Eyes to Illustration: Exercise 10 - A subjective drawing

Friday 20 July 2012

Exercise 10 - A subjective drawing

The object I chose to base my subjective drawing around was a bag. I decided to try this out with both my leather bag and a shopper bag. The brief said to not think about what the purpose of the object was but to think about what adjective describes the item. The words which I chose after some brainstorming were "vintage" and "waterproof" for the leather bag and shopper bag respectively.
I created mood boards for both words see below.
I then created linear drawings of both items and using ideas from my boards I then set about the task of filling my drawing.
The waterproof board had images of rain, pieces of plastic, bubble wrap, splashes etc and the vintage bag had vintage lace, fabric, old style postcards, feathers etc and other vintage inspired memorabilia.

For the shopper I had the idea that I'd like it to look waterproof and have plastic on it - ideas included using rubber gloves but then I remembered about plastic sort of shopper like bags of my childhood which contained various liquid fillings. I set about recreating this by filling a plastic insert with blue liquid in the form of washing up liquid ( this was a messy task) then sealed this with duck tape. and stuck it over the bag outline. I filled the rest of the shape with pieces of plastic bag. I printed my linear drawing on glossy paper to reinforce the waterproof theme.

For the leather vintage bag I tried to fill this in both photoshop and by hand using vintage notepaper, butterfly stamps, old textured paper and added some vintage lettering. I also decided to print this on parchment paper and created a vintage effect by tea staining a piece of paper then leaving it to dry and then putting it through the printer. I also tried adding a vintage backdrop to the image.

Overall, I was quite pleased wtih the results and am going to ask my tutor for some feedback. There are lots more possibilities to explore these technqiues in the future filling linear shapes with various textures etc especially by using layers and photoshop ( which I've now ordered and look forward to trying!)

Update - September 2012 - Just as I was looking out my work again to send to my tutor I discovered my shopper illustration image had lived up to its waterproof name (not !) and burst out over my other drawings. The effect did give it a water like quality but I didn't want to risk sending it to my tutor for fear of it leaking further!