Independent Practice

Portfolio Formative Assessment Independent Practice Unit Yukina Narita 25th Nov. 2010

Publication about each country and London (Potential of the format of outcome)

I was looking at some illustrators, and came across this Czechoslovak artist, Miroslav Sasek.

There’s several picture books illustrating about different cities, such as New York, Paris, San Francisco, Rome.

This would give me ideas in order to sum my thoughts up and put all the illustrations together as a book format or any kind of publication.

I think the next thing I really need to do is investigating each country’s culture from the different point of view as a Japanese.

So the most likely format for the final outcome at the moment is the publication(Books).

This would be a couple of pages for each country, and combined them together to make a series of publication based on the story and inspiration I felt throughout my experience.

It will include the illustration of folk costume from 10 countries, and I will add some pages which will be a pattern or text made out of the piece of illustration. Like the illustration on the right(the sketch from the journey to Denmark), I will draw a couple of small drawings for each countries and put as part of the pages in the publication.

But I am planning to separate the publication into two big categories : one is 10 folk culture from different countries, and other is London’s traditional culture including the costume and unique accent, Cockney.

So for the section of 10 folks will be mainly visual elements, but for the London’s section, it would be typographic design or some illustration using letters and phrases.

UK’s Dialects - London

I tried to research about the different regional dialects in this country.

But there’s SO MANY accents and it is really hard to look through all different dialects to compare, and it is also too difficult to understand and put them into my work successfully, as my first language is not English.

So, I thought it would be better to concentrate on the language used in London mainly, and I came across these three main English.

-Received Pronunciation (Queen English) -Cockney -Estuary English What I am thinking at the moment is to investigate the distinctive differences on each English, and express it visually, for example using the phonetic signs/symbols.

But my original interest was to make a pattern out from these cultures, so I think I will consider the way how I can express each English’s identity such as phrases, spelling, and tone of voice.

Now I’m moving onto UK’s folk culture as well including the theme of different accents/dialects, alongside with different country’s folk culture based on my journey.

And as the way to illustrate London’s folk culture with the traditional costume image, this Pearlies are pretty cool culture to look at, I really like the way they making outstanding patterns and letters with the pearls against the black background of clothes. Very detailed but I think it would look nice if I draw them into simple illustration.

10 Folks with texts

I used the illustrator to create Vector illustration of each nationality in the national / Folk costume.

And translated the phrase I made for each countries in its own languages, and used one colour (and with different tone on text) to make them standout.

From the illustration I did for ten countries, I picked up some parts from the original image and make it looks more like a pattern.

I used Illustrator and draw in Vector so it has much straight lines and shapes, which can be easily repeated.

Texts/ Phrases for each countries

Germany a: straight / geometric n: Fountain / History / Fairy tale Greece a: mythical / blue&white n: Fruit / Myth / Ocean

I thought it would be better to focus on the countries I’ve been travelled in the past, rather than spreading my mind into numbers of countries all over the world. I looked at 10 different countries I travelled in order to get the right concept and avoid making any misunderstand on each culture, because I can be confident with the thing I have experienced.

I wrote down a very simple list of words about representative (or remarkable) points on each regions.

I looked back my records of journey and scrapbooks, and picked up 3 adjective and 2 nouns for each 10 countries.

These words are the description of my personal experience/memory I got from the journey.

Basically these words came up in my mind when I remember what the trip was like and how did I feel about them, so the words are really Simple:P and sometimes really random, like the name of object I remember strongly (like Fruit, Lantern…).

Denmark a: colourful / cheerful n: Mermaid / Fairy Tale / Toy

And after I selected these words, I tried to make random phrases mixing these words.

Then I got following phrases for each counties…

Some of them sounds really strange and might be nonsense but they sounds kind of imaginative?(or poetic in a way…) for me, like the title of books, which makes you imagine the story.

So I will try and make something out based on these phrases later…

Norway a: dark / chilly n: Buildings / Forest / Fiord

I put Japanese translation beside to make myself think about the idea more flexibly, as Im not too sure about English.

Sweden a: time worn / antique n: Lantern / Book / Relief

Germany : Geometric History

(幾何学的な歴史) Greece : Mythical Fruit

(神話の果物) Denmark : Colourful Fairy tale

(カラフルなおとぎ話) Norway : Dark Forest

(暗い森) Sweden : Antique Lantern

(古風なランタン) Finland: Quiet Port

(静かな港) France : Chic Perfume

(上品な香水) Italy : Artistic Alley

(芸術的な小道) Czech : Decorative Illusion

(装飾的な幻) Scotland : Northern Castle

(北の城)

Finland a: quiet / modern n: Tram / Port / Textile France a: chic / art deco n: Metro / Perfume / Cafe Italy a: traditional / artistic n: Mask / Alley / Religion Czech Republic a:pretty / decorative n: Illusion / Astrology / Slope Scotland a: gothic / northern n: Soldier / Castle / Ghost

10 Folks drawing

I drew illustration based on the inspirations from 10 different countries.

I was kind of going to two different directions, one is looking the national costume of different countries all over the world taking advantage of my experience and memory from travel about them, and the other is about traditions and different region’s dialects/accents in the U.K. But I’ve been wanted to create illustrations inspired by different cultures in the first place, so I decided to go for making those first and see what happens.

I know it might confuse me if I look into two subjects at the same time but I want to see how far I can go. So on next stage, I will focus on UK’s culture more and think about the content/ use of the text alongside of illustrations more.

Silk Screen Printing

I did screen print at print area and did the first printing experiment for my Independent Practice.

I was looking into the world’s folk culture but this time I decided to experiment my printing skills with the image of Scottish traditional figure: A man with bagpipe in tartan costume.

I tried to make it simple, and not to draw details to make it looks more like an icon than pure illustration.

I quite like the way it looks simple but still recognisable. Although I might try the other ways to express culture, this method can be the main thing I can focus on through the project.

I thought it would be better to start with the countries I know more and visited in the past.

So I will look back the stuff I collected from my travel again and will try to take advantage of them.

World cup illustrations

Here are the illustration I drew for the project when I was doing Work Experience in London, summer.

I meant to draw the identical illustrations for each country joining the World Cup and tried to get ideas for illustrating the features of those countries, which illustrations can make everybody to guess.

It was easy to draw countries having strong identity or cultural/historical aspects, or simply the countries I travelled, but when it comes to the small countries and if I don’t know any culture about them, it was pretty hard to express with the illustrations.

For some ideas for those country, I just used the colours or symbol can be seen in their flag, rather than forcing myself to draw the things I don’t really know.

So some countries worked well if their flags are really unique or identical.

Anyway the reason I put those works here was to see what I have done in the past; specifically a project looking into different country’s culture and experimenting the way using illustration to express them.

I tired to draw those in different style, or with different mediums(colour-pencils, pens/inks, pencils,crayons…)

And this time I want to explore more those techniques, using photograph and software to combine various media…

Fanzine

Unfortunately I couldn’t finish completely on the day we created a fanzine in the studio. But I could enjoy making images using the postcards, leaflets, and tapes I’ve been keep inside the drawer. And the collages were based on the theme I originally looked at, ‘Collecting from the Travel’. So on the image with typography, I used different kind of languages I found on the stuff I have collected, I just wanted to show the beauty of different languages’ shape. And one image is particularly based on the theme of Travel and Music gigs I’ve been to. So the collage is made up with the copy of tickets and stamps I have been collected.

3 Minutes Hero film project

This exercise was completely outside of my comfort zone, I just made a film fusing video camera once before, and I don’t really have enough skill to edit the film down using software such as aftereffects and final cut pro... within a week.

But I think this end up with nice outcome, after all I quite enjoyed making the sequences with the stop motion and various still images.

Creative Things

As part of the small projects we have done in the beginning of this unit, we analysed 5 different Creative Things.

My Creative Thing was grainedit website, and I feel I was really lucky to get this as my choice.

Because the style and atmosphere they after is exactly the same taste of what I am after too, in order to develop my illustration skill.

Even after I finish analysing I bookmarked this website and keep checking updated posts often.

And it helped me a lot to know the new illustrator, not only from Uk, and it was always interesting to read the article about the biography and interview with the featured artists. It is good that they keep posting new article in nice time span, and each article are written in ideal length so it’s quite easy to make me read.