In this exercise, I am exploring formats.  I will take an image with a range of content, and by using L-brackets, I will crop and zoom to create edited versions. Still retaining the content, I will attempt to present it in a different way.  Then I will choose a word for each image, select my favourite, and draw up artwork to make a poster using the word as the title.

First, I have brainstormed the idea of a family photo while keeping in mind it should be an image with a large range of content.  I liked the idea of a market and started my search for a photograph.

After looking through several pictures, I have selected a shortlist of four photos and have decided on the image on the far left in figure 2.  I have cropped, rotated, and zoomed the image using two L-brackets to experiment with different formats.  Although I have done this manually, I thought this method could also work well done digitally.

I have placed all ten formats next to each other to see how they differ.  Although some of the images were still similar, minor changes like the second person were cut out, and vertical lines became diagonal.  This changed the feel of the image significantly.  By cropping the picture sideways, it created more tension, and the shopper became more important.

I have chosen a word for each image in figure 4.  The shirt image (9) made me think of a shirt with buttons, and I was curious to experiment with that idea.  All these words made me think of how different a backyard is when living in a city. You may have a market as your backyard.  I have looked up “urban”, which means “in, relating to, or characteristic of a town or city”.  Similar words are “built-up or inner-city”.  The title of the final piece will be “Urban Backyard”, and I will use image 1 (figure 4) for the poster.

Next, I explored different mediums to see how I will convey an “Urban Backyard” feel through the medium I use.  I brainstormed grey and neon colours with the spider diagram, but now I want to see what it looks like on paper.  I want to use neon colours to reflect the artificial feel of a city and grey to illustrate the concrete and other cold surfaces significant to city life.

Finally, I have decided to work with Indian ink and acrylic paint.  The Indian ink will give me that concrete look of the wall, and the acrylic gives a flat, matt, and poster feel to the illustration.

I have researched Adolfo Serra’s techniques to find out more about working with ink and water.  Serra uses ink the same as watercolour paint.  Adolfo is a freelance illustrator based in Madrid, Spain.  He explains his creative approach in short online classes and has illustrated a delightful, wordless children’s book of Little Red Riding Hood, among other books.

1. Sketching the image on A4 mixed media paper.  
2. Building up the mid-tones with water and Indian ink.
3. I am using a brush, water, and Indian ink.
4. The bright flat colours are painted with acrylic paint by using a brush pen.
5. I have used a fountain pen with permanent ink to draw the finer details.
6. The near to finished piece. Now I will add the poster inserts and finishing touches in Photoshop 

Once I added the posters in the illustration, I tried out several fonts and ended up with a shortlist of two:  Phosphate Inline and Arial Black.  I wanted to keep the typography simple to contrast with the detail of the poster.  The Arial Black was slightly overpowering, but the Phosphate Inline was suitable, and the mid-tone inline flowed nicely with the background yet was contrasting enough to create hierarchy. 

Overall, I don’t think I would’ve come up with this composition and idea if I had not gone through the complete process of this exercise of image development. 

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The stock photo on the left in figure 9 is by Alice Pasqual on Unsplash at https://unsplash.com