my pop-up idea, and I think it's been really effective. I think there's an avenue I could take around making 3D model illustrations then using photography to capture them.


Like with the blind contour drawing, I have done a little experimenting with using objects in illustrations during an illustration course I took a while ago at City Lit. You can see them below:

So I decided to go around the house and select some other objects that I could create an illustration around. Here are my results!

I think they're pretty successful, and they were a lot of fun to do. I really like this kind of work, it requires you to think more abstractly and let your imagination go wild. I'd like to experiment more with illustrations imposed onto the landscape more, which I haven't been able to do so far.

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