Identifying Tools and Materials 2

I chose to look more closely at the work of Dave McKean and Joel Stewart.

First I had a quick go at drawing in the style of Joel Stewart trying to work out where he had used 'physical' collage and where he had used the computer:

I took his cover page, which I think summed up his vision for bringing a modern twist to the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen. He has used the convention of the Victorian Stage which complements his cold stylised faces - and creates a nostalgic wistful atmospheric quality to his illustrations. The characters assembled are from different fairy stories, and are ephemeral, somewhat nightmarish - nobody is looking at each other they are all in their own little worlds ready to tell their stories.

I used pastel as he did, but without the intensity - however it gave me a feeling for how Stewart works. I'm quite pleased with the results - but it is clear that he must have used collage to get some of the clean lines between the different textures. 

I then took a visual from the Book Cover exercise (James and the Giant Peach) and rendered it in pastel but using different papers for the curtains, the sky - the peach itself and the waves. I intentionally made the waves like a Victorian cardboard puppet theatre set. I then cut the papers out and stuck them together - this is the scanned version.

Just for good measure - I then had a go at ripping up some images from a magazine and just seeing where the wind took me with a collage of the same image done in no particular style without the framing device and I'm quite pleased with the results.

James and the Giant Peach being attacked by sharks - ripped up magazine pages

As a break My friend with whom I am doing this course and I then had a bit of a play with some buttons.  I then photographed the image and put it into the computer to see if I could cut it out and place it on another background out successfully - not bad

Computerised, will have to see if I can put it onto a field at some stage

I then had a go at imitating some of the little carbon paper monoprint icons that Joel Stewart had used in the Hans Christian Andersen book with limited success. I took some small images from James and the Giant Peach again, and simplified them... the results were a bit disappointing - they worked best when I had very damp paper and a blunt pencil so that the bleed was more random... I'll return to this technique another time when I've got more time to experiment.

See my attempt to emulate Dave McKean's work in the next blog!