Shreyas R Krishnan MFA Illustration Practice Maryland Institute College of Art
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Fall 2014 / Spring 2015 MFA Illustration Practice Maryland Institute College of Art
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Image Harvest
Book Binding
Paper Engineering
Sketchbook Project
Letterpress
Laser Cutting
Book Project
Art Martket
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Words on Wheels
Stop Motion
Handlettering
Pattern Design
Self-Directed Project
Retrospect
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Sept. 2 - Dec. 19 2014
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The Meaning of Liff Illustrated cards
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The day we were briefed about the Image Harvest project, I distinctly remember staring at my notebook after class, feeling like someone had very politely asked me to go jump off a cliff.
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Image Harvest involved putting down ten ways in which the ideas and themes that we wanted to work on, could take shape. In a way, we were living out the phrase ‘as you sow, so shall you reap’. One of these would be developed as the final. A few days before we began Image Harvest, in presentations to the ILP cohort, we spoke about our work and what we hoped for our illustration practice. In mine, I spoke about the themes that I hoped to focus on through illustration – gender, travel, culture, identity – themes that I had arrived at after spending the previous year taking a good, hard look at my work. My main goal with this MFA was to find my ‘style’ and voice in context of these themes; but in the face of the image harvest brief, I felt unequipped. Many of the idea books from the previous years had one common thing between them about the Image Harvest project – almost everyone, through the rest of their semester and even year, had drawn from the initial pool of ideas they had generated at the start of the semester. I felt a great sense of panic;I knew what themes I wanted to work in, but drew a blank when it came down to actual ideas and execution. The ideas that seemed to make the most sense to me were ideas and projects that I had toyed with working for a long time. The process also threw up a few more areas of interest (the everyday, the ineffable, wordplay, humour) that could also be 15
dealt with as subjects separate from my larger goals (gender, culture, identity). I do constantly struggle a bit with my desire to work on more serious subjects, and the fact that wordplay and visual puns are a source of great joy for me. Indulging in humourous illustrations comes with a sense of guilt at not dealing with ‘the bigger picture’. This is something I need to find a way to balance, or integrate in some way. Next to the search for style and voice, this will perhaps be my biggest challenge.
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The Meaning of Liff, created by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, is a dictionary of things for which there are no words in the English language. I have been fascinated with this book from the time someone introduced me to it many years ago. That the book appropriates existing placenames for words, rather than making up whole new ones, creates new ways of seeing, both with language and with the everyday. My final piece for Image Harvest was a set of flash cards carrying visual cues for these ‘new’ words (giving me an excuse to indulge in my other love, putting image and text together). In order to maintain a realistic timeline, I picked one word of each alphabet and decided to work through as many as I could. The final piece consisted of 14 cards and a case. Working on Image Harvest alongside my studio elective (Making Good Ideas, taught by Ed Briant) helped me in pushing the visual concepts much more than I ordinarily would have. A particular example of this, that I like going back to as a personal reminder, is the progression of sketches for the word Belper. Looking back, the work I did for Image Harvest is still the strongest, and perhaps most assured, out of everything I did in the Fall semester.
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Amersham (n.)
Belper (n.)
Dudoo (n.)
Quabbs (pl. n.)
Scraptoft ( n.)
Sheppy ( n.)
Farrancassidy (n.)
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Haxby (n.)
Kimmeridge (n.)
Upottery ( n.)
Valletta ( n.)
Polbathic (adj.)
Tegucigalpa ( n.)
Polperro (adj.)
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Fall Flag Book / Book Sculpture
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Book binding was the first of a series of workshops that make up the Fall semester. We were introduced to a material/ technique, and given time to react to it – create something using what we learned.
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The workshop included quick demonstrations of different types of binding, and how one could approach art books. I have previous experience with book binding, through my Under graduation and from my time as a graphic designer. The one new thing that caught my eye was the flag book - essentially a very narrow accordion, with alternating ‘flags’ pasted on the ridge of folded paper. The instant I saw a flag book dummy, I knew that would be the base for my book binding reaction piece. When I am in a place, new or old, I tend to look out for fallen leaves and flowers. Every place has its own unique fauna, specific shapes and colours that occupy the streets and sidewalks. Baltimore was the first time I experienced Fall as a season. I love the fact that the act of trees shedding their leaves before winter (fall), has replaced the word for the actual season (autumn). My flag book, is my memory of my first fall – the colours, the shapes of the leaves, and the sound and feel of dried crunchy leaves. The crux of this reaction piece, is opening a seemingly ordinary book and finding an experience. My first iteration of the flag book elicited the kind of response I hoped it would, at least on the first view. It did have its flaws – the colours were not right, and the book was sparse and would not stay closed. The second version of the book took into account 29
these considerations. The colours were reworked – I took this a step further and worked with simple shapes that incorporated mark making and my collection of found ephemera. The binding incorporated magnets to help keeping the book from opening up, although in this version the magnets still are not strong enough to hold the book structurally. 30
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Trio Accordian Book on Female Jazz Musicans
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The last time I did paper engineering was in my first year of undergrad, understanding three dimensional geometry. My takeaway from that course was that I was terrible at it.
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Working in three dimension with paper requires a level of hand precision that I have never been confident about. I take time to acquaint myself with a new medium, learning to do by redoing. The week long deadlines were proving to be my undoing. Deciding what to do for my reaction piece was a challenge and the execution was a bigger hurdle. I knew that I wanted it to be a combination of flat drawings with three dimensional elements – teaching old drawings new tricks, if you will. My image harvest (and first version of book binding) was visually different from the work I did before coming to ILP. Or at least I presumed that it was. I like working with brighter colour palettes, and the first two things that my classmates had seen of my work were in muted tones. The first version of my paper engineering reaction piece was also a reaction to what I thought other people were assuming my work to be. I decided to work with bright hues; that, combined with my overall trepidation with paper engineering, resulted in a reaction piece that was a big mess. The group critique for the paper engineering reaction piece is a front runner for my worst day of the semester. By this point in the semester, I had too many doubts about my work, and what I was doing. I felt like I couldn’t match up to others in the program and that I was not on the path that I needed to be on. 41
I did rework the paper engineering towards the end of the semester, working with a looser style and a book format. The subject remained the same – jazz musicians. I love drawing jazz musicians; it was my only reason for choosing them as a subject. It was a strangely late realisation, when I looked back on my older drawings of musicians, that I had barely any women in them. After a semester of doing a GTI for Gender in Film, I have been more aware of gender in my own life and I used this redo as an opportunity to look at more female jazz musicians.
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#sketchbookproject 45
The Sketchbook Project is a crowd-sourced library that features 33,768 artists’ books contributed by creative people from 135+ countries.
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Each artist chooses a theme from a selection that is offered by the organisers each year, and aim to complete filling out one sketchbook inspired by or responding to the theme. At ILP, the process was tweaked a little bit – instead of each student working on the same theme through the semester, we exchanged books, allowing each book to become a collection of works by all first year ILP students. The project is a space for experimentation, both with ideas and execution. The collection of books are on view to the public at Brooklyn Art Library in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.
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Moka Pot, French Press, Kaapi Filter Letterpressed Trio of Coffee Pots
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The letterpress workshop is the first and only ILP studio workshop that deals with printmaking. It took place at Baltimore Print Studios. Unlike the other workshops, the reaction piece for was the direct immediate outcome of the letterpress workshop.
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The process here was round about in comparison to the first workshops. Since polymer plates had to be made in advance, in time for the final printing, some understanding of what kind of line work would work for an impression, was needed. I went back to a personal favourite – coffee pots. The final letterpressed piece uses two kinds of line work to explore three kinds of coffee pots from my travels (the moka pot, french press and South Indian filter). Polymer plates were made at Boxcar press. www.boxcarpress.com
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Over the Bridge Three Dimensional Greeting Card
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As a graphic design professional, I built a theoretical understanding of fabrication techniques. Having gotten used to outsourcing most of my production and prototyping to professional printers and fabricators, actual processes had become invisible to me.
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Much like a child that knows meat comes from an animal, but doesn’t comprehend slaughter. The laser cut workshop was my first experience with actually seeing the (red) light. This is a process that involves trial and error to get to perfection, even for people who have experience with it. I had decided beforehand that I would use one of my Image Harvest concepts for this reaction piece – the three dimensional greeting card. Keeping with my interest in place and documentation, I played off a daily commute, the walk from the MICA studio building to the “other side”, over the rainbow bridge on Howard Street. Like all things that appear to be simple, the act of laser cutting a printed illustration required more effort in registration than I had anticipated. This reaction piece did not push the technique itself as much, the level of cutting required for this piece could have been done by hand. I did eventually take the opportunity to come back to the laser cut machine for my Art Market project at the end of the semester.
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P is for Pussy Double Entendre Children’s Alphababet Book 67
This was the one project that I had looked forward to the whole semester; it was the first non-workshop module since Image Harvest, and it is no secret that I am partial to books.
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From the time I began to consciously switch over to doing more illustration work outside my design practice, I have decided the content myself. Even with the Image Harvest project, I decided to use The Meaning of Liff and worked with a curated list of words. The book project was the first testing ground for how I would work as an illustrator who did not also function as an author. The class collaborated with author Elissa Moorhead, on her tongue-incheek, double entendre book proposal, very tellingly titled P is for Pussy. An alphabet book for children and their naughty adults, it would cover words that are seemingly innocent but carry a second meaning for those in the know. As an illustration brief it was fairly straightforward – the visuals would have to convey the innocent meaning of each word, while hinting at the second meaning. The subject and choice of words caused a lot of discomfort in the class; I was not convinced that this combination of word and image required for the image to hint at both obvious and hinted meaning. Nevertheless, I went ahead with the brief, constantly struggling with finding the right balance between showing a sense of humour in the visuals and revealing too much of the secondary meaning. By this point in the semester, I was taking cue from Whitney’s advice in the first week of the year, and attempting varied ‘styles’ with each project. Freshly armed with a bagful of vintage ephemera from New York, I had my mind set on trying out a digital approach that incorporated collage. The resulting 69
visual language worked in some cases, and were weaker in others but it was an interesting direction to explore. ‘Tis better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.
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Affogato Accessories for the coffee lover
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The end of a semester is perhaps a good time to have a realisation dawn upon one. Illustration Practice as a program, does not allow its students to exist in the void of concepts, drawings and print outs.
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There is a strong push towards keeping one foot in the reality of production, pricing, marketing and the general everyday things that we are usually keen on avoiding. There is no other point in the semester, like with the Art Market project, where this comes to the forefront. It is not enough to simply have an idea and prototype it. What is the most efficient way to produce 25 units of it? How does one decide a price point that is both profitable and marketable? How will it be packaged and displayed? I picked up from where I had left off with the coffee pots I had made for the letterpress workshop. Affogato - the Italian word for ‘drowned’ and also a dessert that involves drowning ice cream in espresso – would be an umbrella brand making everyday accessories for the contemporary coffee lover. In its Art Market avatar, Affogato would consist of laser cut wooden earrings and charms, and digitally printed silk scarves. I take shelter in the comfort of paper, and this project forced me to think outside the book. Elements for the earrings were sourced online and assembled by hand. Once the actual production of the products was done, it was fun to dial back to graphic design mode and work out packaging and overall branding for the scarves and the earrings.
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The earrings were backed with printed cards that carried the affogato logo on one side, and coffee themed quotes on the other. They were displayed on one of the vertical columns of the ILP art market stall, along with a few pieces that were placed on the counter.
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Habotai silk scarves were digitally printed from dpi-sf.com. The colours on the light scarf were accurate, while the dark scarf appeared slightly desaturated. The thinness of the habothai silk also allows for the print to show on the back of the fabric as well. They were packaged in takeaway coffee cups, complete with a sleeve and a lid (all
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recycle friendly). One side of the sleeves carried the logo, printed using a hand carved rubber stamp, the other side included a feature that is common on most coffee-shop cups – a pair of checkboxes saying ‘light scarf’, ‘dark scarf’, reminiscent of coffee orders.
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found
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Jan 22 - May 08 2015
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Pandas & Prisms Words on Wheels
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For all my aversion to working with content that I do not have control over, Words on Wheels was was a pleasant surprise. Perhaps it was because it was the right mix of silly and serious.
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The first semester at ILP can leave one feeling like no useful work has been done. I was warned about it through the first semester, and also told that the second semester would be different. That would be the time that I would actually do and make, rather than simply try (and fail). That said, I did come into the second semester with all the optimism I could muster. Formerly known as Poetry in Motion, Words on Wheels is an ongoing collaboration between ILP (previously with the MICA undergrad illustrators), Baltimore City Public Schools and the Maryland Transit Authority. ILP first years are assigned curated poems written by BCPS students. A final selection of this collaboration is featured inside MTA buses around Baltimore city. The poems I was assigned were, as I like to call them, bipolar. The first called Pandas, Pandas Everywhere was literally exactly about that – pandas everywhere. The second, titled Mixed, was about the poet’s struggle with her multiracial, multicultural identity. With one I would consciously be very literal, and with the other it was important that I abstract. It is trying enough to come up with a single workable idea for a brief, how does one come up with three? Three wholly different ways to interpret each of these two poems. In the first semester I would have struggled endlessly with trying to work 99
out the ‘style’ in which I would have approached these illustrations. The inputs I received from my guest critics Edel Rodriguez and Scott Sugiuchi along with Joyce Hesselberth’s insight that the struggle for style was not as important since I had a very unique and specific way of arriving at an idea. The fact that my mind and hand were at work, together, creating something, would already leave a unique stamp identifying something as mine. This realisation, and Shadra Strickland’s advice to commit to my lines, freed me to a great extent. I ideated, drew and painted in whatever way felt natural to me.
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Marudhani Stop motion animation with paper hands
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One of the questions in my ILP interview was how I could build on my on-site drawings. I have never known an answer to that question until this part of the semester.
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I spent my winter break in Atlanta, with family. I might as well have been back in India, considering the amount of Indian food and activities I indulged in. During the first semester at MICA, I had all but stopped maintaining my visual journals. I began drawing again in Atlanta, drawing people, drawing everyday. At a classical south Indian dance recital that I attended, I started drawing the dancer, and at a certain point I began drawing just her hands, because...well, I was drawn to it. Hands stained pink with alta and burnt sienna with henna, were a part of my visual vocabulary growing up. It took that one evening of drawing to rediscover the beauty of hands stained in those colours. I knew that day that I had to do something with them, that they had to live in a space outside my sketchbook. The stop motion workshop with Ru Kuwahata came at an opportune time. My stop motion short did not have a narrative, it was more of an excuse to indulge myself in painting and animating. The music for this piece, Kalghi Stomp by Transglobal Underground and Thievery Corp., was a recent ear worm and I must confess I was very pleased with myself for also incorporating my musical interests into my work.
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The Cigarette Diet Book Cover from the Invisible Library
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Book covers are that perfect point when illustration and graphic design intersect in a way that you cannot distinguish one from the other. Call me a snob, but I am that person who judges a book by its cover.
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We had three options to choose from, for our final handlettered piece – a book cover, three full alphabet sets, or a typographic portrait. Obviously, I jumped (literally) at doing a book cover. If there is one thing that I have learnt from 4 years of designing books, it is that a book as an object is a narrative that works in both space and time. The cover of a book is much like the title credits to a movie, you set the stage for the rest of the book right at the start. Another thing that I find is often ignored is - to borrow a term from Freud, Interrupted, David Kamp’s essay on Lucian Freud - ‘epidermal hectarage’. A book cover is not just the front panel, there is the back the spine, gate folds, dust jackets. All of these elements (even end papers, and the binding technique employed) can be dealt with in a way that they all work together to make the experience of picking up and holding a book unique. In this assignment, we chose a book from a list posted on invislib.blogspot.com, an ongoing archive of fictitious books that appear in literature, cinema and in TV shows. I made a list of possibilities, and the one that stood out was The Cigarette Diet by Dr. Leo Spaceman (30 Rock, Season 4 Episode 2).
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Flashback Patterns based on visual memories
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I looked forward to this part of the semester, for the sole reason that Leah Goren would be teaching it. The first hour of her workshop was spent with me silently having a fan-girl meltdown.
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The basics of pattering are fairly easy. I did not want to simply make a surface pattern devoid of a narrative though. Around this time, for Critical Seminar, Stephanie Plunkett had asked us to write a paper on what/who we considered to be our ‘tribe’. Writing this essay required introspection, and distilling my ideas and work down to its core. “...In some sense, that is what I do unconsciously with a lot of my work. Through design, drawing, illustration and my writing, I separate my reality from me, I use memory to make reality fictitious”. On my first day in this country, I opened a fortune cookie that told me “You find beauty in ordinary things. Do not lose this ability”. I held on to it, knowing that it meant something. But it was not until this semester that I truly realise what. I have always known that I use real life and the everyday as my source material, and I have also always worried that I was not being ‘creative’ enough because I did not imagine fantasy worlds, or strange creatures. All my questions and doubts about my work have led me to this moment of understanding that I do not simply use the everyday as my inspiration, I see it with different eyes and try to make others see the everyday with new eyes as well. The patterns I made were based on my strongest visual memories growing up. If seeing and remembering are what I do best, then why forget that? 125
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Matches could be used more than once, until they burned a crispy black from end to end.
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We would gather from the carpet of fallen Gulmohar flowers at school, and pretend that the sappy sepals were nail extensions.
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We huddle around Amma, Periamma or Patti spending an afternoon with marudhani capped fingers.
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Forever sharpening pencils down to a stub, in a quest for that elusive and perfect flower.
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Patti would collect every kolam she encountered into many foolscap notebooks with careful notes.
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Stravaig Words and pictures on associations with “home� 137
2015 marks a decade since I moved out of my childhood home to go to college; when I stopped being able to call any single place “home�. I have moved around a lot since, always with the acute knowledge that where I was at any given moment was not permanent.
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This itinerance has led me to hold on to moments, incidents, objects and people that give me that sense of ‘home’ or belonging. Sometimes I feel this when I least expect to connect with anything around me. Since arriving at the knowledge that my work dealt largely with memory, I decided to consciously base all of my final projects for the Spring semester on that. My final piece for Critical Seminar was an exhibit that went over the history of the women’s rights and gender equality movement through the illustrations that came out of it. For Advanced Sequential Art with Joan Hilty, I wrote and illustrated a 16 page comic on forgetting. As my selfdirected project, I revisited an idea that I had tried exploring for Ed Briant’s Fall elective Making Good Ideas – writing and illustrating about ‘home’. In the Fall semester, I had written and planned out a 32 page picture book titled Itinerant, about the feeling of growing up knowing that I would eventually leave. I was happy with the writing, but not with the overall shape the book was taking (both in terms of the visual concepts themselves and the visual language). My self-directed project started off as a proposal for a postcard book and blog, that would document those things that I associated a sense of home with, through writing and illustration. A postcard book would have offered the flexibility of starting off with a sequence and then forming new narratives with however they would be arranged. Once I started 139
putting down a list of what I wanted to write and illustrate, I realised that I needed a structured sequence in which they would be seen and read. I approached each item on my list the way I had tackled the illustrations for The Meaning of Liff, by visualising the idea or feeling of that thing, instead of the thing itself. The layout was sparse, giving the text and illustrations room to exist on the same page without overpowering the other. The page plans were structured to allow for each spread to flow into the next, either through the text or through the image.
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I struggled a bit with the title and cover of the book; in a fortuitous moment, I came across a word that encapsulated what I was trying to say and do. Stravaig is a Scots word that in different contexts can mean to wander, to roam, to ramble and to digress. The beauty of the word lay in its ability to encapsulate not just the physical act of moving, but also the act of verbally wandering. With the title in place, the cover followed naturally. I combined two ideas; the first was the kolam, rice patterns drawn in rice, winding around a grid of dots, a tradition and daily ritual where I grew up in South India. Through writing Itinerant, I have started associating the kolam as a symbol of my journey. The second idea was a khaata notebook, a type of notebook common in the state of Gujarat in West India, where I spent four years as an undergraduate student. The kaatha is mostly used as a book for account keeping, its cover is always a constant – a red fabric with a white running stitch meandering around the front and back, creating an organic and ever changing form, binding the book board to the fabric. The final book, Stravaig, is a 44 page hand-bound, deckle edged book printed on Red River Aurora Art Natural 250gsm (double-side inkjet paper) with a hand-stitched cover. As a one-off this makes the book more of an artifact, more precious. I am however looking into making more zine-like editions of the same book, with less precious paper, and maybe an illustrated, not stitched cover.
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Retrospect The year prior to my coming to ILP, was a year that I had spent focusing more on my illustration work, trying to consolidate what I did into a body of work, a form with a thread of ideas that I could recognise. I came in to ILP with that new found and carefully curated work and what I understood to be themes in that work – music, culture, identity, travel and gender. I held on to those themes for a long time, believing that since I had invested so much time in discovering them, I owed them time and exploration. In reality, they were fencing me into a place that I was not comfortable working from. The problem, I realised later, was not that I did not feel for these topics. They continue to be some of my biggest interests. They did not however need to be the direct lens through which I approached illustration and storytelling. The best ideas need cooking (or as Ru Kuwahata said, ‘Ideas need marinating’), and it has taken me time to acknowledge and realise that it is okay to put some concepts in the back burner and allow them the time and space they need to grow just a little bit more. My fall semester was spent moving in circles, stuck inside a boundary that I had decided to draw for myself. I was tired, overworked, and I did not have a proportionate amount of work that I could believe in. At the end of the semester, I wondered if I had made the right decision to switch over from graphic design to illustration – a question that stayed with me until the Illustration Practice and Graphic Design grad shows went up (sometime around the beginning of the selfdirected project). After spending a week helping 159
the second years put up their show and watching their projects come to fruition, I walked over the bridge (quite literally on the other side) to the Graphic Design show opening. I came out of the gallery at Fox with an epiphany. I enjoyed the show, and my love for graphic design has not reduced, but I realised that I am happy about my decision to be an illustrator who can design, rather than a designer who can illustrate. The spring semester, in fact, has offered me a series of revelations. Stephanie Plunkett’s assignment on tribes helped me understand my own work in a way that I had not been able to in the year before I came to MICA. The conflict I had in me about my identity as a designer or illustrator has been resolved. Rather than torture myself chasing a ‘style’, I am conscious of the fact that my thought is as unique as my hand, I am also more aware of the specific ticks in my own way of drawing, things that I had not noticed earlier. This is a good place to go forward from.
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www.shreyasrkrishnan.com