Varoom - The Illustration Report: The New issue

THE NEW

T H E I L L U S T R AT I O N R E P O R T Q U A R T E R LY E D I T I O N

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COVER ILLUSTRATION : MARSHMALLOW LASER FEAST PHOTOGRAPH : LUCA MARZIALE

I L L US T R AT I O N , C U LT U R E , S O C I E T Y

Winter 2016 / Issue 32 / £8.00

10 THE NEW SOCIAL

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Career boosting, selling platform, discussion generating – social media has much to offer, DEREK BRAZELL gets expert insight from six illustrators prominent on various social media platforms. SARAH MCINTYRE, PING ZHU, FRANNERD, HOLLY EXLEY and duo CACHETEJACK, reveal the gains, the frustrations and contrasting takes on selfies

The NEW Social

Interacting with the world online; is it a bubble, a 24/7 rush of communications, images, empathies or misunderstandings, or a genuine area of opportunity and connection?

Focusing on creating commissions or personal projects, illustrators are often working in their own space, and the opening out of this space via the online world can be a release from the solitariness that illustration-making often dictates. Offering friendly interaction, criticism and approval, and also an increasingly common way for artists to seek out, or be sought out by, potential clients.

Ping Zhu reflects that “Twitter can create a virtual community that closes the gap between students and professionals, as well as collectives from different countries,” and Frannerd views her expanding audience as one with whom she builds a relationship “based on trust and transparency”. The sense of followers being more than passive observers comes through, often drawing together artists interested in each other’s work, but also, as with Sarah McIntyre’s campaign #PicturesMeanBusiness, a vehicle for illustrators to be credited for picture books, supporting change within the industry.

Social media platforms are effective image transmitters

Social media platforms, particularly Instagram (obviously) are effective image transmitters, and it’s clear that illustrators delight in showing sketches, artwork and commissions to whoever is watching. And watching they are, over many channels. Holly Exley and Frannerd discuss their YouTube channels, where viewings of their personal approaches to the life of an illustrator and offerings of advice range from a couple of thousand to over 20-30,000.

There’s an altruistic approach at work here, Exley says “I’ve had an amazing response to my videos so far and I like that I am able to offer advice to those just starting out in their creative careers”. This expansion of what was previously a fairly hidden world of illustration production is part of what draws those new to the industry to the positives of social media – the sharing of knowledge and experience. “I joined the LiveJournal community in 2006,” Sarah McIntyre says, “and owe a lot of my illustration to the ideas, inspiration and training I found from looking at the work of comics creators, taking part in challenges and chatting in the comments sections.” Maybe it is all this, and more – as Cachetejack say, “Internet is magic”.

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Abstinence / Silla abstinencia, Cachetejack, from Sliding Adrenaline exhibition, Slow Galerie, Paris, 2015

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22 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS : Motion

Virtual reality headset decorated in moss, using VR to reconnect the modern way of life back to nature and as a means of revealing the world beyond the limits of human senses. 2015. Photograph by Luca Marziale

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INDUSTRY INSIGHTS : Motion 23

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COME TO YOUR

By fully immersing the viewer in a 360 degree 3D environment, with binaural sound that can pitch and throw from any direction, VR has the

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Which brings me to virtual reality – VR is the new ‘new’. It will be at the fingertips (should that be eyestalks?) of consumers this year. Oculus Rift, acquired by Facebook for $2bn in 2014, has finally announced that it will launch commercially in March of 2016. Tech giants Apple and Google are both reported to be investing in VR, as Samsung and Microsoft continue to develop platforms for the new technology. 2016 will see it going from geek niche to the latest cool entertainment platform.

T R AT I O N R E P

I tend to consider things that I feel won’t be just new for a moment, but that represent a new way of thinking, working or making that is of its time but also is a doorway to the future. MARSHMALLOW LASER FEAST (MLF) are inherently producing work that would be considered to be ‘new’. They are more than just a collective of creative tech wizards – they breathe life into new tools and approach ideas with humanness and a marvellous sense of playfulness that never feels like a gimmick but is central to the idea.

US

In my role creatively directing a fairly forward thinking organisation like onedotzero I have been asked to regularly predict the future, whether it be technology or talent, trends or style-tricks for magazines, awards, and cultural and commercial clients alike.

LL

We are all in some ways striving for the new. The next novel idea.

The hot stuff of the future. New is never old. Nothing sells like the latest new. In our swipe obsessed-Uber Express-superfast-hyperlinked-always on world we are living the new on a daily basis. Most working and striving for success in the so-called creative industries have to deliver this new on-demand, for risk of being out of fashion or off-trend.

New is good right?

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BY SHANE WALTER

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Noted: Reflections & Process

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potential to become the ultimate visual storytelling device. What VR gives you is a sense of presence and place. Without the distraction of having to stare at a screen, you literally can be in the centre of the action.

MLF’s IN THE EYES OF THE ANIMAL project was commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) festival for Grizedale sculpture park. With all the talk of new technologies, MLF were actually interested in getting back to nature – literally. They were, “interested in using VR as a means of revealing the world beyond the limits of human senses. Our modern way of life lacks a connection and experience of nature.” So naturally they set out to use VR to make that reconnection.

Visitors were given globe-shaped virtual reality headsets decorated in moss and plants to wear and experience the landscape as if through the eyes of one of three woodland creatures: a dragonfly, a frog and an owl. Visuals created the illusion of soaring above the forest canopy through this abstracted LIDAR-scanned woodland. A harness that fitted around the upper body vibrated to emphasise and submerge you in the experience’s immersive three-dimensional sound.

Each scene of the narrative contains multiple sets of environmental particles that come from Lidar data and dynamic particles that come from highly detailed CT Scans.

These techniques give the work a dreamlike, futuristic aesthetic that merges the alien with the organic and natural as it draws and redraws before your very eyes. The process has the effect of both heightening the senses but also creating stunningly beautiful imagery.

28 NEW FORMATS NEW STORIES

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New Formats New Stories

How do illustrators work with app developers to turn their wonderful print stories into credible digital experiences? Illustrator BEN NEWMAN and Flying Eye Books new digital studio MINILAB reveal the do’s and don’ts in the transition to different formats

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Professor Astro Cat’s Solar System, Ben Newman and Dominic Walliman, educational interactive app, Minilab Studios, 2015 VAROOM:

What is Minilab?

Minilab is a new digital production company created to deliver the most beautiful experiences in visual storytelling, learning and play that children can get their hands on. Starting out as the digital Research & Development of Nobrow and Flying Eye Books, Minilab was set up as a new company in January of 2015 by Nobrow co-founder Alex Spiro and digital creative James Wilson.

At Minilab, we adopt the same basic values of great design of the highest quality that our sister companies are founded upon. We work with teams of talented animators and developers along with expert academics and the best illustrators in the world to ensure that we create the very best digital products for children that parents can rely on. We’ve just released our first app, Professor Astro Cat’s Solar System.

MINILAB STUDIO:

VAROOM:

Who is Professor Astro Cat?

I had worked in a bookshop for many years alongside working as an illustrator and being an avid collector of 1950s and 1960s books, and was saddened by the lack of love that appeared to be going into nonfiction books. I was particularly shocked at what was on offer about space, and along with my physicist friend, Dr Dominic Walliman and Alex at Nobrow, decided to make a beautiful book about the Solar System. It didn’t originally have Astro Cat in it, but he’d existed since 2007 in prints and wrapping paper and he had always been popular in my work, so the thought of marrying him with educational content seemed so perfect that it had to happen.

That book became Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space.

Professor Astro Cat and his friends act as a conduit to spread scientific fact in a fun way that children can enjoy.

He wants to make learning fun, because when done with love and humour, learning is easy.

BEN NEWMAN:

VAROOM:

first app?

Why did you choose Astro Cat to be your

Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space had become one of the best-selling books on the Flying Eye Books list, selling 90K copies worldwide and translated into 13 different languages. With Minilab’s intention to create beautiful, educational, digital content for children and with this proven track record behind it, Professor Astro Cat became the obvious candidate for this new project. James has a background in animation and had previously collaborated with Ben on the creation of animated GIFs of Professor Astro Cat, so it was definitely his first choice for a project too.

MINILAB STUDIO:

The app should not be a straightforward conversion of the book

BEN NEWMAN: When James first showed me these GIFs, even

though they were just for fun, they offered an interesting glimpse into the potential for an animated Astro world. It’s been a real joy to work with him on a professional project.

VAROOM:

to app?

How did you approach transferring from print

One of the earliest stipulations of the digital Astro Cat project was that, even if we were going to be covering similar educational content, the app should not be a straightforward conversion of the book. Astro Cat’s world and mission has been reimagined to create a brand new digital experience. There are plenty of ebooks and enhanced digital books out there that stick to the tropes and practices of print. The end result tends to look and feel like a glorified PDF, which is something that we really weren’t interested in. We thought that if we were going to develop a digital experience that started life as a book, we should offer something that a book can’t.

MINILAB STUDIO:

For me, the interesting part has been to extend my trust to another person to draw things that match my aesthetic. I was not able to draw everything for the app because of other projects, so James stepped in to keep the project moving. It is very odd to art direct your own work when you’re not drawing it, but it has cemented a bond of trust between us. ➳ BEN NEWMAN:

32 Marian Bantjes – The New

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34 THE NEW CANON

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The New Academically, illustration is a relatively new field, an in-between discipline that emerged out of the gaps between fine art and graphic design. Traditionally it has looked to these sources as some measure of its practice.

But in 2016 it’s time to ask whether we need to set down a new canon, a body of individuals who will deliver lessons and models for how illustrators might engage with the world. And in the near future this creative engagement with the world might not involve, pens, paper, scissors, pixels, code or even screens.

While a literature canon might run from Shakespeare to Saul Bellow and Caryl Churchill, illustration as a relatively new discipline has the opportunity to invent a canon that’s creative and not a prisoner of a particular past.

So who are the people, the works that need to be part of the new canon of illustration? What is it that illustration needs to become? We asked some leading thinkers and makers of illustration to identify 5 key works that we need to learn from, to get a sense of what illustration can do in the 21st Century.

CANON THE BRIEF We’d like you to choose five pieces of work that represent for you a key element of what an illustrator needs to know about what it is to do illustration.

Imagine a canonical course of illustration study. These choices may all be illustrations/illustrators – perhaps none will be illustrators. In the age where we have access to inexpensive software and fast YouTube ‘how tos’, perhaps the future of valuable illustration learning belongs in works of physics, philosophy, cartoons, cooking, anthropology…

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THE NEW CANON 35

Organic Robot 2, Geneviève Gauckler, 2013. Gauckler will be leading a short course ar Pictoplasma, 2016

LARS DENICKE Co-founder of Pictoplasma, a Berlin-based festival showcasing the latest trends in character design, Denicke is also writer and coauthor of Pictoplasma: Character Portraits with Peter Thaler.

When we started our research into character design around 2000, we didn’t take illustration into account. New, exciting visions of figurative shapes were produced by graphic designers and typographers for the Internet – still new, still slow as a modem, still full of promises of a virtual world.

Fifteen years later, visual culture has changed and illustration is among the most advanced genres for such visions.

It has become more independent from the words it often stands in context with, and more aware of the various media it is produced in.

The Iconic or Pictorial Turn frames an intellectual debate between art historians, philosophers, and scholars from life sciences, many of who argue for a supposed life of images. Key publications are Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans.

T. Dunlap, Princeton University Press, 2014 and WJT Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of

An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, Hans Belting, published by Princeton University Press, 2011

Images, The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

While media’s change at high speed, it is fruitful to understand the historical emergence of those three media dominant for entertainment in the 20th century, before they converged into the digital code: Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans., with an introduction, by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, 1999.

The avant-gardes between the two World Wars dreamt and depicted The New Man, especially in the works of Oswald Schwemmer and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus in Germany, or Aleksandr Rodchenko in the Soviet Union; as a complimentary reading on the tension of the individual, the masses and politics, read Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, Victor Gallancz, 1962, especially his chapters on the figure and mask.

Go and visit any museum for ethnology, marvel at the level of graphical abstraction for the design of spirits, gods, and other beings, and be inspired by the cultural practices these artifacts were used for.

Finally, explore pictoplasma.com, especially the C-files with many essays and interviews, or the Pictotalks from the annual conferences on character design. !

58 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS: Reportage

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BY DEREK BRAZELL

Atmosphere plays a significant part in how we perceive and remember a place. The lay of the land is all around us: the rise and fall of the hills, roads, streams and ditches cutting through solid or marshy land. LEAH FUSCO’S work has consistently used an atmospheric monochrome ambiance to investigate landscape, influenced and shaped by humans over time, but with their actual presence lightly touched upon. The weight of the British weather, grey skies, rain and fogs, forms a depth to her images and bring together the contemporary place with an interpretation of its past.

Following her OWLING project, tracing the historical smuggling of wool and sheep out of Romney Marsh in Kent to France, Fusco started a PhD, and through her research discovered Northeye, an area of saltmarsh in East Sussex which was once a medieval village. Using illustration to reinterpret archive material of the area, she has created a moving image piece revealing the changes to NORTHEYE over the centuries. The transient nature of the marsh area is investigated as Fusco layers drawings from her field trips to the area over maps detailing the site layout of the deserted village, surrounding fields and marshlands. Stills from the film shown here combine the observational with the apparently practical, as drawn trees and grasses obscure the clarity of the maps, much like the marsh waters claimed Northeye.

These images reflecting the hidden village show how a “visual narrative can reveal and illuminate previously unseen or hidden stories for new audiences,” says Fusco, and express her vision of exploring alternative timeframes through the application of illustration.

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Top: Owling, Leah Fusco, 2010 Lower: Mapping Northeye, still, Leah Fusco, 2015

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