CONVERSATION
WESLEY HARROP - CONVERSATION SUBMISSION
BRIEF Through the application of your chosen practice you are asked to research and develop a visual outcome that centres around the idea of ‘A Conversation’. Tasked with creating a visual piece that would represent our own ideas of a conversation, this could be done in many ways using different mediums. A conversation could be something simple in terms of an emotion a story and important event or even information. What’s the most important conversation for today? What’s the most important conversation for the future? Politics from a students perspective. Something that seems irrelevant but will effect you on a personal basis, the restrictions which hinder you on getting where you want to be, ie finance. who will you speak to? People who it will effect of a similar age, peers students etc. What is the message? Viewing political stories, scandals and information from a students perspective. The unheard voice.
IDEA GENERATION Initial Ideas To the right are the first set of notes that I made when researching and attempting to develop some simple ideas to getmyself started. Out of the say 15/20 ideas I narrowed my selection down to around 4/5 . My initial interpretation of the project was to represent forms of emotion through some sort of infographic. I would deem emotion as an area that would be very broad, allowing me to develop my work into many different practices and sub sections. Beyond researching this I found myself interested in the way people express there emotion through self proclaimed art, body art and skin tattoos. I found myself stuck after researching into singlular ideas that didnt represent anything that I stood for. I was attemtping to visualise an idea that didnt have any meaning or interest towards me as an individual.
Recap I went on to look into something that had more important on the way I lived my life. I researched into politics and student living in terms of how that effects us as individuals and came across how I could visualise this in a simple format. At the time many of the currect news stories were surrounding affairs that effected us as students, stories such as the scrapping of maintenance grants, which essentially would be making us dependant on parents and other individuals also the scandal that surrounded David Cameron. My idea went on to how this would be visualised, I decided to use satire as the approach to get across the message of being dependant on people we shouldnt necassarily look at as figureheads.
RESEARCH Dave Brown ‘Dave Brown is a British political cartoonist for the Independent newspaper in London’. Following on from my initial research I began by looking into satrical artists thatt portrayed politics in there work. I decided to look into the work of Dave Brown who does extensive work in the cartoon politics section within The Independant. HIs work in the independant is where the idea stemmed from to create a satirical approach to something we deem to be serious, for e.g News, Politics, MP’s I looked into some of the work he created and decided to narrow down what I was going to illustrate and how exactly I would be creating it. I used some of his political illustrations as references to show how he exxagerated on things such as body parts and features, mainly areas such as the cheek bones, nose and chin.
The Independant - Special Edition I started by looki Dave Brown and the use of his pictures in certains instances of the independant. Brown often uses them for special editions, most notablly the special edition that was reference to the Charlie Hebdo incident. The work he produces is where I began looking into front pages and special editions of news papers and magazines. I also started looking into figureheads and political events that were either effecting myself or any surrounding individuals. David cameron became the figurehead I ended up choosing to use to create a satirical illustration of. Main reasons included the ongoing scandal which was currently one of the most talked about stories and also the choices that he made which were effecting students and the time (student fees).
LAYOUT Layout Sketches Playing around and sketching out some very quick references to use for the layout was the first steps I made when creating the design. I used simple boxes to keep everything as basic as possible, these would then be followed with information and rough ideas on what to add into each section such as Header and Text. I decided to use the bottom left layou which would provide me with an extremely rough guide on where my images, text etc would be layed out. Although a very rough guide I tried my best to stick to the layout but did encounter times where things needed to be changed.
HEADERS I took 30 minutes out of my time to start writing down some headers that would work well with my David Cameron Illustration. I began by looking into some newspapers, I purchased two to three and looked at how they worded things such as headers subheaders and titles of articles then began by creating my own., Some witty some extremly simple. I decided to use the ‘Year of the pig’ reference which was easily the one that stood out the most due to the satire of the image and the contraversy surrounding what was currently going on within english politics.
ILLUSTRATION Initial Illustrations My illustration was something that took an exstensive amount of time, it was done within illustrator, over a number of days, using my reference image which was hand drawn beforehand by myself. I used images I found on the internet and some artist references to create the illustration lifelike. The two images to right show some of the basic steps I made, from creating the simple shapes which would define the image. I began by creating the basic outlines for each of the main shapes around the body then added to features in terms of hands nose eyes etc. This was then overlapped with fine detail in terms of highlights creases wrinkles and minor details to things such as clothing and hair. The end outcome worked out extremely well as I feel it easily resembles david cameron. The reason I chose to create the illustration was because I wanted to add my own personal touch to the Newspaper front page I would be creating. My next steps would be to create the layout for the front page, and create headlines and the nformation that would incorporate the front page. Final Illustration The final illustration to the right was edited within photoshop so that I could really highlight some of the features. I added some shadows and edited some areas I found that didnt work as well as I first thought. This image would then be used within the final newpspaper design and places accordingly.
REFINEMENTS Header The font used for the header was ‘Avenir 100pt’ with some editing done to the kerning and positioning pf the text, as before I used reference from the independant newspaper as this was the way I would make my own newspaper humorous. Using things such as the Independant Eagle which resides somewhere in each Newspaper and changing this to a pig which represents an animal that has no freedom. Sub-Headers The subheaders and other texts used had a combination of different texts and sizes. ‘Deuschlander’ being the first font used for the blue text and a few other sections, a text i found on a 3rd party website that worked well within my layout. The other being ‘Times New Roman’ which is a well recognised well rounded font for the major header and any other finer sections that needed highlighting. Colours Using simple bold colours was a way of making any text standout and make it visible as a header within the layout. I decided against using any secondary colours so went straight in with two basics which were blue and red.
FINAL DESIGN My Final Design brought together all of the underlying ideas that were stated within previous pages, I tried to add certain levels of humour and depth within the Newspaper front page, it provided some comedic value without being extremely unnessacary and stupid. I did this so that it wouldnt just be a bland infographic which tried to describe my message in a simple format. I feel as though the overall layout works well within the colour scheme and typography to create something that looks professional and visually pleasing, comparing this to past front papers that were already publishedit resembles a similar style and character. I have related back to the overall motive behind the project ‘Conversation’ by addressing the intial questions that were asked within the brief. I tasked myself with using my design to create something that would show politics from satirical perspective highlighting things such as current affairs and mainly things that have effected myself such as finances within university.
CONVERSATION