Identifying Tools and Materials 3

For my 2nd Illustrator who uses Collage, I chose Dave McKean. His work is incredibly powerful , dramatic and dynamic. I looked closely at his illustrations for Heston Blumenthal's Big Fat Duck cookbook, because of the range of styles, some of which are below. I love his energetic fast flowing ink work and the way that he combines that with other elements such as photography.

His work is very complex and I found it quite difficult to work out exactly which parts were photography, which were painted, ink etc and how he went about collaging and layering the image together.

I decided to take a simple image to start with. So I opted for the Jazz Lady visual that I produced for the last Assignment, which I always felt lacked a bit of depth and decided to add a bit of Dave Mckean style to her.

First I took some music, photocopied and tore it up - (the subtext being 'improvisation' - the implication being that this music throws out the rule book and rips up the score)

then I painted over the music with some bright blue acrylic with free flowing strokes - to get some texture and some 'bluesy' colour.

I photographed and then cropped in the computer. I had intended to paint over the top but the texture was a bit too rough for that...

I then did a brush and ink drawing of the Jazz Lady 

 And then coloured her dress and the double bass in the computer, before adding the texture and playing with the mixes and opacity.

With text this might work the best... although I decided to try a different colour scheme and see what the result was.

I rather liked the hot colour version that I tried - in fact it's got more atmosphere about it I think - I also quite like the cropping on this one.

Although this is just a dabble into the techniques of Dave McKean, I think that it has given me some ideas to use at a later date.