Category: First Year

A-Z

A-Z is a first year Illustration project celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was first conceived, compiled, printed and published in Edinburgh on 10 December 1768.

The project began with a visit to the archives of the National Library of Scotland, where library staff introduced the student group to the original Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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After being inspired by the original books, students were asked to each choose one entry and create two pieces of artwork in response:

#Britannica250

In support of the library’s appeal to digitise ‘Britannica’, students created short animated gifs, which are shared across the ECA Illustration and National Library of Scotland’s social media accounts. Use the Twitter and Instagram hashtag #britannica250 to find these lively interpretations of words you may be unfamiliar with. Here are a few examples:

 

 

 

Risograph print

In addition to the animated gifs, the A-Z is a collective book featuring the eighteen chosen Encyclopaedia Britannica entries in the form of risograph prints. The focus of this project was to get students to think about image and text layout and the imaginative interpretation of texts. It also served as an introduction to risograph printing and an exercise in working with a limited colour palette.

This work is currently on display at the National Library of Scotland throughout June, alongside the original Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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Illustrated Anthologies

“Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.” – Jack Kerouac

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Our first year Illustrators spend the first half of their semester working on a number of poems they were first asked to write and then illustrate. Sources of inspiration were Surrealist word games, biographies linked to Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and Political Protest. The main focus was image and text relationship and composition on the page. As part of this our students also learned to put together the pages of a book digitally and get it printed to a professional standard. Come to BOOKMARKS on Wednesday and you’ll be able to see some of these gems at our first year stall!

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Can you guess?

At the beginning of ‘Unspoken’ each first year Illustration student was randomly assigned a painting from the Impressionist room at the National Gallery of Scotland. During a visit they were asked study it carefully and later do more research into the story behind their painting and how it relates to the artist who created it.

Based on this research, students developed a wordless sequential narrative in 4 panels, to be submitted as a high-quality digital prints at the end of the project. It was important to be imaginative with the storytelling and interpretation of any research material and to create many recognisable links to the original painting, for example through brushstrokes and colour choice.

The project also served as a first introduction to Photoshop and explored the merging of traditional mark-making and digital applications. The results are wonderfully painterly and deceiving in that they don’t look that digitally-generated at all!

Our final crit took place in public, right in front of the original artwork, and with an unknown audience of gallery visitors. This would be a good reason to be nervous, even for the most experienced of artists, but our first years managed just fine.

So can you guess which paintings our students were looking at?

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