Make a small collection of objects around a theme – choose from:

Festival, The morning after, Summertime, Workshop

Using a digital camera move around your set of objects. Look at them from above and from underneath. Zoom in and out. Look for interesting combinations of shapes and textures, and document them using photographs. Be unusual with the positioning of the frame. Experiment with diagonals within the structure and deliberately position some elements close to the frame.

Do the same thing with drawing but work in a format that is different from your viewfinder, such as a square format, or long and thin, or an irregular rectangle. If it helps you can make a viewfinder using two ‘L’ shaped pieces of stiff card or paper in your chosen format. Repeat the exercise of exploring viewpoints but this time document your visual journey around the set in your sketchbook. Draw shapes to work with that are the same format as your viewfinder. You may find it helpful to draw around your viewfinder to create a set of thumbnail shapes.

Choose your favourite design. Remember that you are trying to communicate an idea about your chosen theme – your favoured design should be one which is most successful in this regard.

Using a pencil, draw this design on a larger scale. Either draw from the photographs that you took or from the still life directly. Draw your final design to a format and scale which is proportionate to your thumbnail. This line drawing should be descriptive and readable as a visual and not a final artwork in its own right.

In your learning log record your thoughts on the following questions:

• Which viewpoint best fitted the word your objects illustrated? Why was this?

• Which format best illustrated your words?

• Did changing viewpoints make you think differently about your choice of objects and arrangement of them?

OCA Key Steps in Illustration

I think I like the though of drawing something summery as we are awaiting the warmer months, and also, I think I should be able to find stuff around the house that describes summer. I need to gather a few things such as sunglasses, straw hats sun lotion etc.

I started by taking photos of a small collection of items as instructed by the exercise.

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While exploring I wanted to try out different angles and compositions to find something that works. I found this quite useful as I think I found a few that were quite interesting to look at and are evokative of summertime.

I started sketching some thumbnails by first coming up with the frame and then just finding a picture from my gallery above and seeing which ones would fit the format best. I tried square as well as longer distorted rectangle formats.

I really really liked number 2 (Top centre). I thought this is nice because the items are arranged in a way that fits the frame perfectly. I think I preferred this to the others because of its symmetrical layout. I know that the exercise was asking for things to be out of frame, but I felt this concept was overall stronger than any of the others. My close second was number 5 (bottom right) as it was evokative of those instagram shots people share in the summer and thus gave me that summer feeling. I could almost see this as an advertising shot for the sunlotion.

I decided to start sketching out number 2 because this was my favourite.

I think this exercise was very useful as I think I never really thought of creating my composition in real life and then drawing it. I think this is a technique that I should use more often. For this drawing I made my own brush to create the texture on the hat which I am pretty proud of, I think this really given that woven straw feel without too much time investment.

Walking around my little set and taking photographs made me explore the objects better and give me a more holistic understanding of them which also meant that I could draw them more accurately.

Reflection

This exercise was pretty interesting. It took me a long time to take the plunge and start photographing as I thought my collection of items was not enough to convey the selected word. Once I started with this however I managed to complete the assignment in about 4-5 hours altogether. Looking through the photographs definitely helped with depicting the objects better and putting together a concept illustration that I could show to a client and they would understand the idea behind it. in retrospect, I think the idea isn’t very strong so perhaps spending more time when coming up with thumbnails would benefit my process.