Turning an Idea into Understanding

When a client comes to you with an idea it's up to you to be able to take that idea and transform it into an image that anyone would be able to look at and connect it with that idea.  It's convoluted.  Basically you have to take a vague concept and turn it into something everyone can understand by looking at it.

I'm mainly talking about editorial work here.  Editorial art is very fleeting.  You'll see an image in the newspaper or reader's digest and maybe glance at it for a second, but then move one when the article is read.  After reading the whole of it, the newspaper or magazine will be thrown away, not cherished and framed up on the wall.

I think that's what makes conceptual illustration so hard.  You have to illustrate a complex idea, but it has to be simple enough that any ordinary joe off the street can look at it and understand the idea instantly.  If it's not instant than you're not getting the point across fast enough.

I've found that I lean more towards narrative illustration - a piece of art that tells a story.  So this semester I've had to stretch my mind a little in order to think like an editorial artist.  I just wanted to show the progress of one of my pieces and go over some things that help in the creating process.

So for this assignment we had to illustrate a simile.  After weeks of thumbnailing lots of similes and not finding any that were particularly strong I happened upon one that my teacher told me was my strongest idea.  The simile was this:  eat like a bird. ex. "my sister is so skinny; she eats like a bird!"

I did lots of thumbnails for this as well.  Some were complicated or didn't really get the idea across very well and when one is doing editorial work it is better to err on the side of simple.  Simple gets the idea across quicker.

I made a list of everything that was even remotely related to a bird.  Pick out a couple of those and put them together.

Here's my piece.

My teacher really liked it, but during the critique pointed out a few things that could make it even better.  So I fixed a few things and here is the final rendition:

I don't think it's the best piece I've ever done, but it's also hard for me to be very invested or interested in this type of work.  So I guess I know now that I probably shouldn't go into editorial work.  But I also believe that learning to get an idea across cleanly and simply will help me out in my narrative work, so I don't think of this as a waste of time.  There's always something to be learned and applied.

If you have any questions or suggestions of posts you would like to see, please leave a comment down below!

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Concept Design

So I've decided to post a couple of my projects that I've done in my Concept Design class.

start with solid dark shapes and then do the WOTS, which is just adding white lines to the blob.

create a path and export that path into illustrator, illustrator can put that path into perspective. take a screen shot and put it into painter and painter can guide your lines along the perspective grid.

boom. time to smooth it out and add some finishing touches.

the finished piece.  a flying craft based off a fish.

my first sketched out idea

The silhouette, plus the WOTS 

I'm basing this ground vehicle on this dogwood flower.

finished

Bureaucracy

So I mentioned in my last post (Perspective, Determination, and Personal Work) a little bit about my club's Halloween Gallery and some road blocks that we encountered.  The road block is called:  Bureaucracy.

I'm mean, I knew administration was a headache before in a vague kind of sympathetic way, but the moment I became a club officer it really hit like a ton of bricks.  The school administration is so anal about documenting every single little thing you do, and I get it, I do.  If there isn't order then it's chaos and things won't get accomplished and people will take advantage.

But it gets in the way.

So here's the beat down.  Every year our club does a Halloween gallery called the Gallery of Terror.  Anyone can submit a Halloween themed piece and we put it up for two weeks.  We try to have it showcased in a place that's heavy traffic and will be noticed and appreciated by the rest of the school.  The school has shoved us artists in a tiny corner of the school, far away from the main buildings, so we like to remind the rest of the school that we exist.

This year we had a prime spot.  A huge wall right across from the bookstore, the most trafficked area of the school.  We were so excited, we've never had such a good spot!  So the day came and we joyfully put up our gallery.

Later that day we were informed that the Club Office had taken it down.

Our club adviser went down himself to beat some sense into them (just kidding, he just had a very terse conversation).  Apparently we didn't fill out a club event form, so the gallery was taken down.  We tried to explain to them that this wasn't an event, we just put up some pictures.  There wasn't an opening social or awards ceremony or anything, not any sort of organized get together.

So that didn't matter. And the wall across from the bookstore remained empty.

By this time people were asking where the gallery was, they wanted to show off to their friends and roommates and generally bask in the awesomeness that was our gallery.

It was the last week of October and we decided to get hang up the pieces in the hallway that lead to our two illustration classrooms.  It was really disappointing and underwhelming, but the art pieces were at least appreciated by a few of us.

So there's my one of many stories about the bureaucracy of administration.  I'm sure I will have better and larger tales of red tape the further I along my career I go.  The Lesson?  Bureaucracy Exists.  It is one of the many horrors in the professional world and just like making art or finding a job it is work.  The faster you learn the ins and outs of whatever administration you're working for the better off you'll be.

If you have any questions or suggestions of posts you would like to see, please leave a comment down below!

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