I have felt this way towards the end of each year of the
course and have found that steps forward in my practice tend to happen in
summer when I have more freedom to apply the knowledge and experience gained
throughout the winter. I very much feel that the hand-in for this module is the
start of something rather than the end. Through feedback on the competition
briefs I have completed and through talking to professional illustrators I have
been able to identify the goals I feel I need to achieve to improve my work. I
have been told my animal characters are strong and that I need to work more on
human characters. In particular, I want to get rid of the static feel in some
of my compositions through working on characters’ posture, expressions and
actions. This will also help me to communicate emotions and interactions within
my work. The publishers I have spoken to said that character studies are
something they look for in a portfolio because they demonstrate an
illustrator’s ability to maintain a character throughout an entire book.
During the talk we had from Scott Bakal recently he
emphasised the importance of creating work that is true to yourself: being an
artist first, then putting your work in a position to be seen and finding out
where it fits in the industry. This really struck a chord with me as someone
who has been struggling with confidence. If you are constantly creating work
based on what you think people will like, how can you truly have confidence in
it without getting approval from someone else? I think I may have fallen into
that trap with a couple of the briefs I worked on in this module. This applies also to the importance of not
pigeon-holing yourself within the industry. For instance, although my work is
tailored towards children’s publishing, it could also be used in advertising,
stationary/gift cards and editorial.
Working on children’s book competition briefs has helped me
develop a better understanding of page layout and composition. I have learned how to rough out compositions
incorporating text and avoiding the gutter and outer edge of the page, and how
to organise both the illustrations and text across the pages of the book to
maintain the pace of the narrative. I have developed a better understanding of
composition, learning how to create focal points that draw attention towards
key elements on the page, pacing the text to create suspense and using the
direction of movement of the page to increase the impact of moving to the next
page. I have also been researching lettering, looking at the best colours and
fonts to help children to identify letter forms while they are learning to
read, as well as the best use of language to aid the audience’s understanding
of the narrative. I feel much more comfortable now working in these formats and
feel my process has improved throughout the module.
However, I feel I have not spent as much time as I could
have working on the ideas behind my illustrations. The talk we had from Laura
Carlin really brought this home to me and changed the way I think about my
work. Rather than placing too much reliance on images of the characters, she
showed how engaging and effective communication can be achieved through
narrative and illustrative strategies such as creating backstories for the
characters, depicting the consequences of a character’s actions, using posture
to communicate a character’s emotions, and giving the reader opportunities to
complete explanations which are only partially made explicit in the text.
I feel that the work I have done in this module has set me
up well for the next stage in my development, and the ideas presented by the
tutors and other practitioners have given me direction and inspiration to
develop my practice further. At the beginning of the module I was looking at
the hand-in as an end point where the development of my practice would be
finished and ready to present to the industry, when there would have been more
benefit in looking at it as a point at which to evaluate my progress so far and
as a basis for moving forward. It was good to hear Scott Bakal talk about the
stage his work was at when he left education and how far away it was from his
current practice.
