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FMP Evaluation

In the course of this unit, I went on quite a journey from where I started in my first tutorial, talking about personal hobbies and interests, to shared experiences, and ending up looking at remediating local news stories. 

I struggled throughout my project to begin with, it was difficult to find content that suited the brief/learning agreement I had written for myself. However once I found the local news stories that I began to use for illustration content, my project flowed a lot more easily. It stepped away from shared experiences and became more about local news, the comfort it can bring, but also, slightly absurd stories. 

Part of what had my attention originally, with this the content I had found was that it had come from Norfolk, and I felt connected to the material because of that. At that point in the project I thought that, it was a key them in my project and something I would draw attention too in my final piece. Ultimately this didn’t happen, and I focused a lot more on just the pointlessness of the stories. I think it would have been throwing two different ideas together to do both at the same time, and may have diluted the work. I think focusing on one aspect was better.

My interest in visual storytelling was consistant throughout the unit, it was an area of my practice I really wanted to explore and push further. I had felt about my previous projects that although illustration had been a part of them, they had been more of a supporting element. And I decided I really wanted to expand my illustration skills and explore the formats and ways that my illustrations could manifest. Because of the type of content I eventually chose for my project, some of my theoretical research into breaking down narratives to remediate, and how to visually tell a story became a little irrelevant because the stories I had chosen to tell weren’t really narratives, they could be summed up in a couple of words. However my research into graphic novels, had given me more practical advice on how to structure layouts ect, to structure a story, so I was able to bring out the narratives through those techniques.

I am very happy with the final outcome I have produced. I think it meets my brief of adding value to overlooked stories really well. I’m glad I took the time to refine my illustrations, and try them in a few different formats, I think it understand how they work a lot more thoroughly. Before this project I had no experience of drawing comics, or depicting scenes. It’s an area of practice I am very keen to push further and explore in a working capacity, as I leave uni. I also really enjoyed the riso printer, and would want to explore that technique further. For my final pieces, I decided not to riso print as by the time I had coloured in photoshop, choosing how many layers I wanted, the different halftones, and where I wanted colours, and halftones to overlap, I basically had a finished and coloured illustration.

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Final illustrations

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Final illustration style

Annoyingly the file is formatted for cmyk so the colours are showing up weirdly :/

My final illustration style of colouring, it’s coloured using photoshop, but is very riso print inspired.

I limited the colour palette to 3, a blue, yellow and orange, to create a unified set of images. And inspired by riso, am layering them over using multiply layers to create more colours. I am also pushing my use of halftone brushes further to create lots of different densities on tones of colour and have different textures in the images.

This means that the images all have a similar colouring style and are unified, so they all work together as a set. But also have differences between all of them in tone and texture so they aren’t all boring together as a set. Each one is interesting to look at, inside the book. Because of this the book will still have a pace and variation, if they looked too similar, it would be very uninteresting to read.

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Bridget Meyne’s zine, comic strips.

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Final book cover

I decided to riso print my front cover.

I tried a few different design layouts and styles, coloured/not coloured, etc with this illustration. But i think simple more paired down is better - it’s a small format, heavy text and several colours felt over crowded. I think that a cover illustration works more as a summary of content, and should look slightly different anyway.

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Final book

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Cover illustration - design idea

It made sense to have an illustrated cover as, it’s a book of illustrations. But I think a cover image should be a summary of the content, rather than exactly the same. 

This image isn’t inspired by a story, but it is inspired by my other images. I chose a field, because fields and the countryside are a big feature of most of the stories. I considered doing an animal, as that’s another common feature in my content but decided against as my book isn’t about animals, it’s about the localness of the news stories.

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colour experiments

I don’t think block colours are working very well. I preferred my halftone experiments. I think because they are less flat, more textured. They have more visual appeal. 

I also don’t think that the comics I’ve tried with text work as well. The stories are simple enough that they don’t need more explanation than the headline. Also it interupts the drawings.

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drawings 

Creating more drawings, to fully make a well rounded set of comic strips for one book. I found the content buy going back through the EDP’s archive.

I focused on just usual, light hearted stories, that don’t have a particular point to them.

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Riso printing

I also made a booklet. 

I really enjoyed using the riso printer, and I think it really worked in terms of giving my illustrations a less childlike feel, it might be because of the single colour, calms down the images, or the interesting texture the print has, where the ink is patchy. 

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Timetable review

Over the next few weeks as I am coming up to make my final piece, finalise experiments, I decided to create a more structured time table. Make sure I have reminders to by paper sample etc. Plan for printing and binding mess ups. 

I have decided that if hand in is the Fri 11th, and there is a bank holiday on monday, I only want to use  the Tuesday - Thursday for printing and binding final pieces and process book. This gives me time for any print/bind issues. - I am aware that uni print is going to be crazy. It also gives me just enough time to photograph stuff for portfolio pages.

It this means that over the next couple weeks I need to fully finalise my illustrations and type choices. I already have my format and order selected. But I want to make sure I have mock ups to double check. 

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Courtney Pochin

I reached out to an author of a couple of the stories I have used so far. To get her perspective on these types of “silly” stories. 

“I definitely think these stories are important, because so much of the news out there right now is negative and upsetting, so it’s nice to be able to offer a little light relief from that. I don’t think our websites or papers should be full to the brim with these pieces, because there are obviously more crucial issues out there, but they certainly have their own time and place.

In terms of whether local news is viewed differently, I think sometimes it’s not taken as seriously as national news, but that’s because we have to cover very different topics. We’re focussed on what our local audience cares about – the events they go to, the issues that impact them, which to those outside our area, may seem insignificant.”

-( part of the email)

I think the what Pochin  says about local news being focused on issues that impact them is interesting. I think that some of the stories that I am looking at, really will mean something to someone who has perhaps always lived in the city. For example, they might think that someone seeing a deer in the garden is fairly interesting, however some one from that part of Norfolk, will know that is super common to see deer in the Brecklands.

Also I think the distinction she draws between these stories having their own time and place is important. This project isn’t aimed at complaining about normal news, it’s just about celebrating odd stories.

It was very interesting how she also drew a distinction between these stories going down well for digital audiences (as being “sharable content”)  but being dismissed for print. -  This makes me feel that a printed format is the better option for my work, because I am aiming it towards the people who dismiss it and illustrations will add value to it alongside traditional print news.

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News layout experiments

The thing with having put them into news style layouts, is that they now look like news for children. I think the typeface is mostly to blame, I had chosen it because it is a comic typeface, and it does look good with my style of bold line work but it looks too comical. 

I don’t think I need a super serious typeface, it still needs to reflect the content. But it also needs to ground it too. I am going to try out loads of type and see what looks best, but my instinct is that a rounded type will be best, or possibly a script, if it matches my drawing style.

Seeing them all layed out on the same page, has made me see how uncordinated they are. The pages are very busy. I need to have a set colour palette, to make them work together.

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Possible content, I made a strip for it, while experimenting with different comic strip layout styles.

I think it maybe too “newsworthy”, like it’s actually a significant thing, it’s just a very local story. It’s about a dog auditioning and appearing in a stage musical, which is much more newsworthy than the roe deer story, which is just that a man filmed some deer in his (countryside)  garden.

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Moomin research

I decided to look back at a comic I love, the moomins. It’s quite different from my other references, in that it’s completely fictional and surreal.

I wanted to look at the style of illustration and the strip layout. Because I want to try a few different ways of doing my own comics. 

The height of these panels is completely set, but the width is fluid. I really like how the illustrations in some of them, make up the divide, between the panels. I am going to try this format, but I  don’t think that touching panels will work for my project neccessarily, as I am planning un using a lot of colour. Rob hunter’s Map of days is a graphic novel, which uses a lot of colour, layered through riso printing. And he has quite thick white space margins, which I suspect will be more appropriate for my illustration style. 

I also want to experiment with integrating text. I wont have the option of using speech bubbles like the Moomins, but I could have panels reserved specifically for text, just in a more refined way, than I did in my first comic experiment. A vey simple type style similar to this comic, seems to be the way to go.

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More content - about a police officer hearding sheep up a country road.