Abstractions...

We've now been given our second brief for the 'Word and Image' module (Curious incident is still on-going). Its to find a self contained piece of text and make a 'book' (or equivalent) of at least 12 pages. I looked at a few bits of poetry and had a go at quickly sketching out some ideas:

Prayers for the Imperfect by Henry Normal

Indian Prayer (starts "When I am dead, cry for me a little")

Invitus by W.E. Henley (one of my favourite poems of all time)

High Flight (an Airman's Ecstasy) by J.G. Magee

Have had a tutorial and the tutors suggested I follow up both the Indian prayer and Airman's Ecstasy with a bit more work - then pick one to work up into a final piece. Am quite looking forward to this ...

Cars

Just some drawings I'm doing for the "Curious Incident" brief ... sometimes I wish I'd embarked on just an illustration, rather than all this drawing AND making AND photographing that I'm attempting to do ...

Characters

Mithi's world is currently a very busy place with projects left right and center. But I just wanted to put in an update to show that things ARE progressing, albeit very slowly...

After some discussion with the tutor, I've gone down the 'boardgame' route with my 'Word and Image' module; interpreting The Curios Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. The main character really likes games and puzzles and it seemed quite appropriate to represent the story as a game, like Cluedo. So that's what I've been doing. I'm making cards to represent all the main characters, and will hopefully have a few more bits-and-bobs that go into a box that I need to design, and also an actual game board. The idea is to make it visually hang together (going for a 50s feel); but I'm not going to try and make it actually playable - that would just take up too much time. When its all done I'll set it up as if people are playing the game and take some photos and convert them to double page spreads (as that's what the final outcome needs to be)

Above are some initial attempts at drawing up the characters - the colours and what they're doing are based on things from the book (Christopher loves RED and wants to be an astronaut and go away into space with his pet rat Toby). Its early days yet, and I'm feeling a bit "artists blocked" about the game board ... but will get there eventually ...

Proverbial forest

We had a talk today from Tom Burns and then a really short and sharp workshop for the 'Word and Image' module where we were given a list of proverbs, and had three hours to come up with illustrations for one that we choose. We were also in groups so that had to tie in somehow. Our group each picked a nature themed proverb (mine being "Can't see the wood for the trees") and we also choose the colour green, and for some obscure reason making all our images have something to do with food and/or eating (!).

So you have a chap here who is so overwhelmed by the lush green trees in the forest, he doesn't even notice the thing that he's eating is a dead branch! Hmmm...... yesss....

I'm not particularly happy with the execution (this is what 3 hours gets you!). The text was hand painted in acrylic on a sheet of acetate (yes, not even enough time to scan it in a make it into a photoshop layer...); and below is the set up - the dead branch is a piece of dead plant from our garden, and the green thing at the back is a green towel - work with what you have, I say ...

Culture Vulture

Click on the images for bigger versions

This year's 'Process and Practice' module (mostly print making and paper engineering) is going by the theme of 'Culture'. Here are some sketches out of my sketchbook whilst I was thinking of imagery around 'culture'. The top two are me playing with the idea of 'bacterial culture'... something very close to my heart ;) The bottom two are looking at Malaysia and its wide mix of cultures and traditions/religions/customs etc.

I haven't quite decided what path I'm going to go down (have to produce an editioned final piece using print processes, and two double page spreads using pop-up techniques), but we've got a workshop session tomorrow where we have to bring in a colour image that we've made, and learn how to do colour separations for printmaking. I think I might bring along these two as they are both relevant to the Asian cultures thing ... and anyways, this is not the final piece but just something to help us learn the process ...

Back at it!

Wow! What a busy week this has been! Its back to school - second year of my Illustration BA, and we're off to a running start. We've got two modules running parallel this semester - 'Process and Practice' - which is a combination of print and pop-ups; and 'Word and Image' - which, as it says, is about working from texts.

The Word and Image summer work was actually to read and do some background research/ideas on a book /piece of text from a list of about 8. I chose Mark Haddon's "The Curios Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time". I'd read it a couple of years ago and it really appealed to my scientific, logical side.

I read it again, this time doodling as I went through... Here's a selection of my doodles - there's at least one almost every page.


Will update on 'Process and Practice' once I've built up a bit more work on it ... we've been given the overall theme of "Culture".

Another thing worth mentioning is that on Thursday I went down to the opening of the Here Gallery's 5th Birthday show with the Peskimos. Its called "Even Dwarves Started Small" and is a completely Gocco themed show - Hurray! Some lovely work on show and definitely worth a visit (the show is on all month).

Kampung house

Malaysia has some lovely traditional architecture. I've always wanted to do a project on traditional Malaysian buildings. I had hoped to take lots of reference photos this last holiday, but the weather and family commitments meant I only got one photo - of a Malaysian village, or 'kampung' house; as you see here.

There's something really compelling about these lovely wooden structures on stilts (safe from flash floods and wild animals). I might start looking up pictures on flickr - but its not quite the same as drawing from your OWN inspiration...