Exercise: Image development

I made a short list of potential images and chose a shot of an interior from a magazine because I found the colours, shapes and textures so interesting and I did the cropping exercise using photoshop.

I made an effort to crop different sections of the entire image, for example

framed

but was always drawn back to the centre of the original image, which I guess you’d say was the subject, in which case I made it more important in pretty much all of my crops.

stripe

triangles

wedge

The images which I rotated so that the verticals and horizontals were at different angles to the frame were definitely more dramatic because of the sense of instability.

radius

All of these crops had an abstract feel, which I found really pleasing but felt that I might be missing out on the figurative element so I repeated the exercise using one of my photos with people in it.

I made one rotated image, out of curiosity, and that’s the most dramatic of the second batch because of the angles

leaning

For me, the close cropped images of the people are also dramatic because they are taken out of the context of the rest of the scene and are therefore more mysterious.

balance

waiting

hand

I’m not sure if the melon stall or the squatting man next to it is the main subject of the original image. The stall is in the centre and is deeply coloured, so tends to draw the eye.

These crops all make the stall more important

melons

hidden

88D&G

pensive

but these change the subject entirely

relax

stopped

I chose ‘stopped’ as the basis for my illustration.

I made a line drawing (which I forgot to scan) and had the idea to colour it with pencils in the style of the Schiele sketch I showed in my previous post. However, it became apparent that I’d got the proportions wrong and I wasn’t happy with the colour either so I decided to have another go and took a trace of my outline as a guide. Then I realised that my first drawing hadn’t been squared properly and that’s why I’d had problems with the layout. 

I then came across this beautiful calendar of paper cut images with one word captions by Nikki McClure http://nikkimcclure.com/portfolio/ and decided to rethink my approach to the drawing and the colour as these illustrations are so simple, elegant and clean and all the more effective for it.

Having traced my drawing and corrected the proportions I could see that it worked well as an outline only so I began looking for an interesting background to draw it on. I came across an old cardboard envelope and the customs label on it reminded me of a package that I’d sent to the UK a couple of weeks ago that hadn’t arrived because it was stopped in customs. I really liked the texture and colour of the cardboard and thought it would work well with Indian ink.

I decided to shade the drawing by stippling as the dots are effectively full stops and then added some splatter to take the full stop motif further and tie in with the aged nature of the surface. Then I circled the word customs and filled in the hat with red pastel to add a touch of colour, red being the colour that I most associate with stop.

I wanted to have the image stop before the borders of the page but my scanner bed wasn’t big enough to do it in one go so I decided to crop the sides and leave the top and bottom borders open.

I then made adjustments to the image and added text in photoshop.

I chose a very simple font as I wanted the word to look definite and added a full stop for emphasis.

I tried the text in white at an angle but it looked too dynamic and jarred with the angle of the white label so I tried it again in red and bold black in the lower right hand corner so that it’s the last thing on the page, like the end of a sentence.

 I like the red very much as it ties in well with the hat and circle but I think the bold black conveys the meaning of the word the best.

The image could also be seen as a comment on the immigration laws which limit the free movement of the people of North Africa who want to come to Europe. Many, many people die each year crossing the straits of Gibraltar in tiny boats, which you can see washed up on the local beaches. You could say that those people are stopped by the customs of Europe.

I found this exercise quite difficult, probably because I was trying to use a more complex composition than in previous exercises but overall I’m pleased with the outcome. The handlebars of the bike are slightly out but apart from that the drawing is OK and I’m happy with the materials I chose. I think the image and the text work well together. This has encouraged me to experiment further with different surfaces.