Editorial Illustration: Final Images

When creating my final images i initially decided to recreate them digitally by drawing out each component and scanning them in. I felt that, given how each image is comprised of a series of graphic shapes interlocking within a full bleed image, this would give me the best level of control as I would be able to freely alter the sizes and smooth over any problems ie edge quality, shapes out of line etc.

I still wanted them to retain some of the rough humanness that the use of pencil crayon had given my roughs. This was because I felt it further reinforce aesthetically this idea of visceral/emotionally evocative images I had been trying to create.

Therefore I scanned in a series of pencil textures and over laid them over each shape. However I found that the textures were too loud and clashed together too much due to the amounts of tonal variation, particularly due to white paper inevitably showing through.

To solve this problem I played around with the levels, knocking out as much white as possible and adding noise digitally to each texture so as to take the harder edge off of them. In this way digital is much easier to work with than analogue media as you can alter individual elements in a none destructive manner.

However, after he final crit a few main problems were brought to light which, for the most part, I would agree with. Firstly, although it was a much more practical solution given the short time frame and its flexibility, the use of digital media over analogue, people overwhelmingly felt took away the human/visceral edge that my images had originally had in the roughing stage of this brief.

With this in mind I tried recreating the square and portrait images in paper cut, which was effectively the same approach I had used digitally in that I created a series of textures, ink and pencil, and sketched the shapes onto the back to be cut out.

Although I think they do have a lot more warmth and humanness to them I think the same problem that I was having digitally is evident in these. Although I think the ink has worked better, the pencil textures in particular are too loud and clash together, removing the bold graphic effect I had aimed for by using shape based imagery.

Furthermore I tried it with a red background instead of yellow as some of the feedback had suggested the yellow was too strong. However comparing the two versions together I think the yellow works a lot better both visually and aesthetically. This is in that I felt it gave the image a slightly off kilter ephemeral feel which reflects the more surreal and intangible aspects of Murakami's work.

Conceptually I was also slightly worried about these images given that they rely more on a having visceral and emotive impact/feel to them rather than using visual metaphors to communicate a specific message or narrative. Something that was also brought to light in the crit.

However given the intangible and often metaphysical nature of much of Murakami's work and philosophy I do think this is the best way of approaching him visually. I realise there have been a few problems in trying to create this for the editorial brief given the cliental and intent of communicating clear messages to a specific audience.

Despite this I definitely want to pursue and further refine this approach to visually communicating complex ideas in Studio Brief 2:printed images.