Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
The Edinburgh International Book festival is in full swing and the Illustration department is on board too, proudly presenting ‘House Style 2019’.
This project saw every student, from Stage 1 to MFA2, and all members of staff choose a book published in the UK in the past 20 years and creating one illustration in response.
Everyone was asked to work in black and white as well as one out of 4 available spot colours which were randomly distributed after choosing a book, and part of the challenge was to work with this allocated colour.
The master-list of 150 books was assembled by literary critic Stuart Kelly, who helped us launch the project by giving introductory talk to the department. A big thank you goes out to him for his support.
The resulting works have been printed as postcards and exhibited at the Edinburgh Book festival as a full set, to represent the range of work coming from this Programme, in all its considerable variety.
All postcards are on sale now – grab one while you can!
Picture books are how we learn to read, following the images and letting the character lead you through the narrative. For an illustrator there is loads to get your head around including rhythm and pacing, story curves, character development, how to add drama and tone, balancing text and image on a big page. This is why it a great project to set our Year 2 illustrators! We asked students to design a non-picture book of their choice, mapping out a short dummy book first, then completing two of the spreads as resolved illustrations. Lots used a social issue as their concept, others took a more personal route. Some took a classic picture book form, and others explored a comic form. Here are a few of the results:
“Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.” – Jack Kerouac
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!
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?
Muriel Spark 100 – student work exhibited at the National Library of Scotland.
This collaborative project between Edinburgh College of Art first year Illustration and Graphic Design students was inspired by the current exhibition ‘The International Style of Muriel Spark’, which celebrates the life and work of Muriel Spark one hundred years after she was born in Edinburgh.
Small groups of students formed a collective and worked on a series of tasks including creating a collective archive box inspired by Muriel Spark’s personal collections, the development of one character at different stages of their lives, a tunnel book in response to a piece Muriel Spark’s writing and a piece to help promote her work to a new, young audience.
Throughout the collaboration, the collectives were asked to research into the life and times of Muriel Spark, and to create different responses to their findings. The collaborative nature of the project meant that students had to find a common ground and identify common values to work with one another while delegating various tasks amongst the group.
The students attended a series of workshops and crits led by author Vivian French and artists / designers Brigid Collins, Mary Asiedu and Astrid Jaekel, which has influenced the work they have created. We are delighted to see the work displayed in the foyer of the National Library, where it will be on show until 29th May.
There are 18 weeks left before we present this year’s degree show to the world. In preparation we are starting a blog series to feature our soon-to-be 4th year and Masters graduates.
Today, meet Lovely Laura Sayers!
I’ve been working with paper for quite a number of years now after I was given a project in school when I was about 16 that asked us to make a black and white paper sculpture based on a myth. I went straight in with a pair of scissors and found that I loved being able to glide them through a sheet and make new patterns and shapes from something so simple. Since then I’ve neatened up my way of working, discovered my eye for colour and my pieces have naturally ended up a lot smaller and more detailed. I’m still using the same trusty pair of 89p scissors though!
I’m currently reworking a little children’s book about a character called Hi Vis Vincent who is a chubby little guy who’s job it is to paint the words ‘bus stop’ on the side of the road, but he gets bored of painting the same thing and lets his imagination run wild instead.
I’ve become really interested in simple characters who live their dreams as a result of being bored – I love the concept of making fun out of mundane situations. I found a pencil sketch of Vincent in an old sketchbook that I’d forgotten about and I liked the look of him, so this is what he’s developing into.
A lot of my work centres around personalities and physical spaces as I feel this is what my style is best suited to. Literature plays a big part too, whether it’s a story or a poem that I’ve written myself or a piece of classic literature, I like the challenge of visualising the characters and bringing something new to their stories.
In my final year I’m also making some of my own handmade paper, keeping a journal and making patterns from the scraps left over from my pieces, and soon I’ll be starting a project which at the moment looks like it’ll be based on stories about the ugly offices that our studio faces onto.
