Tutorial

Good tutorial today, I think everyone was a bit baffled with my project in that it's based on some crazy concepts that are quite hard to explain, and my illustrations are also a bit random without a good explanation, which I find hard to provide without writing it down. That said, I got some good feedback and I especially like Pauls idea of having some sort of 'key' like a map legend, to let the viewer know which illustration applies to which ocean 'realm'. It was mentioned that the tracing paper wasn't the ideal material as it is quite thick, and it has quite a high 'memory' in that it still has the curve set into it by being on the roll for so long. I hope that once my book is made I'll be able to press it flat for long enough to take the curve out of it - this just depends on my timing! I have to use this paper really due to time constraints and cost, but I think as long as I can press it properly it will be fine. I like the thickness of it, as it adds a nice tactile element and makes the finished book slightly thicker, giving it a more quality feel.
I forgot to say in my last post that while I was at my dads over the weekend I made a couple of changes to some of the illustrations to make them look a bit better in the context of the book;



The rest of this week will be spent planning for my mammoth printing session this coming weekend, and thinking about covers etc...

Cracking On Pt. II

I also had time this weekend to try out a few things in terms of booklets. I thought as I had the use of an AO printer I would go for a simple fold out booklet, as on the plotter I can make the page size as long as I need it to be in order to get the number of pages needed. The only problem in this is cutting it out, especially at three in the morning after a bit of a cider session...


The one I'm cutting out in the picture above is only AO long, so if I do a really big one it will be interesting trying to get straight edges. Anyway, I really like the way the fold-out booklet works, the mechanics of it are quite satisfying and I like the way you can make a whole book out of one bit of paper. I managed to get a version printed on tracing paper to show in our tutorial and I love the way the images layer up - I think this could definitely be the way forward. I'm going to come back later in the week and get on with the final piece. I have found in the past that the design of the book itself will be quite a fluid, intuitive process, and the design will evolve while I'm working on it. It will look really good with some covers and maybe some text, I also need to consider some sort of cover or case... I've now got just under two weeks left of this project, and things are finally coming together! Better late than never I suppose.

Cracking On

I'm lucky in that my Dad is an Architect, and he works from a sweet office in his garden, which is fully decked out with nice printers and computers which I get to use and abuse for my work. So, I spent this weekend at home taking advantage of the facilities, and doing a bit of printing on the A0 plotter. I did my final illustration as well, although this one took a bit longer than the others....
Here's the first couple of versions;


This image is about the 'The Hidden Boundaries' - this means the seafloor and it's sloping margins. This environment is constantly changing, often due to human factors such as drilling for oil and building oil platforms. These, and other factors such as earthquakes etc, cause underwater landslides or open up rifts that another earthquake may close, so the whole seafloor is constantly changing. As the ocean floor is so deep in places it's extremely difficult and expensive to explore, which results in much of the exploration being carried out by people who stand to make a profit from any discoveries that are made - namely, the oil companies. I've tried to represent this through making my photo of some ink look as oily as possible, and putting it in a square. The square, I feel, is the opposite of the natural circle, therefore showing the human element of the equation. The map shows how underwater currents also affect this environment, bringing nutrients from the deep ocean to the surface and enriching the sealife in the upper layers.
However, I just wasn't happy with the image as I don't think it goes with the others, so I made some more changes, below.


I wanted to keep a square element as it represents the human effect on this realm nicely, and I tried playing around with some lines to represent pipes carrying the oil. The main change though is obviously putting the 'oil' in the circle like the other illustrations, and adding the coloured ring. The most effective bit was removing the top of the inner circle to represent the sloping margins being unstable, and the whole underwater landslide thing. This works well in the final image (below), where it is more fractured which hints at it rather than saying it too obviously. Also, as in some of the other illustrations, placing the image off the page slightly shows it's at the edge of the ocean, and our knowledge of the oceans. The white space is also important to represent that there is much we don't know, and have yet to learn. I should point out that the crosses by the words in the illustrations are a subtle map reference, and I think they act like compass bearings, to plot the lack of knowledge for that area on the map so to speak. It makes sense in my head anyway...

Inspiration

Had a wander around the Russle-Cotes Museum today which was cool, especially the Japanese items which were pretty inspiring. Unfortunately they were setting up the exhibition that we really went to see, even though on the website it said it was open...

Active Geology

This one is based on the 5th realm, 'Active Geology'. It's all about seamounts, vents and seeps on the ocean floor. It was the vents especially that I focused on, as they spew out clouds of minerals and heat the water to around 350 degrees C which I thought was pretty emotive and intense... As these vents are often found in water up to 5 miles deep, they are very hard to find and explore - the main method of finding them is by trailing probes from surface vessels, which I've represented through the lines entering the circles.
This illustration, like all the others, would look really good screenprinted which is why I've made many of the images, or elements of them two-tone so that if I get time it would be an easy job to do. A combination of screenprinted and normal printing techniques maybe? If I had managed to get into the project as early as I should have, I would've had time now to experiment. It's a shame, but a lesson I had to learn the hard way I guess.

Some more work..... For this one, I went back to 'The Human Edges'. Using the same photographs as I used in the last one, but trying to continue in this pared-back simplified style I've been working in. I'm actually really pleased with this one, as it says everything I want it to say quite clearly and without any of the fuss or over-complication of the last version.


I liked the idea of the image hanging right off the edge of the page, so I went with that for the finished illustration as shown below.


After producing the last two images I started to feel more confident working in this style, and the work began to flow. Here's one that I was happy with first go - 'The Microscopic'. It's all about how the bacteria that live in our oceans consume much of the Carbon Dioxide that humanity produces, and produce much of the oxygen that we breathe through photosynthesis. As these bacteria need certain minerals to live, scientists have been experimenting enriching the water by adding minerals such as iron in order to provide ideal conditions for the bacteria to thrive and consume more Carbon Dioxide. The brown circles in the image are scap iron, and I made the area of 'microbes' blue to represent the oxygen that they are producing. It's simple but I think it works. The words represent what is stated in the Baseline Report as being the major unknowns for each realm - so for The Human Edges the two major unknowns are distribution and abundance of species, for the Microscopic it's knowing what species of microbes there are. I like having the words in the images as they give them a graphic feel, and the typewriter font makes them look like they were written in a lab by a researcher - I have to be careful to not overdo it with the typewriter though, as if there is too much of it in there it will just look cliche.


As I was happy with this version I didn't want to risk over-complicating it, so I've left it for now and moved on - below is a first version of 'The Ice Oceans'.


This is based on the idea of the ice oceans being un-explored, upside down worlds full of strange sights. There is a huge mountain range under the sea and ice of the Arctic, and a recent expedition found schools of cod grazing upside down on algae growing on the bottom of ice floes. This upside down reference really inspired this image, and like the last one I'm pretty happy with this first version. The map is a chart of Iceberg 'migration' routes, and it gives the image an informative feel.
I feel that the images I've managed to produce over these last couple of days have worked really well, and this style is something I would definitely like to work and improve on. Finally I feel like I've reached a good point in the project, and the work is beginning to come of it's own rather than being forced and I think this is reflected in the images. They work well on their own, but more importantly they work well as a set, and I can see them working well in a booklet or something similar. As it's quite late in the day I think I'm just going to follow my gut instincts on this one, I would like more time to explore other ways of presenting the images but I like making books and I'm confident that I will be able to produce something of a high standard with the time I have left. Hopefully, this will prove to be the case!

Slowgress

I'm getting more and more aware of the fact that I've got less than a month left before hand-in, so I need to get some good inspiration and crack on.
Luckily, the last couple of days have been good for work. I started by looking back through my visual research and got really inspired, especially after looking at the work of Christiana Couciero. I love her graphic style of illustration, and her use of shape and colour.


So feeling inspired, I managed to produce some work....


Above are the first two versions for 'Light and Dark Central Waters'. I think the light and dark circles are fairly self explanatory, and the line represents a divide as the actual divide between the light and dark zones is quite sudden. It was important to me to show how our atmosphere is dependent on the microbes in the top layers of the oceans producing oxygen, and I've tried to show this through the altered top half of the top circle and the blue area at the top, which I much prefer to the circle photo of the sky (the third circle makes it look too much like a circle). There's also a map of some ocean currents in there to give it another point of reference, and to contrast the photography with some hand-drawn elements. A more finished version below.