Here we are, I have reached the end of my illustration online course. I have to say that it has been a nice experience to feel as a students again, of course in a more loose and creative frame than when I was actually a student. Being a student, when I was actually a student, was quite a traumatic, neurotic experience especially in high school, it was much better at university ;) Anyway, I have completed the course in illustration and it was quite interesting. I felt reassured in what I can do already, but also challenged on a few things I need to improve, like becoming better at simplifying my composition and use desaturated colors. I was asked to explore character design in different ways, and nowadays a character in the media has become more than ever a political statement, with respect to gender, race and body shape. Certainly a discussion we should have had, but it has taken a dark aggressive tone, which is dividing people more than uniting them. I believe that it has been forgotten what was the whole point of discussing this topic! As I am always inquisitive regarding the historical origin of what we experience in the present, I started reflecting on how human identity and the perception of the divide between body and mind has always been a topic of contention across time and culture. Every single culture in the world, since the beginning of civilization has fumbled with the notion of what make people, is it their body? Is it their mind? Personally I am aligned with theories of embodiment and sociomateriality, as our mind is an expression of our bodies, a material reality on which we can exert very little control. Our mind is stimulated and think because of the sensorial stimuli it responds to, without the body there were be no knowledge and no thinking what so ever. What an intelligent being can think of without sensorial stimuli? The visual arts are born from a drive towards representing and capturing reality and aesthetics, which is a challenged notion in the art world, is still a drive for most people in appreciating a work of art, we find aesthetic in harmony of forms and colors and then we can argue about which aesthetic and how we individually or as culture relate to it and discover new unconventional forms of aeshetics, but it is aesthetics nonetheless. Notions of social constructivism has been pushed to the absurd belief that even physical reality is a social construct, but that is not true, if we could bend the laws of physics as we wanted, we would have already found renewable and reliable sources of energy that are gentle towards the planet, but no matter how we like to believe that, it is not the case yet, more work is needed! Anyhow I came to think more about how the definition of human identity, destiny and role in the world, are not a new issue for people and it has been debated across many cultures. However, the notion of what it means to be a woman is stronger recurring theme, in relation to how do women and men differ or how similar they are. Where does the duality of gender come from and what does it mean? Biology has good answers about the topic, but on a cultural and psychological perspective, these are not satisfying as they do address the individual quest of what is "my" or "your" role in the world. Looking at human kind from an evolutionary and gene-related perspective, is too abstract and distant from us, it makes us feel as we as individuals do not count, so we are bound to search for our answers somewhere else, and often this search leads to mystical explanations which are more misleading than useful. In general, being a weird kind of antisocial female, who was often a tomboy, just because I did not want to bother with societal claim on women and demands for beauty and seductiveness, all useless stuff that were not worth the effort, I believe that it is up to us to construct for ourselves, in collaboration with our fellow humans to define who we are, not through claims, but through actions. Striving to be our "best selves" is our duty towards ourselves and to the others around us, through cultivating knowledge pursuit, nurturing our talents and helping other through our lives. During the course, I have started sketching a series of marker drawing that I call MELTING WOMEN, as a metaphor of: The constant making and remaking of the women essence across different culture and Our own autopoietic process of self creation, in our pursuit of gratification in life, struggling to find our place as individuals and challenging ourselves in our pursuit of knowledge. To work on this theme, I went back to what I found fascinating when I was a young girl: the dancing body and the forms of wood and rocks. I found some nice reference from pictures of modern and contemporary dancers online, I practiced some spontaneous gesture drawing from images of Martha Graham and Mary Wigman, who were inspirational in my youth, when I was practicing dancing myself, and other unknown dancer. Their bodied are wrapped into heavy long dresses, keeping them down and attached to the ground. Their dresses forms undefined, folded shapes, that seem to trap women as making their figure melt with the ground, this is what I feel the cultural definition of women is doing to them, depriving them of the individual to discover and also decide how they want to be.
I hope you will enjoy my sketches and thanks for stopping by :) Bertie XXX
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So here we are, the second week of my illustration course is gone and the theme was character design. I was hoping to get new inspiration for my class in animations and prototypes for game development, which I will teach at Tech in the spring semester. And actually, I found some good tutorials and ideas from the course but also from my family, both my husband and daughter. The main challenge I have with my class is that students do not sketch enough, they should just draw as much as possible, inventing characters, items and sceneries, become familiar with creating by sketching, which is the hardest part. Specifically concerning characters, it is interesting how characters can have a very minimal look, and the computer helps a lot with modularizing your sketches and animations, but good ideas for characters need to be nurtured. It takes time to create a coherent character, with an identity and a back story, and physical looks, clothes and items that help communicating the characters' identity and history. Anyhow I was hoping to get new inspirations regarding illustration technique, for my own artistic practice, as well as for my teaching. In fact it was interesting to interact with a professional illustrator and get through the assignments. Unfortunately I did not have much time to work in details at my assignments, so I focused on sketching and explore potential characters. In order to ground my thinking I started working on characters based on my daughter and myself, filling pages of the sketchbook I bought for the course. Of course the elderly looking woman with glasses is based on myself ;) Here I focused on exploring facial expressions for the girl character based on my daughter, a sporty tomboy with mid-length hair, wearing shirt over a large T-shirt. As assignment we had to make three drawings of our character while: 1. walking 2. Reading 3. and talking to someone - in this case I imagined a teenage girl frustrated about something and talking to her mother asking for help or just to burn some steem. In the meanwhile I explored characters of other ethnicities than white, as it is a hot topic at the moment and our tutor asked us to try. So I searched for some reference pictures online and I started sketching in a portrait-style. As I said, since I was busy at work, I focused on sketching to explore as much as possible different characters. Here are attempts at an old black man: I worked at a black ballerina character, inspired by an artist from English National Ballet. And finally I worked at a naturalistic theme, where I explored the design of an Asian girl imagined as a gingko fairy. I always find gingko leaves beautiful and poetic, especially in the gracious way they become yellow. These leaves are shaped as a fan, narrow at the top and broader at the bottom, where their shape ends with a wavy line. Moreover, these leaves seem to get yellow starting from the broader bottom, where the color quickly transitions from yellow to a warm brown, in watercolour terms a burnt sienna, while the yellow shade spreads from the rim up to the stem. In my sketches I imagined the leaf as the hair of an Asian girl, here is the initial sketches. And here the final ones on watercolour paper. For next week I have to work on a layered scene and on a mockup for a fairytail and I will post about the results.
Thank you for stopping by Bertie xxx Unfortunately I had so much to do this week, that I could concentrate on the assignments I received from my illustration teacher as I wanted to. The them of the week was reportage illustration, we should image to create works for travel magazines. As a result, my style is not as tidy as I wished, but it became more wonky and comic-like. In the end not too bad, I achieved a vibrant colour palette, with interesting shades, richer than in the pictures I took as references. I also got good feedback from the teacher, who seems to be concerned with getting illustration that are less detailed and more fresh. In fact perfectionism and desire for too many details, that can end up competing within the final painting. So she actually captured something that I would like to improve. However, I love doing detailed watercolour work, when I make it it makes me feel great, like a master ;) I am inspired by great works from the past, like the illustrations of Swedish Carl Larson or British Beatrix Potter, but also the naturalistic work of German Ernst Haeckel provide a great source of inspiration. In general my drawings were appreciated for their consistency in style, lively colours, for capturing the action with close ups and broader scenes, making the drawings look immediate. Here are examples of the drawings I made about the town of Ravenna, an Italian town famous for being the capital of the Ostrogoth empire in the period of Late Antiquity circa 400-500 AD. This is a view of the garden around the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, an Ostrogoth Empress. It is one of my favourite monument in the town, surrounded by a peaceful sunny garden. The monument is sided by a row of slender umbrella stone pines, as if guarding the dead Empress and her celestial home. Inside are displayed the most amazing mosaics, lapis blue being the most intense and distinct colour on the walls. Repeated all around the square layout of the inside, the motive of the two doves by the baptismal font. I worked on a warm-pinkish palette for the Mausoleum, to give the monument a more gracious image than plain yellow and grey shadows. Above a delicacy found in the area: a piadina burger. Piadina is like an Italian tortilla, filled with a charbroiled burger, cheeese and vegetables. Quite an interesting experiment ;) Both works presented above were painted on watercolour paper, which can better tolerate wet-on-wet technique and washes. Underneath a view on the marina, which lays a 30 min drive from the town center. I was fascinated by the strip of rocks dividing the sea, on which people would occasionally seat on. I saw the rocks as faces appearing on the water surface, can you spot the face, nose and eyes? I liked to play with different shades of blue: Phthalo and cobalt for the sky, phthalo and Ultramarine for the sea. I tried to convey how sea and sky almost merge by the horizon, the scenery being dotted by swimmers of all ages. I drew this piece on my sketchbook, so it was a smooth but thick paper type, which can tolerate light washes and wet-on-dry technique, but can lead to a dotted texture in the colors, especially visible in the sky. Finally I made these digital illustrations of the map of Odense. I drew the layout of the city streets from the centre to the outer ring surrounding the centre. I experimented with contrasts, I marked the profile of the blocks and streets with dark grey, and I filled the blocks with violet, the parks with dark green and the river and see with a primary blue. I added the building of art museums, trying to minimize details and playing with contrast, like the yellow and red-orange for Brandts modern art museum and Hans Christian Andersen's house. For the building Filosoffen I used a light and a dark grey and black, plus I added yellow and violet for a poster and lines on the building. In this way, white, yellow and violet remain the main colours creating contrast in the map. In the second map I have erased the grey profile of the streets and the blocks, turning the streets into negative white spaces. In my view, this makes it for a cleaner layout, reinforcing contrast and erasing elements that could compete for the viewer's attention.
I have added a one-legged soldier close to Andersen's house, to refer to the fairytale the Steadfast Tin Soldier, I have added a swan to refer both to the fairytale the ugly Duckling and to the fauna that people can actually experience in the parks. Finally I have added a square piece of Brunsviger, a cake that is actually the pride and joy of Odense and the island of Fyn, so much that there is a Brunsviger day ;) The cake seems like a sweet soft focaccia covered with a sweet and shiny cream, spiced with tones of cinnamon. To add a bit of irony, I added a lot of traffic lights and one way signal, to hint to issues with traffic, something many Danes complain or make fun of. It is actually not so easy to find your way around by car, with the many one way or closed alleys and the many traffic lights. One of my colleagues from the university recently complained that to send a table cloth to clean after an event, it took her half an hour to reach the cleaner, just driving around the many one ways streets and traffic lights, it was quite funny, if you read my post you know who you are ;) I hope you have enjoyed this little article, I will publish next time about the tasks for week two, where the theme is character design. Thanks for stopping by Bertie xxx Thanks to the generosity of the head of my department, I have started this Saturday to take an online course in Illustration. The course is held by the University of the Arts in London, it is online and it will run for 4 weeks, basically all November. The tutor is a nice woman of Japanese and American origins, who is working as a freelance illustrator and she is a graduate from UAL. My goal with this course is:
From a professional level, I really hope to get new inspiration for my teaching and my art, hoping to find out how I can work more as an artist and illustration. At the same time, I wish to become better at illustrating the prototypes and games I do in my research together with my husband. Problem is, I feel constrained when I get tasks from others. Currently I am in the process of finishing my work for Nelle's café, which has been lovely as I have worked with topics and styles that come natural to me, like food illustration, urban sketching and details, experimenting with smooth hot pressed and textured cold pressed paper. On the other hand, I would like to get to illustrate books I like, currently I am discussing a children book project with a colleague of mine and I dream of publishing my own visual poetry booklets and let's see how it goes. Another research project I have in mind is to develop a method and write a book about how to learn and employ drawing for ethnographic data collection and analysis. I published already a chapter in Danish on the topic and I wish to deepen the subject :) Anyhow here are my first sketches for the course, first our teacher told us to draw from a picture showing an English breakfast menu with coffee. We had 30 minutes and we could use any style we wanted, here is my sketch: I quickly sketched the scene with a thin black marker, and of course since we had little time I panicked and got the shape of the dish wrong ;) It was fun to draw the food, the cup and the coffee pot with its polygonal, almost circular, shape. I filled the shapes with strokes of coloured markers, I technique I like a lot. But as I did it very quickly... hmmm... it did not come out so well, luckily I got many likes on Instagram, I wonder what my teacher will say ;) And then for the coming Friday we were asked to start a sketchbook and draw people in different attitudes, possibly from life. Saturday evening I started sketching from my holiday pictures, just to warm up, here is a couple from Odense relaxing at Nelle's café: I went on sketching from pictures I took during our holiday in the Netherlands, I selected a large view of Dam Square in Amsterdam, where small groups of tourists casually appear in the picture admiring the scenery. In the 1st one, I love how the group of ladies was framed by the two black umbrellas, but in an asymmetric dynamic way, it naturally makes for a strong composition. Moreover, the two middle ladies with the red and yellow jackets provide a lively focal point, but without forcing a static central symmetry. Here is the 2nd, a trio of tourists look around. The group includes a middle aged woman and man, the woman is taking a pictures, while the man is holding a sheet of paper (a map?) while chatting with a youngster wearing a hooded wind jacket and holding something looking like a black camera. I thought it could be a family, strolling around Amsterdam. Today I had a chance of doing some real urban sketching at Odense Storm Pakhus, a street food venue placed in a refurbished ex-warehouse. It is a very popular spot, not especially cheap, but with a nice variety of food from all over the world. While waiting for my pizza- yes I was a bit predictable and boring today as an Italian in Denmark, but I already had their chirashi far too many times recently ;) - I observed the people around. In particular I got intrigued by a couple of girls, probably two sisters, the elder around 7-8 and the younger around 5-6 years old, drinking cola and it seemed like looking at a book together. They were both pretty with their golden hair and sweet fresh faces, the younger wearing a pair of pink glasses. Funny note, her hair were messy, indicating that previously they must have been engaged in some wild game like climbing or jumping and there is a small nice playground not far from where they were sitting. In the last sketch I made, I drew a mum (right front view) and a teenage daughter (left back view) enjoying a light lunch together. I am at a stage in which my teenage daughter wants to spend more time with her friends or alone sketching in her room, than with me and I am quite sad about it. So the scene really spoke to me :)
I liked the serene mood they displayed, comfortably sitting in front of each other, eating what seemed to be the same salad or poke. They had the same straight golden hair, tied in a ponytail. They both wore black raincoat, the girl wore a sport jacket the mother had a more tailored coat. I was surprised they were both still wearing their jackets while eating, could it be that they were coming from a long cold walk and still needed to warm up? Anyhow, I have a few other exercise to do for the course, to be uploaded next Friday and I plan on drawing some more people around. One thing for sure, while making these sketches I was experiencing how learning to trust your lines is a fundamental achievement in drawing practice, no matter how polished or rough your drawings are going to be, a confident line will appear beautiful and rich in purpose. Your hands will project your confidence or insecurity to your lines and this will result in a good expressive work or in a messy one, this is an important lesson that is still challenging for me and that I must pass to my students. Thanks for passing by Bertie xxx |
AuthorFreelance illustrator and painter. Archives
May 2023
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