ILL6 - Batsford Prize (part 1)
This year we were asked to create an illustration that we may be willing to submit as an entry to the Batsford Prize competition. This is a competition that is run by the London based publishers, Pavillion Books, who publish a lot of illustration based books in the UK.
This year's theme was "Being Human," which I found to be quite a broad theme to illustrate. I began by trying to consider how I personally live my life and if there is anything significant that I could relate to the theme. This needed to be something that not only I related to, but a large portion of the population could relate to. It was then that I realised that my bedroom was a mess and began to think about how you can discover what kind of person someone is by looking around their home. Your home is somewhere that you are able to be yourself and express yourself freely (in my case very messily.) With this in mind, i decided to do a few very quick thumbnail sketches of different rooms of a house. The first of course was inspired by my poor excuse for a bedroom, but with the rest I tried to imagine other people's homes and how the mess they create may display their day to day life.
I wanted each thumbnail to be a realistic insight into these imaginary character's lives. I wanted them to display the realistic mess we make, as I find that this gave more narrative to the illustration. That is of course not to say that everyone lives messily (like myself) as I understand that some people keep their homes very tidy. However I didn't believe that although that might've been a more realistic approach to this project, it would've made it any more interesting. I didn't want someone to look at my illustration and think it was just a boring sketch of a clean and tidy room, this would not give the audience the opportunity to consider a narrative.
I then considered how I psychically wanted these illustrations to be presented. I knew I wanted them to be seen as a series, so I placed them all together and decided upon a comic strip style.
I took inspiration from a particular illustrator for this project. Laura Callaghan's illustrations appealed to me as they were bold and colourful, with lots of little hidden objects. Her illustrations created a narrative and the longer you look at it, the more things you begin to piece together. This is something I wanted to get across in my work, and so I started to think about how I might be able to clutter them up.
I was also inspired by a particular illustration that was done by one of my favourite illustrators, Mouni Feddag. This was of a cluttered room once again, but I preferred the textured style more than the block colours that came with Callaghan's illustrations. It also showed a narrative that the viewer can piece together and find humour in.
I later began to think about what method I wanted to create this illustration. I decided to focus on two methods, digital (like Laura Callaghan's work) or risoprinting. I wanted to try risoprinting as I hadn't done it before and thought it may be fun to learn a new method, as well as creating something of use.
With this in mind, I began to illustrate one of my 'scenes' neatly, before separating specific aspects into three different layers. We have four different options for colours, blue, pink, yellow and black. I decided to stray away from black as I thought that layering the remaining colours would create a dark shade if I wanted one anyway. I also wanted it to be quite bright like Callaghan's work, and so I strayed away from dark, bold colours such as black.
Below are my three different colour layers, which I would later put into the risoprinter. This was quite difficult as you had to envision what each layer would look like overlapped. I did this by using clipping masks in photoshop, to mimic how the print would look after coming out of the printer.
This works slightly similar to how a screen print would. I had to make three different masters, just as you would burn three separate screens and then layer them over the top of eachother. The final result was slightly different to how I envisioned it looking. I wasn't overly happy with the way it looked and I think this was partly due to my illustration being quite detailed and in order to pick up the details correctly on a risoprinter, the layers need to line up perfectly, which is something I was struggling to do. A few of the parts of my original illustration also didn't show up on the print, so this would've been something I needed to edit.
After this test I decided that due to my design being quite busy and detailed, and also the fact that I had not tried risoprinting a lot yet, it was best to try a different method. So with this in mind I decided to make these illustrations digital. I approached this knowing that I wanted plenty of texture in the illustrations, as well as some bright colours. I began with the kitchen thumbnail:
And around halfway through this, I began to think that maybe I was straying away from the the of 'Being Human' and that maybe I could do something more relevant. I was struggling to add objects that would all link together to form some sort of narrative. And since this was the basis of the idea, I wondered if maybe there was something else which might somehow link better.
I then decided to go back to the drawing board. I will follow this with a separate blog post with more on that, as well as the finished product. Although I didn't end up using this idea for the Batsford Prize, I may continue it in the future as part of something else, as I do think it has some promise.
