Point of Sale Assignment

I began this exercise by thinking about how a supermarket which prides itself on high quality food would want its food presented.

I liked the freshness of these illustrations

I looked in magazines and cookery books to see the various colour combinations and media used, and cut out a load of images of fruit and designs based on fruit for my scrap books. I also had a look in our local supermarket to see if they had any point of sale displays, and they really had nothing, just their own branding.

collection of cuttings for summer and autumn fruit and colours etc

So I started off with a bit of a brainstorm, and a spider diagram. This provided me with some ideas for fruit and veg for Autumn (turnip, pumpkin, blackberries, corn, pears, mushrooms, corguettes, squash) and Summer (strawberries, oranges, lemons, lettuce, salad leaves, blueberries, raspberries, apples). It also helped me focus on the way the produce should be seen: Juicy - Healthy - Sunny - Colourful - Bright - bursting with goodness. All these words seem to suggest lightness of touch, quite fluid textures - perhaps water colours - splashy effects.

sketchbook berries and apple

I started off in my sketchbook with some observational drawings, in watercolour pencil, crayons and ink

blueberries

raspberries

blackberries

sunshine oranges - blue background (didn't scan well)

ink and watercolour

autumn veg

The background colour had an important part to play in the way I perceived the fruit - the bright blue sky colour worked well with the orange - it almost made it look like the sun in the sky (although my scanner hasn't picked this up). On the other hand, the complimentary colours of purples and reds with berries made them look as if they were so juicy they were bleeding their goodness onto the page. All quite useful observations.

At the same time, I played with some compositions that would stand out amongst the fuit and veg in a busy supermarket aisle!

sketchbook composition page

sketchbook composition page

One idea was to pick a colourful array of fruit and veg and use some of the words that came out of my brainstorm as a texture in the background.

Another plan to take one fruit and blow it up to fill most of the board, to make a really bold statement.

Another idea was to have the ABC of Summer and the ABC of Autumn, but this didn't fit into the square so well.

I liked the freshness of the watercolour pencils and crayons, they give a bit of texture but also the wash brought out the juiciness of the fruit and veg, so I did some individual studies and scanned them into the computer, cut them out played with scale and placed them in the right sized square.

I wanted a sort of 'home grown produce' feel about the images, as if they had been picked from the farm, and thrown onto the farmhouse kitchen table ready to be cooked. This led me to the idea of using a gingham cloth as a sort of texture for the background. The hope was that this would give me a bit of depth to the images, which looked a bit stark on a white background.

So I went for 4 fruit on one page, big and bold, which might work well if the display was high up - the words really just giving it some texture and context - a bit of shadow helped sit the fruit and veg on the background.

autumn display

summer display

I still am not sure which composition I like best. But I like the boldness of the colours.

The 2nd part of the assignment was to incorprorate an element of the season. These were based on the first idea I had for the compositions. This was a more of an intricate idea, involving more types of produce in a colour palette that I felt summed up the season. The autumn one was based on our Allotment produce and a farmhousy wooden chopping board, to give that 'I'm about to be cooked' feel. Our scanner has packed up and I'm struggling with the camera to get decent photos, but this was work in progress, I had been planning to add a tablecloth and I feel it really needs it. 

Autumn produce, watercolour pencils and crayons

I thought that the gingham would be too intricate and fight the fruit and veg too much so I went for a simple check. I like the ambiguity, it could be a picnic rug or a tablecloth, either way it brings connotations of family picnics, fresh air, wholesome food fun.

finished Autumn Board

I went for an autumnal earthy red colour to bring out some of the reds in the fruit. For the summer arrangement I decided to go for a sky blue background, clear sunny skies.

finished Summer Board

The photo has not really got the brightness of the image, I'm still not sure if I should have shadows under the fruit, or if they would dull the colours... I rather like the checked background being a little less literal. Looking at the photos, the Autumn colours are a bit brighter in the flesh, but these are technical problems I will have to work on.

I'm quite pleased with these images, but they might be a little 'fussy' for a supermarket campaign.

Visual Metaphor

First I trawled the newspapers and mags for Visual Metaphors.. and found quite a range. Too many to post here, but they are all in a packet for future reference.

I then went to my logbook to have a bit of a brainstorm about the different topics, and found that Broken Relationship yielded the most visual images to play with, the problem was that they were all a bit cliched. 

log page

After that, I went to my sketchbook and started to get some ideas down on the page.

sketchbook page

3 images from my sketchbook

I quite liked the broken heart and the cupid falling, as long as they didn't end up twee. And I quite liked the broken home, with the children standing under falling debris. 

I then had an idea for Censorsip of the Press - based on the 3 wise monkeys, but this time they could hear evil and see evil, but not speak it.

hear evil, see evil, but speak NO evil

and finally I thought of gagging the technology so I used censorship tape round a lap top, a hostage style bag over a desktop and some barbed wire around a computer, tv and newspaper. I had a problem with the TV because modern tvs are more or less all flat now but I had to make it into an old cathode ray to make it look like a tv to me!

bound laptop, gagged pc and barbed wired 'media' images

Thinking in metaphor is a very useful exercise. I think that I naturally am quite literal, so this is an area I will have to work on! For a succesful Visual Metaphor I think one needs to use images that are shared and accessible, but somehow steer away from cliche, add an element of surprise, or use cliche for a specific purpose, not neccessarily the obvious.  Not easy.

subjective drawing cont...

Here are the Welly Boot Monoprints that have now dried. I used drawing through the back and reductive techniques. Not sure about the effect. I quite liked the idea of the welly trees, but on reflection they look like the people wearhing the welly boots are upside down! I quite like the muddy murkiness of the printing technique and the paper.

welly tree 1

welly tree 2

Choosing Content

This exercise was to draw a simple portrait of the Man described in the passage from The Daffodil Affair by Michael Innes.

I read the piece through several times before answering the questions posed.

The Character:  If it were a film the character would be contained and silent - middle-aged, but not old. The weight of the world would be on him, his eyes dark and brooding. Anger simmering inside him but not overt. His face would be worn, his brow furrowed, possibly a Liam Neeson like at the end of Schindler's List.

Clothing: The passage is set in the 2nd world war. The Man would be wearing a worn flannel work suit, probably his only one. He's not wealthy but he is a workaholic, probably a chain smoker. Doesn't take too much care of himself.


Furniture: The desk is important 'the big desk lay islanded in a creeping parallelogram of light', he might have had a lamp and telephone on his desk, an ashtray, pen holder, ashtray, blotter, and maybe a filing cabinet nearby.


In my sketchbook I did some sketches from the Internet of 1930/40s suits and office furniture.

The room is described as like a "room in a shop window, but larger and emptier" - does this mean, exposed or small? Large but empty?

I researched New Scotland Yard in the war and discovered it was in the Norman Shaw Building. The windows high up are 6 or 9 pane sash windows (although the passage describes plate glass). It was close to Big Ben, and could well have looked out towards St Pauls.

A problem area for me was the Light - this is very confusingly described, it's a 'creeping parallelogram of light' and there is a massive shaft of shadow which passes to and fro 'perhaps twenty times', so what's creating a shadow that moves like this. It could be searchlights, but it's clearly daytime. The spring sunshine is described as 'bleak and functional'. Perhaps there is a passage of time involved, so that the scene takes place as the evening becomes night.

The words I was interested in communicating were 'Austere', 'Bleak' and 'Brooding' - this gives me a colour scheme of dark greys, beige, dusty coloured light, shadows and gloom.

A trawl of the internet gave me some pictures to work off, I wanted to include an element of wartime England outside the windows, as I was trawling I had the idea of using the tinted, charcoal quality of old photos and film,

I then turned back to the sketchbook and began to play with different compositions;

In this idea I was thinking about a scene with a locked off camera where the man would dissolve on and off the screen in different positions, but this would have been difficult to realize and wasn't really the 'simple' portrait that the brief asked for. 

In this sketch I used watercolour crayons and pencils - I tried to capture the watery spring sunshine, and the grubbiness of wartime London, with wardens with gas masks climbing on the rubble outside the windows. 

In this, the man is small, dwarfed by his desk (the weight of his work) and drawn to the chaos outside. 

In the first sketch above, I was toying with the idea of having him working, but that wasn't right. In the bottom pen sketch I went for a night-time and searchlight image, a closer portrait of the man's face. 

I ended up working on two different images, and chose vine and stick charcoal and a mid-tone grey pastel paper. 

I decided to add a sense of unease by offsetting the windows and having them off centre, but I'm not sure that this worked, perhaps the desk should have been further to the left, or maybe I should have made the figure central and the windows symmetrical. Not sure, looking at the cropped version. 

cropped to experiment with composition

The use of Charcoal, I hope, created the austere atmosphere I was after, and I'm largely pleased with the back view of the figure, I decided to limit the amount of furniture and stuff on the desk to enhance the feeling of austerity and bleakness. However, I wasn't happy that his face was so small (I was working on A3, so it was difficult to get too much detail in). So below is my 2nd attempt where I went more for the character of the Man. The face is from my imagination, although I used the photos and the sketched face on my mood board as a reference for shadows.

I tried to depict a man who has buried the anger he feels, and it has made him tired and brooding, worn out by his work and the world. I am quite happy with this portrait and I like the view of wartime London from the window, and the searchlights as well as the light on his face, although maybe he could have had darker shadows in his cheeks. I thought that the light from the searchlights would reflect on his face, but I'm not sure it comes across quite right.

  

Visit to Heath Robinson exhibition Woking Lightbox

I have been familiar with Heath Robinson's work since childhood, but I've never looked at it with a critical eye before. I came away with huge admiration for the way that he uses black and white and composition. I found his colour prints sucessful, but I was less impressed with his use of watercolour and bodycolour which seemed to dilute his dramatic compositions.

I find his use of line and mark making from dots to cross hatching to more free lines, really inspirational. Perhaps the most interesting thing from my point of view though was his bold use of blank space. He uses line drawn figures/scenes and silhouette in foregrounds and backgrounds to draw the eye around the image. He also uses vast areas of white or black space, which are seldom related to light source, but more to mood atmosphere or simply to balance his composition. 

His humour reminds me of Wallace and Gromit, i think Nick Park must have been a fan! Also, he followed the basic rule of comedy that a 'funny' character must have absolutely no  idea that he is funny! Robinson feels it's important that his comic character, Uncle Lubin, takes himself very seriously, just as Basil Fawlty takes himself too seriously and has an over-inflated sense of his own status. The purety of his succesful images is astounding, it's precision and detail and his ability to draw an entire scene is something that I will try to learn from.

Black and White

As somebody who often works in black and white and tone, I thought that this might be quite an easy exercise, and I was surprised at how challenging it was.

I took the word 'Journey', and played with several types of drawings in my sketchbook.

Eventually I worked up 1 of the images, which had more of a metaphorical theme and using pen transfered it to an A3 image.

pen on cartridge paper

Not having easy access to a photocopier, I decided to try the exercise on the computer, so I inverted the image. 

computer generated inverted image

And then started to cut and paste - first using the 'end of the journey' as a black hole and then using it as a white light and seeing the difference that this made to the mood of the image. 

white trees - innocence?

Black trees, more threatenting, but bright path  leads the couple clearly to the end point

To put it simplistically, the figures appear innocent when they are white, as if facing a black and threatening future. When this is inverted, the figures appear more certain and confident, but the black trees are also very threatening, so the future doesn't look altogether rosy for them! The tonal images are more focused, more definite and more satisfying than the line image, which is impersonal and cold. 

I was horrified to find that both my friend, with whom I am doing the course and my husband saw something reminicent of female genitalia in the image, but now they have said it - I can't get it out of my head, so I decided to have another go. 

I also wanted to have a go at someth was less regular - where the areas of black and white were more varied. So I worked up another image.

I inverted it...

Then played with the black and white areas and am pretty happy with the results.

I'm pleased with this image, there is more to discover as you look at the image. Not sure about the white leaves on the bottom left though. Might have to go back and get rid of them. 

A bit better! I know that there are some lines still left on the image, but I felt it needed them. I wanted some white stones on the path, somehow all black would have been too regular and uninteresting. I suppose it would be worth inverting the whole thing too.

For some reason it now looks a bit like the figure is walking along a stream with a sunset. Not sure that I like this one. I think it would be better if the trees were dark too.

The result is more of a fantasy image than I predicted. It's got a sort of fairytale quality about it. 

While doing this exercise I visited Woking Lightbox where there was an exhibition of Heath Robinson Illustrations, and I found these really quite inspirational. More on this to follow.