Collect as many examples of visual metaphor as you can find. Often metaphors are used within political and issue-based works to give complex or subtle ideas greater clarity. For this reason you are likely to trace them more easily within editorial contexts: newspapers and articles in magazines.

Reaching retirement, Dreams of romance, Broken relationship, Censorship of the press, High achievement, Economic catastrophe

Choose one from the phrases above and create a drawn visual list of objects and subjects which could be used to symbolise them. You may find that it is in the way that the symbol can be modified that you can convey your idea most effectively. Don’t be overly concerned with the aesthetic quality or technical accuracy in the drawing. See this as an extension of your visual shorthand. If you find it useful, make a spider diagram around the phrase to generate other words, which will bring other visual connotations.

Show your drawings to someone else to check their understanding of the meanings in your drawings and gauge how far your drawings communicate what you intended.

OCA Key Steps in Illustration

Examples of visual metaphors

Visual metaphors are everywhere. I think that we more and more think visually, due to the nature of how we are having conversations for example, which might have something to do with this, Emojis are everywhere and these small pictograms enable us to create visual metaphors ourselves, so therefore we are more receptive to this kind of art. I also like seeking the meaning behind some of the more obscure ones. It is just a nice entertaining activity.

I have gathered some visual metaphors from the internet on this Pinterest board. This is only the tip of the iceberg, there is just so much out there.

I especially enjoy the ones that are about social media and its effects on society as a whole. I even found one on Pokemon GO, a game I play everyday, which I found quite funny.

Censorship of the Press

I chosen the above topic as I think it has a political charge that will be quite interesting to explore.

Some of these things are definitely more of a general censorship simile, however I was running out of ideas a little bit by the end of it. I think I have managed to generate some ideas that would work well in an illustration. I quite enjoyed trying to scome up with things that would represent the same idea in a variety of ways. I normally do this I think so it was not that different from my normal sketching, however I found it interesting to think around a certain topic and generate more complex ideas around this.

I asked my partner to see if he understood the sketches and asked him to tell me what topic the sketches would represent. While he was not able to give me the exact answer, most of his thoughts around the sketches were quite close to what I wanted to communicate.

Some of these may not work too well as when we talk about press we usually associate this with printed media, but some of my sketches were referring to something audible, so for this reason I don’t think they would be super successful in conveying the message.

Overall a very enjoyable exercise, I think visual metaphors are definitely something I can see myself using. In fact I have (unknowingly) done so for one of the exercises in part one.