Illustration Authorial Practice MA
MAI 120, Negotiated Practice Project 1
RESEARCH
Caslon Old Style
William Caslon ccirca 17th century
Headstone Standard Alphabet
MacDonald Gill 1925
Johnston Sans
Eric Johnson 1913
Although around as a concept for thousands of years it is only since the invention of the printing press and more recently the computer that typography has developed rapidly. There are now many typefaces available and the creation of new typefaces is a considerably easier task today than it was for the earliest type setters.
In order to create a sense of authenticity it will be important to use a historically accurate type.
The majority of typefaces used on the examples are Old Style or Transitional typefaces with limited sans serif typefaces see example.
letters and postcards from the trenches
references
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Shaun Tan’s ground breaking graphic novel tells the story an immigrant’s experience with no words, exploring the theme of diversity. Tan describes himself as “still the child on the lounge room floor with a pencil, just trying to figure it all out.”
All of the details in The Arrival were based on research particularly oral histories recorded by people migrating from Europe and Asia to Australia and North America. It has received a great deal of positive feedback from migrants who strongly identify with details in The Arrival.
This book was given to me as a present and has been a massive influence on my work. The pace of the story is fantastic, the cuts from one drawing to the next functioning like the editing of a movies. The choice of viewpoint and use of tracks in and out create a wonderful cinematic feel and Tan’s draughtsmanship is precise enough to communicate delicate, nuanced emotions.
The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes
In his essay “Myth and Education”, 1970, [Hughes] expresses the idea that some kinds of imaginative stories can have a curative effect. Hence The Iron Man can be read ... as a healing allegory, a story of redemption, a story of healing a fractured self ... in the narrative Hughes personifies the wake of the ongoing environmental conflict between the age of machines and technology, and the destruction of the environment, through human-induced changes to nature. However it also tells the story of friendship, betrayal and reconciliation between Hogarth, the little boy, and the Iron Man. The Iron Man also functions as a counterpart to the George and the Dragon story, typified by the “Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon” which threatens the earth, and feeds on living things... the movement of its wings restarts the music of the spheres … bringing an end to all conflicts and wars all over the globe. At the end of the story culture and nature are again in harmony."
Loraine Kerslake
The Land Ironclads by H. G. Wells
The land ironclads appeared in the December 1903 issue of the Strand Magazine. The ironclads are described by Wells as "long, narrow, and very strong steel frameworks carrying the engines, and borne on eight pairs of big pedrail wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel and set upon long axles free to swivel around a common axis. . . . the captain . . . had look-out points at small ports all-round the upper edge of the adjustable skirt of twelve-inch iron plating which protected the whole affair, and . . . could also raise or depress a conning-tower set above the port-holes through the centre of the iron top cover." Riflemen are installed in cabins "slung along the sides of and behind and before the great main framework," and operate mechanically targeting, semi-automatic rifles.
Wells has been broadly credited with inventing the concept of the tank and his story certainly predicts the impact the real thing had over a decade later. In the 21st Century it is hard to be surprised or shocked by real or fictional technology; if it hasn't been invented it will have been visualised with CGI. So for me the most interesting element of the story is the shock and fear caused by the arrival of the machines. I imagine the sight of 30 foot tall steel giants walking through no mans land, impervious to bullets, would have at least a similar effect.
Naomi V Jelish, ‘Hoax art’ by Jamie Shovlin
"Naomi V Jelish’s life story is one of pathos and tragedy.
Her strange tale is explained to visitors on labels, in newspaper cuttings, photographs, school reports and through personal mementoes.Naomi showed great aptitude for art in the face of complete indifference from her family and school. But in 1991, a few months after her father drowned, Naomi, then 13, her mother, and her four siblings mysteriously walked out of the family home in Gravesend, Kent, and despite extensive police inquiries, none of them has been seen or heard of again. A cutting from the Kent Messenger discloses that in September 1990 Naomi won "the prestigious North Kent Student Art Prize". In August the following year the paper reported that police were concerned because the family had vanished. Neighbours said the family seemed "cursed". David Jelish, the head of the family and a road mender with Kent county council, had drowned while saving one of the children, another child had recently survived electrocution and Vanessa, the children’s mother, was suffering from a stress-related illness following the death of her youngest son in 1989.
A book accompanying the display at the Saatchi Gallery goes on to say that Naomi’s precocious drawings were recovered from the abandoned house some time later by the late John Ivesmail, a science teacher at Naomi’s school who had befriended the family. Though beguiled by her sketches, he waited until 1999 to show them in a small exhibition in Gravesend. Soon after, he passed Naomi’s pictures to a friend, a young artist called Jamie Shovlin, who curated an exhibition of the drawings, along with all Jelish memorabilia recovered from their house and the newspaper cuttings.
The story of Naomi is moving, but it is a hoax, the products of the imagination of Shovlin, 25, from Leicester, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, who spent three years creating the fantasy. He produced the drawings, the cuttings, the school reports et al in order, as he explained, "to test the boundaries of ambiguity".
Naomi V Jelish and John Ivesmail are anagrams of Jamie Shovlin."
Nigel Reynolds, Saatchi Gallery
Kafka
Kafka is renowned for his surreal and enigmatic stories that often present a grotesque vision of the world in which individuals burdened with guilt, isolation, and anxiety make a futile search for personal salvation. His writing evokes helplessness, powerlessness and impotence.
The Trial, and Metamorphosis are two particular stories that have influenced me; both as an animator and artist.
Brazil
"The cold, bureaucratic nightmare of Brazil’s unnamed dystopian metropolis would have made Kafka proud. The world shows all the hallmarks of your classic dystopia: an endless sea of gray skyscrapers overseen by autocratic government agencies with scary names like Information Retrieval and the Department of Records; beaten-down office drones dealing with cumbersome technology somewhere between a typewriter and a Commodore 64; and tiny bullet-shaped cars that confine as much as transport. Gilliam’s stifling Expressionism hammers home a world overly obsessed with the convenience of technology to the point where agency is handed over to it."
Clint Worthington, Consequence of Sound