Cynthia Kingsley-Smith
Illustration



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Commercial Realisation Semester Planning

This week: 

                 Project Delivery
               Initial Thumbnails
               Supplimentary research and justification
               Initial Developments


First, I set out some personal aims and key dates to manage my time around. Importantly: 

    Outcome every two weeks.        
    Critical Review every two weeks.
    Progress Review 30th March.

Keeping these three goals in the front of my mind will help me have active deadlines to work towards; resulting in a more controlled / smooth workflow which was a weakness of my first semester. 

My intention with keeping a physical sketchbook alongside my digital blog is to record my traditional developmental work such as test prints, markmaking and colour/texture experiments which may have otherwise not been recorded digitally. I will upload this sketchbook alongside my digital developments and writing / analysis for my hand-in. 

Considering my personal goals and theme set out in my proposal and treatement, I want to use this module to respond to some contemporary protest events happening around the world - rather than a more generic message as I produced in my commerical 1 flag outcome. This will push me to improve my academic research skills, creative use of narrative / metaphor to convey a specific message relating to a specific thing AND work within a tigher timeframe while being respectful to sensitive messaging. 

In my personal life, I have been affected by the unlawful actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement federal agency in America. As mentioned previously, I believe that trying to prevent the apathy often encouraged my mainstream media towards the wider political system and other human beings can help prevent authoritarian right-wing crackdowns such as this as well as bring communities together for mutual aid and so I wanted to start this module by creating responses that focus on unity through resistance that could potentially be shared on social media.

I immediately started thumbnailing out ideas - getting the rough idea out in paper and then introducing more complex elements such as layering and typography down digitally. 

I started with this “whistle” a4 design - I thought it was a nice lower complexity idea with illustrative merit that would be a good launching off point for my series of prints as well as a test of my time management skills and initial exploration of typography and reduction linocut that I could bring forward into the future weeks.




I used a simplistic block shape for the whistle while I was planning my layout. I wanted to design the illustrative elements traditionally, as I knew that keeping this whistle as a lone linocut element would allow me alot of room to experiment with where to print it on the page.

I drew a quick line from the whistle, around the bottom third of the page and back - this was to represent a lanyard / neckstrap. I then chose a font with more naturallistic letterfroms (here - the open-source OpenDyslexic typeface).

This was my first time doing a reduction linocutting method: 

  • I started with the whole shape of the whistle, and printed it in a light pink
  • I cut away a rough semi circle shape on the “side” and front of the design, and printed in a red colour. My intention here was to create some highlight looking designs for image depth and contrasting texture.
  • I finally cut away the majority of the lino to just leave the outline of the shape, which I printed in a bold black.
  • I found the design and print quality to be too rough, as well as very technically challening. 



While the design was very simple, and I was not pleased with the result - I did learn a few things: 

  • I need to spend a much greater amount of time in the planning / thumbnailing phase if attempting a reduction, in additon, I need to try and produce MANY more copies.
  • I find the process of washing the lino and cutting away at it again quite awkward, because the malluablility of the material changes which changes the amount of pressure you need ot apply to cut, leading ot lots of mistakes. I will be more aware of this in the future. 
  • Combined, these things make this not ideal for responding to short-term briefs with - and I am more likely to leverage this method in personal work that could be sold at art fairs, etc. 
  • This design is not a lost cause, I can absolutely still scan it and possibly upcycle it into a collage or texture. 

This was a good warmup, but I will look to learn silkscreen printing over the next month while I have less time pressure right at the start of the module - and I’m already confident with a single linocut block. 

READING:
https://opendyslexic.org/ - 29 Jan
https://www.lauraboswell.co.uk/studiodiary/?p=432









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