The brief
The title is Seven days.
These can be the seven days of the week or random days that tell a story. Your interpretation can be objective or subjective. You can produce seven separate, one large diagrammatic or a continuous strip illustration. You can decide on the media and methods you will use; the context – magazine, newspaper, book, brochure or poster; and the intended audience.
You need to write yourself a brief that is clear and challenging but manageable.

What to do
Be aware of the processes which have so far led to your development in ideas generation, visual research, image construction, understanding contexts and media usage.
Make sure that you are clear what the final size should be, but you can work at any proportional size. Use worksheets and sketchbooks to explore solutions and refer to examples of work which solve similar types of problems. Think back to how you have treated similar briefs.

OCA Key Steps in Illustration

Here we go! Last assignment of the Key Steps in Illustration unit. I feel like I learnt a lot during this unit and I cannot wait to show off all my new knowledge in this final assignment. I would like to cover all aspect of the workflow, so that my piece is very well considered and showcases all the skills and techniques learnt in this part of the course.

The brief is really open ended, which might be a little difficult at first, I think I need to start by brainstorming ideas for the application of the final illustration to consider the form factors and any limitations that I would need to keep in mind while creating my piece.

The seven days of the week is an interesting topic, because I think it can be interpreted in so many different ways. When you think about it, the week is the largest perfect time measure. What I mean by perfect that it is a perfect loop. It never changes. I find this trail of thought quite inspiring, and I think I will use this as a jump off point when creating my illustration.

I also looked into the etymology of the words and found that they are related to pagan deities which I guess could also be used to depict these, though I think this might be a little bit too expected.

I started by creating a mind map to explore some ideas that I had that the 7 days of the week could be related to in advance to create an illustration.

I also started sketching some thumbnails of initial ideas:

I really liked the comic idea. I wanted to draw up a nice brief for myself so I can work on this in a way that inspires me, as I noticed from previous exercises/assignments that I seem to work best when I have a solid brief.

Brief:

Create a comic strip for the Guardian. The title is 7 days of the week. It needs to be humorous, can be slightly political. The artwork will need to be 4×1 (landscape) aspect ratio and will be printed at a relatively small size – w12cm x h3cm.

Research & Planning

I have done some primary research before I even decided what my final piece would be. I looked into where the names of the gays come from, and the reasons behind why a week is 7 days etc. I found all of this interesting, but I wanted the theme of my illustration to be much more down to earth. I wanted to go with something relatable.

I started looking at some comics that appeared on the Guardian to gauge my audience and see what type of humour the paper would find acceptable.

I started by looking at the Guardian online in their cartoon section. https://www.theguardian.com/cartoons/archive

I added some of my favourites to a Pinterest board:

The cartoons were really political, and I wondered if this will be the right approach, but then I thought to myself this way I might be able to get a nice edge on the otherwise pretty mundane topic of 7 days of the week.
I also found quite a few comics that were topical like “Claire in the community” which were less directly political but they were portraying current times really well. talking about lockdown and the way our lives have evolved due to the covid-19 pandemic. I thought this could also be a nice angle to investigate.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I have seen all of these videos and pictures pop up which were illustrating the mental state of people trying to cope with being isolated from their normal existence. I wanted to gather some of these images and see if I can put together a sort of collage that would help me come up with my comic.

Found this video that kind of illustrated the thing I had in mind:

I thought this might land as a nice story for my comic and will be quite topical while keeping with the brief.

For style inspiration, I think I would like to use the style of Walter Scott’s Wendy comics. I think this simplistic style will work well when talking about the topic of lockdown and the mental troubles it causes. I also liked the fact that it is greyscale, I think this also resolnates well with these dark times.

Thinking about my own experience during lockdown I feel like there are definitely ups and downs that one goes through emotionally, so I really wanted to capture this in the comic as well.

First I wanted to plot out my little story so I know what I was going to draw roughly.

7 days of the week lockdown

• Day 1: I have so much free time!
• Day 2: I should really exercise every day in lockdown to stay in shape
• Day 3: I am so depressed
• Day 4: Bored
• Day 5: I can do this! It can’t be much longer now.
• Day 6: Meeting friends on Zoom
• Day 7: Meltdown

I tried to come up with some layouts for my comic. For the above idea, I needed 7 panels.

I was feeling a little overwhelmed by this to be honest. I felt like. creating 7 panels in an already really small sized illustration might be a recipe for failure. I wanted to challenge myself, but this may have been a little bit more than I could handle in this very moment. I was also thinking that perhaps I could combine some of the days to illustrate how the days of the week melt into one in lockdown. I think this could be a funny twist and might work better in terms of a layout too. I decided to look at the day titles I came up with earlier and see what I could cut out.

• Day 1: I have so much free time! I should really exercise every day in lockdown to stay in shape!
• Day 4: 3 days later… (Show character in a very similar position as he was on the first panel)
• Day 5: I can do this! It can’t be much longer now.
• Day 6: Meeting friends on Zoom
• Day 7: Meltdown

I think this is a lot more concise, and I think the story is forming nicely in my head now. I wanted to sketch a few things that would inspire the character, and come up with some basic concepts.

I drawn 2 different versions of my character, one was calm and collected, while the other is in disarray. I think I would like to play with this contrast in my comic, which will hopefully make it funny.

I wanted to start sketching my character to form my comic, but first I wanted to have some visual brainstorming in terms of the situations he should be in.

I wasn’t too sure about the images and the story at this point. I felt like it was really uninspired and uninteresting. It was missing the point somehow. Maybe I was trying to do too much at the same time?

I was very torn at this point. Do I go back to square one and try something else? I wasn’t sure if the idea was good enough or really relevant at this point. Most of us are getting back to our normal lives now and I just wasn’t sure if the idea was landing the way I wanted it to due to this reason. At the same time, I was already passed my original deadline and didn’t want to delay too much longer.

I felt like I was really lost with this assignment and I had no direction. I tried to listen to some music to inspire me, do some more research and just explore different ideas but nothing seemed to help to get me out of this rut.

I decided to read the Brief of the assignment once more and it hit me! The seven days don’t necessarily need to be a week. I think this will make my assignment slightly less contorted, and it might help me finish what I started. Looking at my initial sketches again I quite liked them, they just lacked story. So I went ahead to brainstorm some more ideas about what people go through during lockdown.

I wanted to gather some ideas that would help people to pass the time in lockdown and also some stuff that I know some people have been doing during the pandemic that are out of the ordinary somewhat. I wanted to do a 2 panel comic for each of these so that they are punchy and to the point.

I wasn’t 100% sure about some of the ideas but I felt better about these than the previous idea. I just needed to get on with it and make these fully finished pieces. Maybe while finalising these I will be able to tweak them to make them a bit more funny and relatable.

I have created my comics one after the other thinking about the different ways we tried to entertained ourselves during lockdown and came up with the below seven 2 panel comics:

Although I still didn’t think it was showcasing everything I have learnt during this course, I felt happy that I have created 7 pretty fully realised pieces of work that are tied together by the style, the character and the the theme. I think the illustrations are fun and have the sense of duality that I wanted to reflect about this time of isolation.

I wanted to tidy up the text a little by using my DTP application as I think this will add another level of uniformity and polish to the project.

Mockup

Since I intended this to be a newspaper comic, I wanted to mock this up to see how the final product would look like.

Reflection

I found this assignment extremely difficuly. I think the open prompt made me think that I could be doing so many different things and that whatever I think up may not be the right approach and this analysis of what else could be done really made it hard for me to focus on the project and come up with something that I am truly proud of.

On top of this, the pressure to show something truly awesome that shows off all that I learnt during the course made me doubt myself every step of the way. I feel a little disappointed in myself that I haven’t managed to come up with something special.

Overall, I think the comics are fine, and they are at least talk of issues that are current and topical, but not what I imagined I would be doing at the end of my illustration module. It took me about 2 weeks to get to this point and I don’t think it really shows in the final product.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aEsu3EU88k
• https://www.theguardian.com/cartoons/archive
• https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/this-is-the-psychological-side-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-that-were-ignoring/
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52780259/coronavirus-a-day-of-lockdown-for-young-people-in-the-uk
• Mockup psd created by freepik – www.freepik.com