Cynthia Kingsley-Smith
Illustration



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Prelude: Summer Project


My summer project primarily involved a huge amount of research. My intention with this project was to:

Gain a strong understanding of my own practice and workflow;

Have an artistic medium and aesthetic “style” I am comfortable pursuing alongside my chosen Editorial / Alternate Publishing specialism;                                                  

Find a strong, cohesive concept with a strong foundation of research to springboard my Proposal and Treatment.

Choosing A Theme - Self Reflection

The initial themes that stood out to me conceptually:

  •  4: Edgelands
and
  •  7: The Lonely City

I need to consider deeply how I want my own work to develop next year, and if these themes will provide opportunity for that. 

To better understand my own work, I looked at my work specialisms essay, developments and some of my favourite illustrators discovered during University modules. 

  1. Work specialisms: I made strong observations in my conceptual workflow. I must be able to read or hear a concept and reduce the core concept down to both a strong metaphor and inherently simple visual concept. 
  2. My development: I think working predominantly with a tactile medium like linocut over the last year has positively changed the way I look at creating an illustration (as evidenced in work-based specialisms). I think a natural next step for me to take is to increase the complexity/scope of my responses in order to be able to communicate more complex ideas in my developments, quicker. This could be through better use of colour, more intricate lino work OR more integrated use of digital elements in my workflow. This is absolutely something I should start figuring out over this summer project. 
  3. Favourite illustrators: A short list of stand out illustrators whose work I admire. These illustratos work in advertising, editorial / publishing, While I may not work in the same way as all of these; I think I can learn much from them. In particular, I think all of these professionals have an excellent academic understanding of "good" visual communcation, and are fantastic at portraying tone / feeling through formal elements. 

I think my most successful two "completed" pieces from last year are: 



These pictures are evicence that over the last couple of years I have made established a workflow that works for me and made massive progress in finding a stronger artistsic voice. I have also identified obvious holes in my skillset, weaknesses and spaces I'd love to improve on and become more comfortable with, for example, these are both sparse on colour, rely heavily on silhouette for impact. Additionally, I've only used linocut and I'd love to branch out. As far as targets go, apart from generally improving at the things listed - in a sentence:

I am aiming to become adept at visually communicating simple and complex ideas through printmaking. 

I think that with a combination between my ability to self-reflect and establish clear goals and the project i'd like to set myself for this year, I am in a fantastic spot to push these specific skills that will cause me to be most successful at creating: prints, posters with very graphic designs as well as responding to editorial or publishing briefs. 

As for my conceptualisation for next year, I’d like to combine my semester one and semester two in such a way so that my centralised sphere of research can reach and benefit all of my modules. Each of my four projects should provide a unique opportunity to shift my focus either subtly or majorly to allow me to develop different parts of my practice.

My research and concept timeline over this summer looked something like this: 
  • I read “The Lonely City” by Olivia Laing and “Edgelands”  by Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley. These books both made me think deeply about Lonliness, sense of self and detachmetn from society.
  • My personal social media became very active coinciding with protests in America against the Illegal ICE raids. I followed alot of artists that contributed protest art to this cause, this includes posters, flyers, zines, digital art, infographics, etc.
  • This caused me to think about the practical elements of protest art: about what materials I’m frequently seeing, about what layouts and concepts I thought made the most effective imagery, etc. 
  • As I was thinking about lonliness at the same time, I realised that protest act can be such a powerful and unifying way to communicate - I kept thinking about this concept - especailly; mutual aid; togetherness, and how just having a loud; clear message in all sorts of societal or political contexts can help combat lonliness
  • From a practical point of view - this concept will allow me to explore narrative printmaking; graphic elements; how typography and strong layout combine to create memorable imagery.


I kept my initial sphere of research very broad and then narrowed down my options as I came closer to the concept I wished to pursue.
     The chosen books.
    Artists: David Darger, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz.
    Japanese Woodcut print movements; especially Sosaku-Hanga.
    A massive amount of political activism and protest research.



Regarding my workflow: I'm actioning some advice I recieved before summer - to be more selfish with my work. That means I am going to be working in a fashion, with media and methods that I think help me produce the best work the fastest.

I am facinated with visual communication as an academic concept. It may partially come from my previous career choice of working with information structers on the Internet, where everything is very key info based and graphic design adjecent but I think it's also come from my personal struggles with growing up autistic, where my brain doesn’t quite interpret everything the same - so in turn I had to be very vigilant with how I gave information out otherwise I’d end up confusing the people around me. So the way I look at building my images from a practical, technical PoV is very personal and important to me aswell and I hope that this gets reflected in my final outcomes.

My workflow is heavily based on two things; research and experimentation - I can utilise strong knowledge to make better narrative decisions, then I use imperfect markmaking + layered self-made textures to help express emotion and it's the combination of these two things that leads me to my final outcome - I think that going into the future nurturing this method will make me more effective at responding to briefs, especially editorial / publishing ones. 

I think overall I will get to spend time developing these hard and soft skills that I think is very important to successful practice. I get to grow in confidence, final show and paper jam exhibition opportunites, Something I haven’t touched on; the flexibility of my approach means I have windows to experiment with the commercial viability of my outcomes.

Due to the potentially sensitive nature that could come from some of the art - but it is a tool that can help people. It provides clear ways to communicate messages and ideas where words can get lost in translation; and in doing that it can bring people. 
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