Commercial Image Creation - Evaluation

At the beginning of the module we were given a range of brief to choose from, ome more open than others. I chose the One & Another brief. The aim of this project was to create a series of illustrations (minimum of 4) for a magazine called One & Another based around either The Underground Music Scene or Cafe Culture of York. After researching both subjects I chose to do the Cafe Culture of York as it was a subject that I was drawn to more than the Underground Music Scene. 

I looked at 3 artists Veronica Lawlor, Julia Sverchuk and Sunga Park. All 3 are reportage artists yet they all have a different approach to it. I really liked the lines they all use but I really like the technique Sunga Park uses for his water colours. I took a lot of inspiration from Sunga Park by doing a black line drawing and using coloured ink for the background. 

At the start of the project I took a few trips to York and went into a few cafes for research and drawing purposes. I did some reportage drawings but I only stuck to pencil and Aqua Ink Molotow pens. After the reportage I re drew from photographs I had taken just to clean up the lines and make the image more accurate. I wasn't sure on my idea at this point as I hadn't received the mood board from the client so I just did some drawings. I did a drawing of each cafe, one with a border and one without, for experimentation reasons.

My initial idea was to go along the lines of what Sunga Park does and draw the cafe in black fine liner and use some kind of water colour / ink to give the image colour and depth. I also had the idea of collecting napkins, leaflets and menus and making a collage for the background of my illustrations but this proved difficult when not all of the cafes had the things I needed. Nearing to the point where I needed to start thinking about creating my images, the client who wrote the brief still hadn't sent me the document I needed. This mood board would have told me what was expected, what style, what ideas, and the colours which she would have liked the illustrations but instead I had to create everything myself and come up with every little idea in less time than I expected. This situation didn't cause many problems but it did drag my project on a little which gave me less time to create my illustrations. 

Due to the client not sending me the document at all I had to start thinking of another idea. My new idea was pretty simple. I would use the drawings from my sketchbook and then create a background using Brusho. I think Brusho was a good choice as the colours are really loud and eye-catching. I tried out a few different techniques with the Brusho. The first did not work so well as the colour was too strong and the Brusho powder had clumped on top of the image and it did not look good at all. This technique was wetting the page with water and then sprinkling the Brusho on the top. After the first technique failed I took a different approach. I sprinkled the Brusho colours onto the page first and then used a sponge to squeeze water on top of the powder. This created large beads of water on the page which I then soaked back up with the sponge leaving only a light patch of colour on the page. This technique worked much better because I had a little bit more control and the colour and shape came out really well and I think they will be perfect to use in my illustrations.

To create my images I went through a simple but long process. I started out by scanning in all of the sketches, ones without borders and ones with. I then put them into Photoshop and took away the background so that only the line was left. To do this I went into the select tab, clicked on colour range and chose the white background of the image with the colour dropper and then deleted the areas it selected. I then used the levels tool to make the pencil line black. I could have made this easier and skipped this step if I had drawn over the line with a fine liner before scanning. Next I scanned in the Brusho pages and went through the same process as above, I deleted the background so that only the Brusho was left and the background was transparent. I then chose one sketch (with a border) and one Brusho image and assembled them together. I changed the opacity of the Brusho on some of the images as it was a little overpowering and it was hard to see the line. After I created all of the images with the black borders I decided they might look better without the border as it took away the attention from the line drawing which is the main part of the illustration. So I saved those images and created a new set without the border and I like them so much better. They are so much more simplified but I think it works. I think as well because the magazine style is rather clean the thick black border wouldn't have fit well with the theme of the magazine. (I created a comparison image which will be shown below). The colours I used for the Brusho were blue/red and yellow/green and this is because these are the colours I've seen most throughout the magazine issues and as my audience is teens and young adults I think these colours are most aesthetically pleasing and will be noticed. Because I didn't receive the information from the client I had to figure the size of the illustrations out myself. The magazine is around A4 size so I created an A4 sized canvas on Photoshop then put the images on one at a time and shrunk the image so there was a 1.6cm border all the way around, and an extra 5mm bleed. The purpose of the border is so if the illustrations were to be printed in the magazine there will be a lot of spare space around the edges for printing error. Also, because I planned on these images being full page the border will allow them to be centered rather than take up a large portion of the page but still be a full page illustration. I also printed out the illustrations on 4 types of paper in the case of making prints in future. I used regular cartridge paper, Matte, glossy and luster. Unfortunately I could only print 3 of the glossy and luster but out of all of the papers I think Matte would be best for prints as the paper is clean and white and the colours are vibrant and for the magazine it would obviously be printed onto glossy paper and that came out quite well too. The cartridge paper gave the image a duller colour and whilst the luster paper had a nice texture I don't think it is very useful. 

Overall I think I have tackled this project well. I feel that my images portray the unique and abstract style of the cafes in York and I think these images would make great prints. Unfortunately I don't think I did the best work as I didn't have all of the information I required and I dived into this project thinking I would get given requirements and I didn't which put a small delay on my work. I guess I will just learn from this and hope that it doesn't happen when I get work from other clients. But other than that small problem I think my illustrations worked out really well.