Reading #4
Working as an Illustrator involves a process. This consists of twelve steps: 1. Prospecting for work 2. Communicating your product to a potential client 3. Receiving an offer from that client 4. Considering the offer carefully and laying out your terms for what you'll be working for, how much you expect to get, etc. 5. Negotiating the client's terms where necessary 6. Creating the roughs 7. Delivering the roughs on time, and listening and responding to the feedback 8. Creating the final piece 9. Delivering the final piece on time in the right format 10. Working out the payment deal for your work 11. Tracking the payment 12. Receiving your final payment and working out how to use it.
Business plans are important to this, they help one answer their own questions about the type of business they will establish. They can include such elements as an executive summary, a description of the business opportunity, your marketing and sales strategy, your management team and personnel, your operations, and your financial forecasts.
It's also important to not work for free, to not be afraid to negotiate, to conduct yourself professionally, to be tenacious, to be prepared to stick up for yourself, be wary of clients changing your work, be efficient, be positive, and be versatile.
Starting your own illustration business will be tough, but it will yield positive results when done right, and one should not be afraid to do it out of fear of failure.
Business plans are important to this, they help one answer their own questions about the type of business they will establish. They can include such elements as an executive summary, a description of the business opportunity, your marketing and sales strategy, your management team and personnel, your operations, and your financial forecasts.
It's also important to not work for free, to not be afraid to negotiate, to conduct yourself professionally, to be tenacious, to be prepared to stick up for yourself, be wary of clients changing your work, be efficient, be positive, and be versatile.
Starting your own illustration business will be tough, but it will yield positive results when done right, and one should not be afraid to do it out of fear of failure.
Reading #3
Communication is an important aspect of mankind's nature, a thing without which our society couldn't function properly. Artists use this to deliver messages through their artworks in a variety of ways, and the study of communication contains two "schools" of thought known as the Process School, which deals with finding out how the whole communication process itself works, and the Semiotic School that deals with text, and the signs and codes which it is comprised of.
The communication process itself is comprised of four stages: You, Message, Channel/Medium, Destination. You are the creator of the message, the message is the idea that will be conveyed through whatever codes you apply to it, the channel/medium is the means by which the message is carried to the masses, and the destination is the crowd your message is supposed to reach.
The combination of a signifier(the thing within an artwork that depicts a familiar object within your mind) and signified(the object being displayed by the signifier) makes the sign and there are different types of signs, those being the Icon, the Symbol, and the Index. The Icon is an object rendered in its purest most simple form which is easily recognizable just by seeing it alone, the Symbol is a littlee more complex as it represents something we know in real life, but doesn't look like it and is only recognizable as what it represents because it has been given meaning by society, and Index is something that we actually see in nature that, through our own knowledge, we know to mean something is going to happen or that something has happened because of it.
The communication process itself is comprised of four stages: You, Message, Channel/Medium, Destination. You are the creator of the message, the message is the idea that will be conveyed through whatever codes you apply to it, the channel/medium is the means by which the message is carried to the masses, and the destination is the crowd your message is supposed to reach.
The combination of a signifier(the thing within an artwork that depicts a familiar object within your mind) and signified(the object being displayed by the signifier) makes the sign and there are different types of signs, those being the Icon, the Symbol, and the Index. The Icon is an object rendered in its purest most simple form which is easily recognizable just by seeing it alone, the Symbol is a littlee more complex as it represents something we know in real life, but doesn't look like it and is only recognizable as what it represents because it has been given meaning by society, and Index is something that we actually see in nature that, through our own knowledge, we know to mean something is going to happen or that something has happened because of it.
Assignment #3
I chose Maurits Cornelis Escher (M.C. Escher for short) for my Illustrator presentation. He was a famous dutch illustrator that was known very well for his drawing and printmaking, some of which were "mathematically inspired" and consisted of woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, and he was most well known for his print and engraving style that distinctively played with orientation and space. He was born on June 17, 1898 to an engineer and the daughter of a government minister, and graduated from the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem in 1922.
His first graphic work that was completed was a linoleum cut in purple of his father in 1916 as shown here.
From this point, he had many works published, displayed, and illustrated. His art career really kicked off, however, when, after graduating from school he traveled to Italy and met his wife Jetta Umiker, marrying her shortly after in 1924, and they settled in Rome until 1935. This entire 11 year timespan consisted of him travelling throughout Italy each year, drawing and sketching for the various prints he would make when he returned home. In addition to Italy he also travelled to places like Spain, drawing inspiration from nature and using mathematical objects in his work, along with many reused things from nature, like lichens, insects and entire landscapes, as well as doing sketches of local architecture and entire cityscapes . It was during his trip to Spain in 1936 that he made a pivotal turn in his work where he moved from landscapes to "mental imagery", the graphic works and tilings otherwise known as "dividing the plane". He had this to say on the subject:
"The regular division of the plane into congruent figures evoking an association in the observer with a familiar natural object is one of these hobbies or problems...I have embarked on this geometric problem again and again over the years, trying to throw light on different aspects each time. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if this problem had never occurred to me; one might say that I am head over heels in love with it, and I still don't know why."
All of this was still fairly early on in his career, and all of them were things he was recognized for later on by scientists and mathematicians alike, and in popular culture where his works have been used on many book and album covers and was even asked for permission from Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones to use one of his pieces on the cover of their album "Through the Past Darkly", which he refused. He was even a major inspiration for a book seven years after his death on the 27th of March, 1972 at the age of 73.
Here are some of his most famous works.
Still Life And Street
This is a woodcut print first printed in 1937, and was his first print of an impossible reality. Here there are two quite distinctly recognizable realities bound together in a natural, and yet at the same time a completely impossible, way.
Relativity
This was a lithograph print first printed in 1953. This particular piece was influenced by his miserable memories of one of the most unhappy periods of his life in 1903 at the secondary school in the city of Arnhem, where his family had moved.
Ascending and Descending
This is a lithograph print first printed in 1960. It was influenced by, and is an artistic implementation of, the "Penrose stairs", an impossible object and a concept which Lionel Penrose had first published in the February 1958 issue of the British Journal of Psychology.
Waterfall
This piece is a lithograph print first printed in 1961, and is a further developed representation of the concept he introduced in his earlier "Ascending and Descending" piece.
Reading #2
There are many aspects of illustration used to convey the most powerful images possible, consisting of many different mediums and traditions of depicting space, form, tone and light, composition, and color dating back hundreds(sometimes thousands) of years. Several of them had movements based around them throughout artistic history, the births and deaths of which were for various reasons, typically from political and social upheaval.
Drawing is the basic form of art, the keystone, so to speak, of visual arts. Although the pencil is the most commonly used tool for drawing there are many other different tools used for it, such as chalk, crayon, pastel, and graphite, with eraser tools called rubbers ranging from hard to soft for various purposes.
Painting, printmaking, and assemblage are three other forms of visual art. Painting has been used for thousands of years through a variety of natural substances used to make paints and inks, and applied to a variety of surfaces with brushes, rollers, squeegees, hands, and sometimes the human body itself. In modern days illustrators have tended to prefer water-based paints over oil-based colors, which includes paints like gouache, acrylic, and watercolor.
Printmaking is essentially a wide array of techniques used to enable an image to be reproduced, which includes Wood engraving, Linocut, Drypoint, Etching, Engraving, Lithography, Screenprinting, Monoprinting, and Digital printing. Most of these techniques involve carving out a design from a certain object using certain tools, placing ink on it then running it through a press to put the ink design onto paper or some other medium.
Assemblage is unique in that it uses pieces of actual images and combines them together in a new way, creating a strange patchwork that one wouldn't expect to see together, and this method was made popular by the Surrealist and Dada movements.
Drawing is the basic form of art, the keystone, so to speak, of visual arts. Although the pencil is the most commonly used tool for drawing there are many other different tools used for it, such as chalk, crayon, pastel, and graphite, with eraser tools called rubbers ranging from hard to soft for various purposes.
Painting, printmaking, and assemblage are three other forms of visual art. Painting has been used for thousands of years through a variety of natural substances used to make paints and inks, and applied to a variety of surfaces with brushes, rollers, squeegees, hands, and sometimes the human body itself. In modern days illustrators have tended to prefer water-based paints over oil-based colors, which includes paints like gouache, acrylic, and watercolor.
Printmaking is essentially a wide array of techniques used to enable an image to be reproduced, which includes Wood engraving, Linocut, Drypoint, Etching, Engraving, Lithography, Screenprinting, Monoprinting, and Digital printing. Most of these techniques involve carving out a design from a certain object using certain tools, placing ink on it then running it through a press to put the ink design onto paper or some other medium.
Assemblage is unique in that it uses pieces of actual images and combines them together in a new way, creating a strange patchwork that one wouldn't expect to see together, and this method was made popular by the Surrealist and Dada movements.
Reading #1
According to Chapter 1 Illustration is unique compared to most other career fields in that other career fields usually don't require one to come up with new innovative solutions to the problems they're faced with and simply have to work within the confines of existing practices and knowledge which makes the risk of failure not nearly so present, whereas illustrators never have a set way of solving the problems they face in their line of work, as it is very dependent upon what idea and what concept they're tasked with advertising as well as what picture and word combination would best advertise it to the average viewer which makes the possibility of failure ever-present.
The two things illustrators work with to solve these problems are words and pictures, both with their own pros and cons, which combined accentuate the other's strengths and negate their weaknesses and become altogether stronger.
This complex problem can be divided into either applied art or fine art, applied being the application of one's work to someone else's product or problem, and fine art being a work of art that stands alone as a representation of an idea or concept that the artists themselves want to display. The starting point for either is in the illustrators work space or the "blank space" where they are tasked with turning a nothing into a something through a rigorous 7- step process, which utilizes the problem solving methodology of Edward De Bono known as the "Six Thinking Hats".
The first and second steps utilize the "White Hat" method to figure out what the problem is, and do research on it. The third step utilizes the "Green Hat" Method to generate several options based on research done in step one with which to present the idea, which brings us to step four and the combination of the "Yellow, Black and sometimes Red Hat" methods to evaluate these options in order to give one the general idea of both the strengths and weaknesses of each idea, and in the case of the Red Hat method, to think about them emotionally so that they may determine how it can be best tailored to elicit the necessary emotions of the viewer. The fifth step involves more "Black Hat Thinking" to come up with a criteria to judge your own ideas and their effectiveness at meeting the requirements for the purpose of the illustration, and the sixth step involves both "Black and Yellow Hat Thinking" to try and implement the chosen idea in the best way through visual refinement. Finally the seventh step, which goes back to the Yellow and Black Hat methods, involves reflecting on your finished piece and determining both the strengths and the flaws of your work process so as to keep to your strengths and avoid your flaws in the future, which is greatly assisted by following the Blue Hat method throughout the entire process.
The two things illustrators work with to solve these problems are words and pictures, both with their own pros and cons, which combined accentuate the other's strengths and negate their weaknesses and become altogether stronger.
This complex problem can be divided into either applied art or fine art, applied being the application of one's work to someone else's product or problem, and fine art being a work of art that stands alone as a representation of an idea or concept that the artists themselves want to display. The starting point for either is in the illustrators work space or the "blank space" where they are tasked with turning a nothing into a something through a rigorous 7- step process, which utilizes the problem solving methodology of Edward De Bono known as the "Six Thinking Hats".
The first and second steps utilize the "White Hat" method to figure out what the problem is, and do research on it. The third step utilizes the "Green Hat" Method to generate several options based on research done in step one with which to present the idea, which brings us to step four and the combination of the "Yellow, Black and sometimes Red Hat" methods to evaluate these options in order to give one the general idea of both the strengths and weaknesses of each idea, and in the case of the Red Hat method, to think about them emotionally so that they may determine how it can be best tailored to elicit the necessary emotions of the viewer. The fifth step involves more "Black Hat Thinking" to come up with a criteria to judge your own ideas and their effectiveness at meeting the requirements for the purpose of the illustration, and the sixth step involves both "Black and Yellow Hat Thinking" to try and implement the chosen idea in the best way through visual refinement. Finally the seventh step, which goes back to the Yellow and Black Hat methods, involves reflecting on your finished piece and determining both the strengths and the flaws of your work process so as to keep to your strengths and avoid your flaws in the future, which is greatly assisted by following the Blue Hat method throughout the entire process.
Assignment #2
I decided to use Saussure's Semiotic model to analyze my work. My signifier, according to this model, would probably be the word "slave", as it is a word that is easily recognizable to most people, and it symbolizes control. My signified would probably be the leash, as it indicates ownership, which is what the viewer is supposed to infer from my work. From there their eyes will drift to the man on the other end of the leash to see that he is the one that is owned, and the signifier of my illustration adds a little more context and impact to the already pretty strong message given by the signified.
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