Sketches | Graphically Speaking

Green plastic bottles on an orange background with a fish in the middle

Whereas I had to drag myself through the Abstract Cities exercise, working on the photomontages was a complete joy and something I could happily carry on doing outside of the course. I decided the issue I would focus on is environmental sustainability. I had several ideas about how this might incorporate issues around food production/monocultures. Although it is hard to draw a montage I did sketch out some ideas to give me a starting point.

: Photomontage thumbnail sketches 1

: Photomontage thumbnail sketches 2

This helped me to assemble a number of stock images and some of my own photographs to create the photomontages themselves. I decided to work in Photoshop as for me it is the most efficient way to combine images and easily work with layers and masks. I created six photomontages, laid out in the order they were created:

: Just before midnight

: Time running out

: Wheat

: Three fish

: Down the plughole

: Plastic shoal 2

Just before midnight: three core elements with a textured background showing a parched earth
Time running out: playing with the Just Before Midnight (JBM) approach and morphing the clock
Wheat: A more structured design using the cycle of wheat production from growing annual wheat to supermarket shelves to waste and mould
Three Fish: I had something else in mind but when I added the fish layer it came up this big and I liked the way it looked lying on the rubbish. So I added two more fish to resemble fish lying on ice in the fishmonger
Down the plughole: working with the fish and rubbish theme and showing everything ultimately swirling down the plughole
Plastic shoal: I had made an early sketch of fish swimming with bottles and this is the result

Just before Midnight started with the background. I then added the earth on the left, followed by the clock and the pumpkin. I finished by adjusting opacity and using some masking. It is designed to be read left to right.

: JB4M Process 1

: JB4M process 2

: JB4M Process 3

: Just before midnight

Time running out (TRO) was created using a similar process with layers and masks and using the distort transformation tool.

: TRO process 1

: TRO process 2

: TRO process 3

: Time running out

Wheat used a more formal grid structure. I wanted to try a different format and to create something that looked at the issue of monocultures and the growth of annual wheat varieties in particular. The background image is of a huge dust storm to which I added the photos of the wheat roots and the soil differences. I moved the images and changed opacities and added the wheat. I added the circles of supermarket shelves and finished with the mouldy bread to show the lifecycle of the process.

: Wheat process 1

: Wheat process 2

: Wheat process 3

: Wheat

Three fish was very simple in process terms. I found the rubbish image and used that as the background. I was intending to weave the fish into the rubbish but when I added the first fish I decided to just copy them and overlay them on the rubbish. I left both at 100% opacity.

: Three fish process 1

: Three fish

Down the Plughole used the same background as three fish and I integrated the fish into the rubbish. I thought I would just fade the bottom as a metaphor for bleaching coral but this looked quite top heavy and I wasn’t sure how how best to finish it. Thinking about pollution I decided to ad an oil slick. I completed DtP by working with opacity levels, masking, using the swirl filter and adding a plughole.

: DtP Process 1

: DtP Process 2

: Down the plughole

Plastic Shoal came directly from one of my early sketches. I knew I wanted to use green plastic bottles so decided on an orange background. I added the fish and made some adjustments because it wasn’t quite flat on. I then added the bottles in a fairly random order. I finished by creating more of a repeating pattern with the bottles.

: Plastic shoal process 1

: Plastic shoal 1

: Plastic shoal 2

I shared these images with other students at our recent monthly Thames Valley Group meeting and had some very helpful feedback. The two images that seemed to stand our most for the group were ‘Just before Midnight’ and ‘Plastic Shoal’ (PS). Some liked the image of JB4M but felt that the message wasn’t clear enough. Everyone felt that PS had the most graphic feel but one person thought the message was too strident/obvious. It seems the issue of message is a hard balance to get right. Someone said the images with the fish felt quite ‘pop art,’ which was appropriate for the subject in terms of reflecting on where consumerism has brought us.

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Four abstract arches to use for a city guide cover for Madrid

Create a series of ten abstract designs in which you balance blocks of subordinate, dominant and accent colours. These designs are going to be used as covers for ten cities. As part of the process explore your DTP packages further by creating the artwork in different software packages.

I think it’s fair to say that compared to previous exercises I have made a complete meal of this one! I made a fatal mistake at the beginning, which was to do the maths – ten designs at four to five different iterations, that’s at least forty images! Oh, my that’s a lot of ideas and uploading. I think at this point I became a bit overwhelmed by the task and wasn’t sure how best to approach it. This triggered quite a lot of procrastination and longingly reading and re-reading the next exercise about Photomontage.

I collected the odd image and started thinking about how I was going to approach the exercise but the inspiration was slow in coming. Some of the cities I knew so had some initial connections and my own perception of colours and shapes. I did some wider research online to collect images of the different cities. This then prompted some initial sketches to start the process of thinking about composition, having decided I’d work on composition first and then work with colour. I was reasonably happy with some of the ideas but not wildly excited by them.

Six thumbnail monochrome sketches for travel guides

Panorama based sketches

Unusually for me I also then looked at other student’s work for this exercise. I wouldn’t ordinarily do this as I have found in the past it can be a bit intimidating when I see the quality of other peoples work. I am also mindful that sometimes you can take on subliminal ideas that may then appear unintentionally in your own work raising concerns about originality. With those caveats in mind and being as stuck as I was I thought it might help. It was certainly useful in seeing how others had approached the exercise, and especially helpful in looking at how others had assembled their palettes and the use of Adobe Color. I also noticed some motifs and images were used by a number of students and that these were very similar to the images I had found.

The next step was some quick research on other travel guides. The ones that stood out for me were the Louise Vuitton and the Luxe guides. It was particularly the Luxe guides that caught my eye, I really liked the idea of taking a small detail to represent the bigger concept. My first sketches, and other student work seemed to be more panoramic in nature and I wanted to focus in more.

: Marco Polo Guides

: Louis Vuitton Guides 2

: Luuis Vuitton Guides 1

: Luxe Guides

: Guruorange Guides

: Frommers Guides

: Eyewitness Guides

At this point I decided to refine the brief and think about them in terms of guides for art lovers in each city, which meant I could focus in on a particular theme. As I did the research this also helpfully showed that many of the arts buildings in these cities are quite iconic. Finally, I had a way in and something that interested me!

Abstract Cities – stage two

Having decided on the approach I wanted to take I set out some dedicated time to work on all ten cities together. I worked on them in batches rather than city-by-city, in part to think about consistency but also to keep the energy going.

I created what I have called a mood board for each city in which I brought together arts, architecture and public art examples.

: Mumbai

: Montreal

: Melbourne

: Marseille

: Marrakech

: Manhattan

: Manchester

: Managua

: Malmo

: Madrid

I put all the mood boards into Adobe Colour and used that to create a basic colour palette for each, based on their bright or custom themes. In some cases these were adapted further when I worked on the design. The Colour Palettes PDF shows the initial colour schemes.

I then started a new set of sketches to work on the compositions. These were developed in Illustrator.

: Abstract Cities thumbnails 1

: Abstract Cities thumbnails 2

: Abstract Cities thumbnails 3

Abstract Cities – Stage three

Madrid

Based on contemporary art in the city I tried to do the exterior of the Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia but I was struggling with Illustrator and it started looking too fragmented. The second idea was based on a piece of public art but wile I like the idea it felt too derivative. I finished by using an aspect of the exterior of the Matadero, which I think captured the wider iconic arches in other parts of Madrid as well as the Spanish colours.

Managua

I had thought I would use some of the city’s public art but after more online research I found that several of them had been demolished. In the end I went with the iconic trees (although these seem to have mixed appeal in Managua itself!).

After learning how to make swirls in Ai I used Adobe sketch and transferred the result to Ai. I was struggling to make the colours work and was painstakingly using the pen tool to map areas and apply colour. In the end I used the trace function and decided to use a thick stroke to paint the curls. I was going to tidy the edges but decided I quite liked them a bit sketchy.

Marrakech

Based on the exterior of the Marrakech Museum for Photography and the Visual Arts. It was one of the earliest sketches and I was happy with the composition so concentrated on the colour combinations. I used variations from the colour palette, which were evocative of the city as a whole. In the last two versions I added the drop shadows under the windowsills but I didn’t feel they really added to the design. (I have just read the Museum has closed while it seeks a new location so would have to rework this for a guide now!).

Manhattan

This design uses the iconic interior of the Guggenheim museum. As with others I started with too much detail so after the two early attempts I decided to simplify it and make it more abstract. I didn’t like the all caps typeface and tried to find something that was stylish and cultured.

Malmo

These compositions are based on the exterior and interior of the Moderna Museet Malmo (MMM) and the Malmo Konsthall (MK). I kept the exterior ideas very simple and abstract. The all orange example is from the interior of the MMM and plays with some of the architectural features. The MK interior is very minimal reflecting the perspective in the gallery. The typeface is modern and simple.

Manchester

These designs are based on the exterior of the People’s History Museum and as with the other designs they incorporate colours from across the city. I was reasonably happy with the composition so worked on various colour palettes. The first two didn’t feel well balanced and the interaction of colours wasn’t working. I decided to use white for the background, which lifted the colours and made it more dynamic.

Mumbai

Initially, I thought I would use the exterior of the Bombay Arts Society but when I started working with the shapes it wasn’t coming together. Instead I used the interior staircase design that is very distinctive. Once I had got the basic layout I worked with different palettes until the final version, which I felt was the most harmonious. Again I chose a typeface that felt in keeping with the destination.

Marseille

This started with the night view of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (MuCEM) but it looked too busy and fussy so I moved on to the aerial view and created something much simpler. The colours draw on the wider palette of the city and are not specific to the centre. I added some texture in the final version to evoke the amazing external structure of the building. I kept the typeface clear and modern.

Melbourne

My initial ideas were to use the distinctive façade of the Australia Centre for Contemporary Art and while I liked these I thought perhaps they were a little too abstract. The second set of ideas take public art in Melbourne as their starting point. The colours are reasonably close to the original works but also encompass the sunshine, red earth, and blue skies.

Montreal

This is the iconic façade of the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art. The original building only has one red window but this has been extended to three in the final version to reflect the presence and importance of the colour red in the city. The overall palette was kept relatively muted to reflect the city’s architecture.

Final selection

Having done the original sketches and then working up the designs in Ai I selected the final ten which I felt were probably the most successful. Some are more successful than others but I think there is some sense of them working together as a series.