The Brief

Building on the work produced in the exercises, your assignment submission will demonstrate your ability to use experimental drawing to build and inform your illustration sketchbooks in increasingly imaginative ways.

There are three parts to this assignment.  First, look back at the collection of facial pareidolia and develop them as characters.  For the next part, you should produce a series of background layouts or scenes for your characters, utilising the notion of the ‘happy accident’ in either their content or the methods you use to make them.  The final stage is exploring how to bring these together. 

Spider diagram

It was a tough call if I should do a spider diagram first or further develop the characters.  So, I have decided to first work on the characters to see in what direction the characters will take me in terms of the type of illustration I want to do at the end.

Once I started working on the characters, I realised they all have ‘monster’ faces and animal or alien qualities.  It was now a good idea to start brainstorming ideas to refine the characters further.

It was already dictated that I would have strange creatures in the illustration, but I had to decide on the context in which they would be illustrated.  If the illustration is for children, the creatures must be less scary and have pet-like qualities.  Even though you might want to convey a villain, you still don’t want the character to cause nightmares in children.

I was thinking of illustrating the characters as soft toys around the theme of a tea party in the forest or a picnic.  My other idea is a child reading a book and building a narrative around things happening in the child’s imagination.  A child visiting Mars and learning more about the solar system is also an idea.  All of these ideas could be an illustration in a children’s book.

If my audience is teenagers or young adults, I would create a page in a zine, comic or magazine.  Considering that it needs to be a story around strange creatures, I could do an illustration around Halloween, a Dress-up Party, a Masquerade Ball or a nightmare.

Another idea is to do a spread in a zine of an adult picnic.  When I recently travelled to the Northern Cape, the landscape looked like another planet in some ways. 

The sand was red, with just a few trees dotted here and there.  Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe after World War 1, in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed art to allow the unconscious mind to express itself.  I could use this landscape as a base to build a scene from my imagination.  For instance, I can see a giant snake slithering over the sand dunes.

Looking at that landscape, it feels like there is enough space for a giant creature.  The landscape colours are raw sienna, ochres, white gold, and cerulean blue skies.  Enough to inspire any creative person.

Developing the characters

Using the pareidolia pictures of exercise 2.6, I further refined the characters.  Photocopying the images in black and white creates a different visual effect that gives a new perspective and angle with new possibilities.

When looking at the jewellery bowl, I saw several faces and sketched them all.  I then used collage to get a different angle on the drawing and built the picture with materials I could find around the house, such as a brown paper bag and scraps of paper.

I photocopied the collage owl and then sketched the owl, as seen in the coloured drawing in figure 3.  I then made another drawing of the owl and tried to think about the aesthetic properties of the collage, such as the zig-zag edge of the brown paper bag and how the handle folds.  This gives the drawing more character and interest. (Under the black arrow in figure 3).

The white beaded earrings have interesting contours and convey a feeling of movement and energy.  It can be eyes or eyelashes, so I photographed it separately and included it in my sketchbook.  I tried it on the owl and a girl character. 

I want to discover an alternative to cartoon eyes and see if I can find it in objects or even get away without having eyes like the dog bowl character in the tuxedo.  (Figure 5).  I came up with many characters that will live in my sketchbook for now if I don’t use them for the final illustration.  I am particularly fond of the ghost character that started with the dog bowl on a square towel, to the tuxedo character, and then I thought, what if I take the bowl away and then take the face away?  The ghost has four tentacles to walk on, and the fold looks like his mouth.  I know this has been done before, but how it developed was pretty interesting.

I experimented with paper cut-outs and painted canvas to see if the dog bowl could work as a character when the square head is in a different material.  I am moving on and might come back to it later.  I like the papercut cut-outs stuck onto painted canvas.  I will most definitely explore this ‘look’ further in my sketchbook.

The curtain heading developed in a few characters.  I especially like the one in the middle that looks like a blob sea creature with big nostrils. (Figure 7).  I experimented with materials on the right, using collage for the fabric horse and crayon, watercolour and newspaper cut-outs for the flame.  The flame could also work well as candy floss.

In Figure 8, I am developing the jewellery faces further by adding a body.  The faces look upwards, so a frog or a fish could work well as a body.  You can find the Giant African bullfrog at my sister’s farm near me.  They grow up to 20cm (body alone) and weigh over a kilogram.  My sister complains that they chase the dogs, which is quite funny. These alien-like frogs will work with the faces I have already created. (Figure 8).

Figure 8, on the left in the middle, I used the owl face on the frog body.  I am pleased with this outcome and am excited to have learned how to discover new characters. 

Photocopying pencil works well because it comes out light and can be drawn over and changed using a darker drawing material. 

I have enough characters and should start with thumbnails of how I will use these characters in an illustration.  At one stage, I felt “What am I doing?” and “Where would I use these characters?”  I feel I need to have some direction of where these characters will go, and that is why I did the spider diagram right at the start.  I can tweak my ideas as they unfold.

In Figure 9, I explored a narrative as a spread in a children’s book and tried a few compositions using the frog, horse, owl and snake.

When it comes to children’s books, I admire the work of Isabelle Arsenault.  I often page through her illustrations.  In the book Captian Rosalie by Timothée de Fombelle, she uses harsh blacks, greys and oranges. She contrasts it with a soft rendering method that looks like watercolour or smudged pastel.

I especially like the illustration in the kitchen, where she uses colour sparingly.  The white candelabra and cups stand out against the greys and black, creating a charming yet sombre scenery.

Although I like the thumbnails in figure 12, there should be more interaction between the girl and the soft toys.  There is a large table between them, so maybe have some teacups out and a smaller table where she prepares for a tea party with her soft toys.  The characters around her, such as the steam of the kettle, the owl outside and the bowl of dishcloths, are all watching her as if she is the star in a play.

On the left of figure 13 is an outside tea party by the tree.  I like the idea of a tea party, but I want to take advantage of the open brief and create something surreal that complements the unusual characters.  For this reason, it will make more sense to go for a teenage/young adult audience. 

On the right (figure 13) is a teenager hiding from all the pareidolia faces around her.  This thumbnail is coming closer to the outcome I want to achieve.  I will now work on my iPad using a landscape photo from the Northern Cape and develop my ideas further.

In my first draft (figure 14), I used elements from my sketchbook to build a composition.  I also used a layer of blueberry texture in my sketchbook to see what kind of texture it would create when layered over the illustration.

I prefer the traditional hand-drawn or painted illustration combined with the photo.  It blends better with the photo compared to the digital drawing.  The narrative is a surrealist scene from my imagination.  The snake and the girl with the dark hair are in the same tribe, so they both have beaded eyes/crowns.  The woman with the red hair prepared a picnic for herself and a friend.  (I still need to decide who her friend will be).  The girl and snake are curious to see what they are doing and want to join them and learn more about these strangers.

I like this idea and develop it further in Draft 2, figure 15.  I added her friend, who was inspired by the swimming pool net.  Her friend is a companion and a picnic blanket protecting her from the hot sand.  The open avocado reminds me of an African sunset, but instead of colour going from yellow-orange (closest to the sun) to red-orange (further from the sun), it goes from light yellow to darker yellow to green.  This will work well for my surreal sunset.  I am still not sure how to incorporate it, but I need to trust that everything will come together in the end.

Referring back to Isabelle Arsenault’s books, I noticed she also uses cut-outs in her illustrations, as seen in figure 16, from Virginia Wolf.

I was under the impression that she used different layers of watercolour cut-outs in figures 17 (the plants) and 18 (the fireplace), but when I looked at it again, it looked like she used a masking technique or very skilled watercolour techniques.

Her illustrations are beautiful.  This time, I will use paper-cut techniques, but I will do the cut-outs digitally.  I will experiment with her other watercolour methods at a later stage to try and figure out how she achieved the look and feel in figures 17 and 18.

Now, I need to look at backgrounds to work with my draft.  I have enough surface space for the background to come to its full right and enough direction at this point to know what I am looking for.  The characters will be rendered with watercolours, pen and ink, the same as the picnic food. 

 Although I had already done these experiments in my sketchbook, there was not a big enough piece of the beetroot, blueberry, and turmeric backgrounds.  This time, I will work on watercolour paper.  I will first create the backgrounds with the fruit and spices and layer them with watercolour inks, and once they’re dry, scan them in as a background.  I will also cut trees from these background sheets and build a background this way.

Above is my finished series of backgrounds.  The top left one is beetroot only.  Next to it is turmeric with a layer of slate blue and sepia ink.  The bottom row starts with beetroot and blueberries on cold press paper on the left, followed by beetroot with a layer of slate blue ink, and lastly, crushed blueberries with a layer of blue and sepia watercolour ink on the far right.

In Figure 23, draft 3, I have built the background with different cut-outs of the background paper I’ve created.  The avocado sun works well, and I blended it into the background using a soft brush eraser.  I am happy with the illustration so far, but I feel I have lost the perspective by covering the trees, which are becoming smaller and eventually disappearing in the background.  I have lost the magnitude of the landscape, so for the final illustration, I’ve decided to keep that part of the photo intact.

Overall, it was a nerve-racking experience to trust my judgement and feel to tie so many loose ends together.  The more I do projects like this, the easier and more confident I will become.  I achieved what I planned from the start, and it is rewarding to see the finished product.

However, I think the characters would’ve worked better as a pencil drawing or a black-and-white illustration.  It will stand out more from the background, resulting in a simpler illustration with better hierarchy and fewer colours.  I would keep the avocado sun, food, matt, trees and background sky in colour.

My main challenge in working with unusual drawing materials was the unpredictability of the fruit.  The beetroot was overripe the first time around and worked better than the fresh beetroot I used the second time.  The fruits are sticky, but that didn’t bother me that much.  I will use beetroot, turmeric and blueberries again in my sketchbook in the future. 

Using an imaginative approach in drawing is fantastic, to say the least.  I will be using it all the time from now on.  I worry less since I’ve been drawing quickly and make smaller mistakes part of my drawing.

My favourite illustrator in Part 2 is Christoph Niemann.  I listened to this TED talk and watched his Netflix series as well.  He is innovative, and the ideas he generates are inspiring.