Rich Pictures
- Reflective Practice
This week:
I explored the concept of a “rich picture”, which is an illustration using metaphor to help define the abstract of my design practice. I found that a rich picture is generally only used to describe very personal or very complex experiences – so I decided that mine should be simplistic, graphic
and incorporate printmaking as well as digital tools as these are core
tenants of my personal design practice used throughout my projects.
In order to challenge myself further, I decided use woodcut (for the first time!) to produce my initial print. I discuss my experiences using woodcut instead of linocut in my weekly Skills Development blogs.
When considering the potential “uses” of this rich picture in my own career, I found that I am most likely to use this to help describe my process and practice / production pipeline to other artists and designers. To make this as practical as possible, I decided to go with a metaphor that is accessible to other people from the outside, yet when viewed in conjunction with a short description written by me, should unlock deeper hidden meaning:
“By building a strong ocean of reasearch to fall back upon, I am able to cast a wide net and realise stronger creative solutions, sooner.”
This rich picture shows a what is a mostly monochromatic scene of a fishing trawler with smoke billowing into the sky - it casts a large net into a deeply textured ocean and catches an abstract splash of colour. Multiple parts of the images work in tandem to create the narrative. The boat represents me - sometimes tackling challenging briefs can make me feel like I'm lost on an ocean. However, the ocean also represents the body of research I conduct before tackling the brief. This body of research is what gives me the confidence to find the best creative outcome to a brief. Additionally, “sailing out” to sea can represent how I push my narrative and technical skills further with my strong basis of knowledge.
I was drawn to use the scene of an ocean to represent my design process. This is because I tend to think deeply about the functionality of the work I produce, and I want to always create imagry with a strong sense of depth, whether that be through the literal meaning, layered imagery, deep concept or narrative, or even use of varied material textures.
A potential negative view of this idea is that there is some juxtaposition between the rigid way I try to structure my workflow for the sake of consistency (research then concepting then media testing then...) and the inherent organic and fluid nature of the ocean, however, I think that within strong illustrations, smart use of juxtaposing formal elements are often what creates the most striking visual imagery - and I think that this can also apply here!