Ive chosen the topic "ENVIRONMENT" for my editorial final piece. We had a look at previous students zines. They were quite inspirational, and showed me how unique you can make your article look.
I had to choose an editorial text that I will illustrate. Because I've been looking into satirical editorial illustration, I chose an article from online satirical website: The Onion.
https://www.theonion.com/encouraging-report-finds-polar-bears-evolving-aerospace-1844467616
I liked the humorous nature of the article and how it talks about relevant environmental issues. To start this project I've done some rough drawings of the Polar Bear to work out color and anatomy.
We had a workshop on how to use Adobe InDesign to make zines. Out of this drawing I made a double page spread:
For our last workshop before Christmas we looked at different types of humor. This is definitely useful for me as my article is satirical. We then practiced our own visual thinking by picking 2 topics and seeing how they correlate.
I then made a grid with the topics, and put words associated with them on the axis, and made some rough drawings. This method is a great way to get lots of ideas out really quickly, which will benefit my work a lot.
From all these new ideas I have i decided to go with the fishing industry. Over fishing is a big problem in our world, it disrupts marine life and the lives of small communities who rely on fishing for income. I did a few rough ideas to work out the perspective I wanted:
I decided to go with the middle one because I liked the symmetry It gives, whilst showing how different fishing can be. This is the final piece I produced, using ink pen and gouache:
I like how the ink pen gives a scratchy effect. I also find it interesting that the grey stormy sky with the whaling boat also serves as a grey murky sea for the fishermen. It suggests that the fishing industry is also a big pollutant of the oceans.
This workshop has shown me a whole new way of thinking which will be very beneficial to this module. In one day I went from 2 words and now I have many ideas, rough drawings and a final piece to show for it.
I realised I needed to familiarise myself with the concept of aerospace engineering, to understand better what these Polar bears are trying to achieve. I found it humorous how such a complicated science is being tackled by these bears, and how successful they’ve managed to be with the limited resources the artic has to offer. I’ve roughly sketched some quotes from the article, written in green. I liked adding a rustic twist to all the mechanical aerospace appliances, and drawing the expressions on the polar bears, which I think I’ll draw realistically to further emphasise the nonsense, and this will help me work out colours and composition of the final piece in the future.
One of the characters in the article is a scientist called Adam Yelnich, who along with his team discover the Polar Bears aerospace activities. I thought this would be a fun aspect of the article to explore and did a bit of character design and research into arctic clothing, the looks kind of came to me as I was drawing. I also did a couple roughs of how I might want the final spread to look, with maybe the inclusion of the scientists.
After having a tutorial, my feedback was that I should stretch the limits of this article and to make it more fun. I've decided to make this final piece more orientated towards children, and to break up the article into 4 parts so its laid out more like a story. In the article, the Polar Bears make rockets out of ice, driftwood and fish. With the roughs I've been producing, the rocket design is very basic and. I definitely could be more detailed, because this is a fictional article and I want to go crazy with it.
In my tutorial I was shown the sculptures of Grayson Perry, and how he makes things with a variety of different materials, much like the Polar Bears.
I also looked at the process of ice sculpting. This company, Hamilton Ice Sculptors, create large scale scenes made of ice.
This ice replica of London with the Gherkin, Big Ben and Canary Wharf are all kind of rocket shaped, which will be useful for ice rocket inspiration.
I found an artist called Jeffro Uitto who makes beautiful driftwood sculptures. He cures the wood then varnishes it to make towers and patterns. Some of his pieces are kind of rocket shaped, which I could incorporate into the Bears' rockets.
There are not a lot of sculptors who incorporate fish, but Damien Hirst, popular for his dissected shark in formaldehyde, has created pieces using smaller fish, both living and dead. There's the possibility of using fish as a way of generating electricity for the rockets.
Some studies of original NASA blueprints, to see how the layout was. Paper wouldn't last very long in the artic, so snow and ice will have to do for the bears.
I had a look at some intial NASA rocket designs. They are all unique, but have a similar streamlined shape to cut through the atmosphere.
I took some of these shapes and incorporated the Polar Bears materials. I then went to Photoshop and made some rockets collaging the images of the Hamilton ice sculptures, Jeffro Uitto's driftwood, and Damien Hirsts' fish. I could add these into the final piece which could give it a more mixed media look.
I was looking into the science behind rocket propulsion, and how they use tons of fuel to create thrust to lift off the ground. That would be trickier in the arctic, so i had a funny idea of lots of fish that had been compacted into the Bears rocket interiors, coming out at such a fast rate it gives liftoff. It would add to the humor of the article illustration if there was a trail of fish falling from the rocket as it flies upwards.
This led me to produce a rough with much more detail. Laying out the text in small boxes with a large background image makes the reading flow. The rocket designs are much more interesting, and whilst its still a news article its also more like a children story now.
Fonts are important in kids books/magazines. It depends on the age range. Some of the text in Aquila has a more handwritten style, in a color that strongly contrasts the shape behind it. The font and color might also change to indicate when a character is speaking.
I wanted to try a similar style for my article. I digitally sketched an icy background, picked a font with a scratchy handwritten childlike feel. The final text has to be hand drawn, but this is a good way of seeing a wide variety of fonts which I can then base my own off of. I created some blob shapes to make the text stand out on them and played around with warping the text to the shape. I like the effects and color scheme so far, and with the inclusion of the characters, will look more put together, but I think it still needs some refining.
Here's the same background with a different color scheme, and hand drawn words. I also added on of my collage rockets and a rough drawing of Adam Yelnich, to get a feel of how they'll cooperate with the background. I prefer the lighter shapes as it makes the background drawing less crowded.
I also wanted to research the native people of Alaska to get a sense of their culture and how they live in such a cold climate. One of the researchers accompanying Adam Yelnich is an Inuit woman. Unlike the synthetic modern materials Yelnich wears, Inuit people made clothes out of the caribou and seals they hunted, wasting nothing that the animals could give them. It was interesting to learn about how the clothes were made, and how they are still considered the most effective cold weather clothing developed to date.
When I looked at the roughs I was producing, I started to think that the ice backgrounds didn't look like they were disappearing, which is the main reason the Polar Bears are fleeing Earth. I looked at how climate change has affected the Polar Bears way of life om the WWF website.
Because my article is satire and comical, it's saddening to remember that Polar Bears are having to adapt to melting sea ice without rockets, and are struggling to stay nourished and healthy with decreasing food and shelter.
In my last tutorial before the hand in, we discussed humor, and what type I want this article to be. I don't think I've been putting as much thought in how I want the readers to react to the illustration. The type of humor I enjoy is slapstick and dark, which I could definitely include in the Polar Bears attempts to build a rocket.
I had a look at some old shows that incorporate dark/slapstick humor. A Town Called Panic is a stop motion animated sitcom that incorporates a lot of slapstick and surreal humor. The animation is pretty crude, making it look like a child's imaginary game with plastic toys.
I want to make the Polar Bears antics more humorous, and the quirky visuals in this show could be a source of inspiration.
I also had a look at Beneficial Shock! magazine, a magazine that focuses on creativity and illustrators. One of the articles stood out to me, I like the zoomed out composition, where there's lots of things to spot. It's a good way to fit in lots of funny situations.
These are the final rough drafts for the illustration, this time adding more humorous slapstick situations for the Polar Bears. I also included a title page in the style of blueprints.
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