Discuss the Pace of Class Assignments—Moving forward, not that students understand the steps in the illustration process, turnaround times for assignments will be faster, with multiple parts due at once.
Review Assignments and Expectations for Next Week’s Class
Due Next Week
NEW! Assignment 3, Editorial IllustrationPart 1 – Brainstorm & Research (NO THUMBNAILS) Identify articles on a topic that is current and meaningful to you from a trustworthy news source. Summarize the articles. Create a Word Web for the article. Begin a Pinterest board of images related to the topic.
Review Assignments and Expectations for Next Week’s Class
Due Next Week
Assignment 2 – Poster Illustration Part 3 Final Sketch
Come prepared with your final drawing for your 11 x 17 poster. This may be for an artist, a social or cultural event, or a cause. You may draw at a 1:1 ratio or larger and directly on your final working surface.
Practice drawing references from your Pinterest board of inspirational images in your sketchbook.
You will finish this project in ink next week.
Sketchbook Exercise Week 8: Practice drawing references from your Pinterest board of inspirational images in your sketchbook.
Review Assignments and Expectations for Next Week’s Class
Due Next Week
Assignment 2 – Poster Illustration Part 2 Concept Sketches
Come prepared with 3 tight concept sketches for an 11 x 17 poster you would like to illustrate. This may be for an artist, a social or cultural event, or a cause. The drawing must be at 50% scale or larger. They must illustrate 3 distinctly different concepts.
Practice drawing references from your Pinterest board of inspirational images in your sketchbook.
Sketchbook Exercise Week 7: Practice drawing references from your Pinterest board of inspirational images in your sketchbook.
Review Assignments and Expectations for Next Week’s Class
Due Next Week
Assignment 2 – Poster Illustration Part 1 Brainstorming, research, Thumbnails
Come prepared with a detailed proposal for an 11 x 17 poster you would like to illustrate. This may be for an artist, a social or cultural event, or a cause. Write a short post (approx 300 words) about the event/artist/cause and your connection to it.
Using Sterling Hundley’s Method of IDEATION: Create word stacks associated with the topic.
Make a Pinterest board of inspirational images.
20 – 25 Thumbnails
Assignment 1 – Beverage Label, Part 5 of 5 Final ART & 3 Value Studies
You’ve been contacted to produce a poster for a special event for a dream client! Choose a favorite band, show, or cause and represent the feeling of it through skillful design and composition.
CHECK OUT Concert Posters from the San Francisco Fillmore for inspiration. Try searching for different years. The Fillmore has had an illustrated poster for every concert since the 1960’s, when its doors opened.
Text should be minimal and complementary to the Illustration, which should be the focus of the project.
Choose something you truly care about.
The cause or event can be a real or made-up.
The copy can be real or made up.
The subject is totally up to you.
Final art needs to be black-and-white and 12″ x 18″.
Note: If you have the opportunity to use this assignment to make a poster for a real event, school play, friend’s band, and so on, it’s recommended that you go for that!
DUE next week:
Choose your topic and thoroughly research it.
Brainstorm thoroughly on your topic to help you come up with UNIQUE concepts.
Decide on Copy and create at least 20 thumbnail designs, demonstrating at least 5 different concepts, for a poster advertising the event or cause of your choice.
Write a short description of the idea for your project and why you chose it, the copy for your event, and your inspiration. You may begin to assemble a library of references for the project as well, and you can feel free to share it.
This week in your sketchbook, we will practice rendering texture and line in ink.
Begin by finding photo references for two objects.
Choose objects that are very different from one another. They do not need to relate, thematically.
References and Inked Studies
Looking at your references, ink the surfaces and details as realistically as you can with various pens. Try all the tools you have! Rendering different textures is a good way to explore different ways of inking and becoming familiar with your pens.
You must have a minimum of five different textures total for the two objects.
Detailed Directions:
PART 1 – Use Pencil to sketch.
Find a photo reference for two objects of varying texture, such as a wood-grain surface, basket, mammal, reptile, grass, flower, tree, metal surface, etc. The objects must have very dissimilar surface textures.
Draw two 3×3 Squares in your sketchbook. (Hint: you can also sketch FIRST and draw the box later to crop the drawing in a way you find interesting.)
Position and scale your sketches to create interesting positive and negative shapes with the 3-inch square.
Using pencil and paper, sketch from the reference, focusing on its contours. Draw the majority or entirety of the object.
PART 2 – INK
Before you begin to ink, preplan the strokes. Mentally organize the shapes that are to be a pattern, texture, or local color/value. You need to decide whether the stroke has a specific function, such as defining a form or creating a surface like fur or scales. No strokes should be random.
Respond to the name of the beverage that you generated randomly. Write an exhaustive list of images and words that come to you by free association.
Brainstorm in your sketchbooks based on research. Let one thought lead to another. Feel free to go with random ideas and whims, and to free associate, Don’t censor yourself! Use the Word Web Method we practiced in class.
Research the client as well as any imagery suggested by the beverage, the brand, or the name. Search for images as well as information.
Write a sentence about your client. What is your overall impression in one statement?
Word web using Japan, New York, and Central Park as Key Words.
Next:
Identify at least 4 different concepts for the final illustration and describe them in detail.
Write them out in the form of a sentence. Be sure the concepts are a good fit for the client.
Mint Magic Tea, Celestial Seasonings, Braldt Brald 1986
EXAMPLE:
“Client Celestial Seasonings, Mint Magic Tea is whimsical, fun, and magical.”
Concept Examples for MINT MAGIC TEA:
illustration of a wizard, in a garden maze made of mint leaves, in front of a celestial sky
illustration of a fairy bathing in a warm cup of tea
illustration of a friendly gypsy reading tea leaves, in the cup you can see the tea leaves form the words “mint magic” in hand drawn letters.
illustration of a cute baby dragon heating a tea kettle with its firey breath
Explore these different concepts through rough drawings in your sketchbook.
Create a Pinterest board of inspirational images for Assignment One to share with your client next week.
FINALLY DRAW YOUR Thumbnail Sketches
Write your concepts out in the form sentences in your sketchbook, to refer back to as you sketch.
Using a Ruler make 20 -25 boxes in your sketchbook approximately 2″ on the longest side.
Always draw thumbnail boxes in proportion to your final art! In this case that is horizontal, 2″ x 1″
Be sure thumbnails don’t share edges. Leave a space between the boxes.
Fill these boxes with 20 – 25 thumbnail sketches exploring your concepts.
Look at your inspiration board as you explore your concepts visually.
EXAMPLES OF THUMBNAILS
DUE NEXT WEEK:
Upload to the DROPBOX:
One PDF including:
A short written response to the project including your name, the client name, and your 4 different concepts expressed in the form of a sentence.
And high-resolution (300 DPI ), easy-to-read scans of your Brainstorm and Thumbnail Sketches, carefully labeled, with the name of the client and concepts illustrated, along with any additional sketches you may have done.
Remember that your username and display name can be pseudonyms, rather than your real name. Your avatar does not need to be a picture of your face–just something that identifies you on the OpenLab.
Floriaan, OostEke Brewery, Belgium – Designer: Jonas Devacht, New York
Project Overview:
Congratulations you got your first gig! A client has approached you to redesign an existing beverage label. Your client will be assigned at random by your professor for this project. (You may choose to interpret the design prompt as an illustrated tea, soda, or beer label. All designs are for an illustrated wrap-around can for the specs provided.)
NEW DESIGN MUST BE PRIMARILY ILLUSTRATED, NOT TEXT BASED. If text is included in the final design it may not constitute more than 20% of the final artwork.
Instructions
Final Art is required to be created in Black and White only. Work will be conceptualized in pencil and finished in ink.
Work in Progressmust be posted for feedback to the DROPBOX. This is part of the design process and is a graded component of the project.
Due Date(s)
Part 1, Brainstorming, Research & Thumbnails: Generate Ideas, find new ones through research, and create an image library. Come up with at least 4 concepts to discuss with your client.
Course Goals: To familiarize students with the illustration field including its basic working methods, industry practices, basic history, and philosophies. Artistic techniques will be taught as well, however, this is a class focused on concept generation, and the creation of thoughtful illustrations, as opposed to a drawing or painting technical course.
To-Do Before Class
Join this Openlab Site
Review the Syllabus
Topic
WELCOME TO INTRO TO ILLUSTRATION
Objectives
To familiarize students with the objectives of the course.
To establish working practices and clarify expected outcomes.
To introduce the basics of illustration working practices.
Prepare a 3 minute Presentation (5 minutes total with Q&A) on your story and your working process, guiding us through the project from inception to conclusion.
You will Present you work on the last day of class.
There is no hard and fast rule on HOW to digitally color. Digital coloring in infinite and there as many different methods to work as there are artists out there. I wish you the best of luck in finding the method that works for you.
Here are a few tutorials just to get you started. If you find some good tutorials, please share them in the class resources!
To accurately describe a color and differentiate it from another, there are 3 attributes to measure.
HUE
When the average person says “color” they are actually mean hue. The hue of a color is its particular light wave energy frequency. Remember, light is waves of energy, and white light is contains all possible colors! Violet is the highest visible light frequency and red is the lowest, which we humans have receptors to see.
In this diagram, note how the blue becomes pink, but all of the colors in between are of equal intensity, as it as it moves from right to left.
SATURATION
Saturation (or chroma as it is sometimes called) means a color’s purity. When people are talking about a color’s intensity they mean its saturation or chroma.
In the diagram, note how the blue becomes less saturated as it as it moves from right to left.
VALUE
As we discussed earlier in the course, colors have values just as shades of gray do. A color’s brightness or darkness, and its nearness to white or black respectively, is the color’s value. Value is independent of hue or saturation and can be seen even in a black-and-white photo.
Tints, Shades, and Tones
Value has is has its own color terminology.
Remember that the value of a color is how light or dark a color is, or how close it is to black.
Tints are when we add white to a pure hue:
Shades are when we add black to a pure hue:
Saturation also has its own color terminology.
We get different tones when we add gray to a pure hue:
Another way to envision this is as the hue itself becomes less saturated, it appears more and more gray.
Munsell’s Color Tree
Talking about color can be very misleading! For example, when you go to a paint store, you can buy a can of Honorable Blue, Flyway, or Wondrous Blue! When we say Flesh Tone, what exactly does that mean? Whose Flesh Tone are we talking about? It can be very confusing!
Albert Munsell, an artist and professor the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, felt the same way. In 1905 he developed a “rational way to describe color” using numeric notation instead of names to describe color. To assign these numbers he used the three attributes we discussed above: hue, value, and chroma (saturation).
In the diagram above, you can see the traditional color wheel as the center ring, and Munsell’s Color Tree, as it came to be known, growing from the center. The trunk of the tree represents zero to ten in value. The farther we move from its “trunk” represents an increase in chroma, until the hue—represented by the separate “branches”—is at full saturation, farthest away from the center.
Recent Comments