Learning from Victo Ngai and Tomer Hanuka

We looked at these two during the Visual Language session on composition, and I've fallen in love with both of their styles.

Tomer Hanuka's work (left) has a much more narrative (in my opinion) quality to it, and a focus on character and storytelling withing his work. This piece is a poster for the movie The Warriors, which is obviously a narrative itself, but these themes come across in his other work too. 

Ngai on the other hand seems to me to be more of an editorial illustrator - her work, although it does have a narrative and character element, comes across to me as singular pieces made for a specific context rather than part of a wider story.

The main thing I admire though about both illustrators is their digital ability. I'd like to be able to use digital media as well as these two do. Their line quality and use of colour through Photoshop (or similar) is something I want to get better at myself. I've not pushed myself to work much with digital this year - I'm a bit of a perfectionist and my mentality is that if I can't do something right the first time then I don't want to try and fail. I'm working on improving this mentality into something more productive, so that I take more risks and experiment with my work. And above all else, be exhaustive! Draw LOTS! Draw things many times until I can do it with my left hand and eyes shut type thing. I need to use my sketchbook (analouge OR digital) for its intended use - sketching. Not perfect finished pieces. I need to practice, get the hours in and actually try, not just sit around and wait for the skills to come to me.

Study Task 4 - Where am I now?

Louise Lockhart

I've already talked a lot about Lousie Lockhart in my Visual narratives brief, so I won't go on too much.

She uses a lot of shape and bold colours, and a lot of print. Her work inspires me to use more shape and bold colour, and also perhaps venture into printing at some point? Her work contains a lot of texture as a by-product of printed, but this gives it a cute low-fi and naive look, with a lot of content and detail within the image.

I also like her use of hand drawn type - it keeps her work feeling handmade rather than kinda harsh digital 'perfection'.

OUIL405 Visual Narratives evaluation

1.  Which practical skills and methodologies have you developed within this module and how effectively do you think you are employing them within your own practice?
·         Developed my use of colour and shape, steering away from my usual choice of black line. ·         I've also developed my use of research within my work, finding the personal research trips helpful in developing my ideas through taking pictures and drawing - problem-solving to see which ideas work best.
2. Which approaches to research have you found most valuable during this module. How have you interrogated your research to identify appropriate ideas?
·         I found the personal research trip very useful for developing ideas - taking lots of pictures and identifying visual themes that I was interested in through drawing. ·         Artist research has also been an ongoing useful way of exploring new ideas and finding inspiration.
3. What strengths can you identify within your submission and how have you capitalised on these? What aspects of your submission are you satisfied with?
·         I've stepped out of my comfort zone by focusing shape and colour. I still need to play around with these elements more but I feel confident that through experimentation, my proficiency with colour and shape has improved. ·         I've looked at other artists' work and I inform my practice by being aware of what other practitioners are doing, and I'm regularly looking through platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. ·         I'm pleased with my final outcome of the module, despite struggling over the past few months with motivation problems due to mild depression. I'm proud of what I've managed to produce even if it's not my best work.
4. What areas for further development can you identify within your submission and how will you address these in the future?
·         As with the last module, I've recognised that I need to address my time management and sleep schedule - these problems in the past month or so have been exacerbated by personal issues, and I'm concentrating on fixing them by talking to people and perhaps organising timetables for myself. ·         I could have conducted more research, both primary and secondary, and experimented in my sketchbook more, with a wider variety of media. ·         I felt that because I was stepping out of my comfort zone by using shape and colour, I didn't want to push myself too hard to use media I was uncomfortable with, but I did play around with a select few in order to finalise ideas for my book.
5. How effectively are you making decisions about the development of your work? What strategies informs this decision making? ·         My decision making process can be disorganised - for example, struggling to decide on my final idea. Talking to people about my ideas helps me to realise which ideas have potential. Although I don't always agree with their perspectives, it helps me to make realisations and decisions about my work. ·         I use my sketchbook to make decisions about colour and media, as well as continuing to use roughs and storyboards to decide what works best visually. ·         Reflecting on my work on my blog also helps shed new light on my ideas, as thinking critically allows me to realise what's working and even generate wholly new ideas.
6. How effectively have you managed this project and organised yourself during this module? ·         I've not managed this project very well. From the beginning I was struggling with sleep problems and mild depression, which has affected my motivation and time-management. Although I've been trying to work through it with the help and support of others, there have been times where I've not done this as well as I could have. As a result, there are areas throughout this module where I feel I could have done a lot better.
7.How would you grade yourself on the following areas: (please indicate using an ‘x’)  5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
	1	2	3	4	5
Attendance			x
Punctuality				x
Motivation			x
Commitment			x
Quantity of work produced			x
Quality of work produced				x
Contribution to the group				x

Edit/update for my last post (Kyle T Webster)

In my last post I wrote about how I want to explore different styles and have a variety of 'voices' in my portfolio, like Kyle T Webster, and he's just posted an article talking about this and how it's a good thing! I completely agree that it opens up more opportunities for work in the future, as different clients will want different things, but also, as he says, I can do so much more than just one style, and want to share that.

Here's the post for reference: https://medium.com/@kyleTwebster/the-style-problem-for-artists-bb4c79f2582e#.24dlfrol2

Artist influences - Kyle T Webster

This post is kinda related to the book project we're currently doing for the Visual Narratives module. I've made a blog post on my Studio Practice blog about artists that have influenced that project (which also relates to PPP) but I haven't mentioned Kyle T Webster in that particular post because what I want to say about him relates more to PPP than that module (although it does relate to that blog post!!).

In the blog post on my SP blog I talked about how I want to experiment more with shape and colour, having experimented with it in Vis Lang and looking at other artists who use those elements well. I'm much more of a 'black line' person. But this also relates to how I want to be a diverse and open illustrator. I want to be able to do a bit of everything and do it well!

Here's where Kyle comes in. During the Big Heads talk with him (which I didn't originally blog about because I hadn't got the hang of blogging yet), we looked through his portfolio and I noticed what a range of visual signatures he exhibited. For example:

These images are all have different aesthetics but they're all by Webster. I often feel like I want to make images in different ways and not stick to one style. I've been feeling that a lot in the past few months as I've started the course and progressed through the different modules and briefs - we've been pushed in different directions, limited, challenged and encouraged to open our minds to different ways of thinking and image-making. And I've been feeling it and loving it! I want to try all the things!! And do them well! My goal is to have a portfolio as diverse as Webster's by the time I finish the course.

Although I don't necessarily like all of Webster's work personally (some of the visual signatures he shows isn't what I'm interested in making myself), I can still admire his open-mindedness and skill in each area, and it's something I want to reflect in my own way.

Screen Printing - Visual Narratives and possible personal project

I really enjoyed screen printing today for the Visual Narratives first brief - a hotdog book. I've used this process before a couple of times but I really want to experiment with it more because I love the variety of effects you can get with it. For example:

Natalya Balnova in the first two - a good example of hand-drawn screen-printing and a lovely use of overlapping colours. Kristyna Baczynski in the last one - a digital approach but still a lovely use of overlapping colours to create different hues.

This is our hotdog book. Although there were some things that went wrong (detailed on my Studio Practice blog), I think experimenting more with screen printing is the only way to get better! So I want to use as many opportunities as possible to get in the print room and improve my practice.

I've actually also started on a personal project, which I hope I'll have time to complete. It'll be at least one poster based on song lyrics by my favourite band FIDLAR. After lunch in the studio session today, I kind of hit that stage of the day where you're a bit tired and can't be bothered to do what you need to do (it happens sometimes, sorry!). But I started doodling the lyrics of the songs I was listening to on my iPod.

I really liked the grungey handmade paint effect of the type - it reminded me of the Queens of the Stone Age album artwork by Boneface, 'Like Clockwork' (I'm starting to notice that I mention Boneface and this piece of work in particular quite a lot - he's one of my favourite illustrators!!):

That kind of type really suits the surf punk genre FIDLAR are, and their first album cover is similarly consisted of messy type (pictured below).

Anyway, from these lyric doodles, I got this idea for a poster, putting all the lyrics to a song on one A3 (or even A2?) sheet and maybe adding some illustrations fitting the song. For example, here, I've drawn some punks because the song is called... you guessed it, 'Punks'.

This is what I've developed so far - I've done a few versions because it's hard to know how to fit all the song lyrics on one sheet until you actually play around with size and placement. I'm going to do more (I hope) but I need to focus on our set briefs primarily.