OUIL 504 Visual Journal: A Summary
Investigation of line
As Gaiman's work is known to carry darker overtones than the average children books, I decided to pick the theme of fear as a starting point for my visual journal.
I decided to pick old, abandoned houses, spiders and weapons as my 3 motifs. Though these might not be actual motifs in his ‘Coraline’ book, I thought they were best to represent Fear in general. Line is used to suggest direction, motion, energy and mood. I used the directory of line that I created to experiment how different line qualities affect the representation of my motifs and its tone of voice.
Format and Composition
Different line qualities can also control what the eye sees as being more important in a composition and what is less important.
With these I was trying to see how changing the arrangement, size and line quality of these 3 motifs would affect how a composition is read. For example, strong, bold lines make a visual element appear more dominant because it is what catches the eye first. However, the size can also play a part in deciding the order of importance of certain objects within a composition.
Shape and Colour
Colour is an extremely important element in art. Combining line and color is perhaps the most common way in which artists convey the intangibles; mood and emotion in a picture. Different shapes have different connotations depending on the lines and colors used. On the page to the left, the shapes I used are quite sharp and precise to connote severity/ dangerousness. I combined these shapes with colour to see how I could communicate and further emphasize the dark and scary mood associated with the theme of fear.
Texture
The red, black and white colour combination of my collage and line pieces was said to have worked well to evoke the atmosphere of my theme. I decided to keep to these limited colours with the next set of experiments. Textures can be used as another way to emphasize the mood of a picture and story. I experimented with a variety of handmade textures for my collage pieces. The ones on the right are my favorites out of the other 12 because the textures are not too over-powering but just right to convey a dark atmosphere. Also I think these ones turned out the best, due to the simple, straight forward composition.
Visualising Texts
At this stage, I decided that for my moving and printed pictures brief, I wanted to animate and illustrate various pieces of texts from the book ‘Coraline’.
I decided to think about how I could visualise some of the imagery from the book, whilst also applying my knowledge of line, mark, colour, shape and texture. I continued to experiment with different line qualities, colour and textures with the aim of trying to capture the dark atmosphere of the story.
As well as experimenting with different line qualities, mark, colour, shape and texture, I also experimented with different medias and tools.
Here I wanted to communicate a ghostly atmosphere, which smudging graphite, I found, does exactly the job. I really liked this hazy effect because it created a sense of gloominess and uncertainty within the drawing.
I then decided I wanted to look more at the characters in the book, which led to the experiments on the next page. The two sketchbook pages look at the same subject matter but investigating how different qualities of line, shape and texture affect it stylistically – more organic lines vs. sharp and rigid shapes.