The Outsider.

For this project I have been asked to illustrate 3 key moments, and an idea for the binding of the novel The Outsider by Albert Camus. I had never read this book before and I enjoyed it very much, in fact; I loved it. This makes it very hard to illustrate because it’s unlikely I will ever feel I have done it justice. However, I shall try...

The novel is written in the first person, and I am sticking with this point of view in my illustrations. The protagonist, Meursault, should be hard to identify with, which seems like a good reason for me not to draw him in my illustrations, but I actually did not find him difficult to identify with. Even when he commits the crime of murder and does not show remorse, I still find him simply endearing. He is childlike in his petulance on many occasions, and speaks very matter-of-factly about things most people, unthinkingly, romanticise when they talk about them: like death, sex and love. In this way he can be seen as insensitive, even heartless, in fact he is not. He feels emotions, he just analyses his own feelings from a distance; his logic can, most often, not be faulted. We really are inside his head in this novel, with no filter on the selfish or inappropriate thoughts we often chide ourselves for having. With a first person illustration, we see the world through his eyes, as the author intended and as the Folio Society’s brief insinuates: Getting inside the outsider.

Throughout the book, heat and the sun are recurring themes; in a strange and confusing sequence of events the sun’s heat causes Meursault to shoot a man. For this reason I would like the sun to be present, as an ominous force, in each of my illustrations. I would also like to use a lot of patterns, especial wavy lines, to create the feelings of confusion and nausea Meursault often feels under the Algerian sun. My illustrations should include little, if any, human presence, as Meursault often seems to find it hard to deeply connect with others, and because he spends much of his time in the book alone. I would like them to be composed of inanimate objects which, somehow, convey a great sense of foreboding and pressure... A big Ask indeed!

I explained all this in my first Crit. and my tutor seemed happy with my ideas, especially once I had explained my interpretation of the book. He suggested that I look at:

William Scott:

This image is called Blue Still Life...I found his simplistic, abstracting technique of representing the kitchen equipment very useful. I hope to do something similar to create a feeling of alienation in my illustrations.

Mary Fedden:

This painting is called Near Sienna.

I found this painting interesting for the depiction of the still life in the foreground, with the contextualising background behind it. This is the approach I am attempting with my fried eggs illustration.

David Hockney’s swimming pools:

This piece is called Schwimmbad Mitternacht.

Water and swimming are also reoccurring themes and I wanted to use even more wavy lines to represent this. Here is a link to more of Hockney’s swimming pools:
http://swimsallyswim.blogspot.com/2008/08/art-david-hockney.html

I experimented with sponge textures and paint to create marks with a hot or watery feel (example below)...

I also experimented with stencils which had a much more pleasing, graphic effect. I remembered the work i did for The Poetry Project and that some of my work looked like lino cuts, so i thought I’d try the real thing.

For inspiration in print department I looked at the artists:

Edward Bawden. The way he uses a limited colour palette is very inspiring, in such images as these coloured prints:

I also particularly love his used of pattern texture to convey the weather in his lino-cut, Snowstorm at Brighton (1957):

Jon McNaught has somehow created screen prints which appear both serene and fraught with meaning. This is the ultimate aim I have given myself for this project. I also noted that he uses dark colours wisely, in moderation and hardly ever uses a true black. This is his Jet-streams series:

He also uses patterns to convey weather, water and plant life in a satisfying, graphic way.

This print is from a series called Broadcast:

This print is from a series called Pebble Island:

I had to do a lot of preparation before i began to make my prints. I had never created a lino-cut before and I had to get my head around the colour separation. Here are some photographs from my time in the workshop:

My sketches reflect this colour-separation working-out process:

On the left is my initial drawing for my print and on the right is the finished product.

I also spent a very long time choosing my colour palette, of just 3: which I wanted to convey heat and intensity while still remaining pleasing to the eye. I also felt the need to avoid black, as Jon McNaught does, so that the image did not become completely overwhelming or at all clichéd.

I was very pleased with the outcome, especially for a first attempt. Unfortunately, learning this new skill and the process itself took a lot longer than I had expected and, therefore, missed the Folio Society deadline. However I feel I have learned a great deal about my working process during this project. I hope to create more prints during my FMP and so improve my technique and technical skill.

Youth Theatre Poster Project.

We were given a brief, by a local theatre, to illustrate a poster for an up-coming youth theatre production. This was quite a short project turn-around: with the gap between being given the brief and meeting the client for the final time being only about two weeks long. Therefore, I needed to come up with a simple solution to the brief with an outcome that could be easily be manipulated to the client’s specifications if need be. This is why I decided to make my final product a digital image. A digital final outcome would also be appropriate as we were told the chosen design would be printed on both a small (magazine/ programme image) and very large scale (roadside banner).

It was suggested that the illustration would make reference to:

• Youth Theatre
• David Garrick – the 18^th century theatre
• Zombies
• Hereford
• Humorous/Fun

I decided to leave out the Hereford theme as it was just too much going on. I tried a few designs including some reference to Hereford, but found them too messy and confusing. Luckily, in a meeting with the client, she made it clear that this wasn’t a problem and Hereford was only an optional, suggested theme if the designers had decided to approach the brief from that angle.

I, however, concentrated on trying to make a simple poster which would appeal to young people and reflect the fact this is a youth production. The strongest idea I tried to convey visually was Zombies at the Theatre! I also tried to work in details which would create the mise-en-scene that this zombie-theatre activity was occurring in the 18^th century.

The brief itself came attached to a lot of mid-late 20^th century style zombie/ horror posters to give us an idea of the kitsch, over-the-top yet harmless gore they were looking for.

In addition to this, I gathered visual information concerning the 18^th century theatre:

And fashion, here are just a few of many examples:

In the end, my designs did not include very detailed representations of the ornate 18^th Century theatres as it did not work with the simple-silhouette design plan I had come up with. However, I was able to work in to period hair and hats into the crowd, subtly.

I also looked at the real-life characters portrayed in the play, but only actually included David Garick himself in my final design:

I also looked at very simple posters such as this one:

.... Created by Lloyd Stas for the humorous, recent zombie film Shaun of the dead (i felt this was a good move as this film was constantly referred to as an inspiration during our first meeting with the client). This is the image which confirmed my sentiment that using simple silhouettes would work well for this project.

And finally, in order to make history seem appealing to young people and adults alike, i looked at the Horrible Histories books I enjoyed so much as a child:

Using the light humour teamed with historical reference of these illustrations I hoped to create a simple image which conveyed history, horror and entertainment all in one. Below you can see one of my development sheets where have tried to depict David Garrick with the gentle humour used by Martin Brown, who illustrated the Horrible Histories...

I created my final images by hand drawing them first and then manipulating them on Photoshop.

When developing my ideas, I tried out colours using pencil crayon:

...it soon became apparent that this was not the appropriate medium for such a project. I didn’t think the pencil-crayon texture would scale up very well and was also slightly too childish. I found the worksheet (above) visually appealing, but felt this medium would be better suited to a brief not so concerned with horror. This was a step too far away from the zombie posters from the 70s-era originally attached to the brief. Block, digital colour was the way to go:

I also tried using the scanned-in texture technique I used for the Poetry Project, but I found this made the images too confusing and robbed them of their simple, almost cartoon-like clarity and humour. I left the texture on my marginally more serious image as an extra option for the client to view, but left it off the more humorous image I developed of Garrick peeking through the theatre curtain at the 18^th century zombie hoards. This second, simple, light-hearted image was selected to be used as an image to be to illustrate the cast listing, which I was very pleased about.