Prophets and Poets

Drawing and Media

Dry Media and Painting Techniques

A useful exercise in trying out techniques and processes that could then be applied in production pieces. However, as I found out, the small scale explorations do not always lend themselves directly to whole pieces in the way you would expect. So the experimentation and learning goes on even when you try to apply them. In fact I feel that this exercise is only truly valuable if you make time for it to be an ongoing part of the creative process - not something that I have always been patient enough to do.

I particularly liked some of the broken colour effects created through the scumbling of acrylic paint and the sgraffito possible through built up layers of pastel or acrylic. Some of the results of dropping powders and the like onto watercolours also produced interesting qualities. You really see the importance of annotating the experiments too.

The challenge now is to continue the experimentation, to look at the work of other artists and try to unpick how they might have achieved certain finishes, and, of course, to be able to wield these effects in subtle and visually satisfying ways myself.

Prophets and Poets

Print and Photgraphy

I was really looking forward to this block. The techniques on offer are intriguing but the structure of the three weeks has been a little frustrating. Essentially we have three thursdays worth of facilities available to us. Trying to take advantage of these outside of the allocated times has proved to be nigh on impossile. I understand the reasoning behind, for example, restricting access to the print room to supervised sessions only, but I wish that there were some open sessions that I could access around my own commitments. I could make better use of my time this way and my learning would benefit - I need time to explore techniques that I cannot access at home.

We have also had a number of relatively passive demonstration sessions. These add to the feeling of inactivity and a sense of lack of achievement.

Developed Flash images in monoprinting. Found out that newsprint paper offers really interesting line quality - feathers in a way that other papers don't. Painting over the oil based inks using water colour and acrylic creates strong illustrative effects.

Would like to experiment with dry point in future because the scratchy etched quality is an interesting feature that I would like to incorporate into my work.

I think my screen printing sub-consciously referenced Picasso and Matisse - bird motif. As part of the whole process found out how to make photographic stencils and how to use different registration techniques. Using dark coloured papers and card make this process more difficult because of their opaqueness. This is an important consideration particularly if you are applying other components to print over e.g. pieces of cut and torn paper. Found it interesting how printing colour over a similarly coloured ground darkens it substantially and gives it a subtle textural difference.

In future I need to consider maintaining a margin around the printable area and the appropriate application of the process over others e.g. digital printing. Screen printing comes into its own where large areas of flat colour are required or for printing directly onto 'unusual' surfaces e.g. glass, clay, wood, plastic etc.

In the photography studio I learnt the difference between low-key, high-key and contra jour lighting and how to set up lights accordingly. Made to feel very welcome by Colin. Enjoyed the protraiture work.

Colour assignment was tricky because it feels difficult to walk straight onto good photographs on demand. Tried to resist the temptation to use macro close ups to fulfil the whole brief. It would have been a bit too easy and wanted the collection to have variety.

Referenced Henri Cartier-Bresson and Bill Brandt when considering the monochromatic shots.

Learning how to look for rhythm and structure in compositions. This includes judicious use of cropping.

Used my own compact digital to take all shots. Would like to learn more about setting up still life studio shots and make use of digital SLR to gain greater control over images.

Prophets and Poets

Motion & Interaction

Learning about Flash and its applications contained some metally challenging moments. Just when you thought that you had worked out the logic behind it, it would defy your understanding by acting in a completely unexpected way. It was great to be breaking into new areas of learning though.

The block was really well organised to support novices like myself. It was successful because tightly focussed 'hands on' practical tasks, where we learnt, for example, how to make movie clips and buttons, prepared us with the skills and understanding necessary to complete the ultimate part of the brief. We were actively engaged in discrete practise of the skills beforehand that we were then required to apply in a creative way. Brilliant - a bit like the format for QCA D&T units for schools.

The other nice element of this block was that it was fairly portable - you could work on it at home or indeed anywhere. Seamless.

I decided that I wanted to give the project a handcrafted quality which wasn't without its problems: all those separate drawings of body parts, lots of scanning and toggling between Illustrator and Photoshop to colour the pieces, and having to overcome layout issues presented as the individual pieces (and typography) made their way into the composition.

Looking back over Heroes and Heroines I was drawn to the work of David Hughes and felt that a style of that ilk lent itself to the look that I wanted to achieve. I liked his quirky character drawings and use of subdued colour.

I selected the final idea from a short list of three or four that I had story-boarded. I felt that, although it may be simpler in concept than some of the others, it told a story in its own right. It had a narrative that was clear even without the supporting text. Mind-mapping key words from the poem certainly aided the generation of more unusual or novel ideas, e.g. 'lift' - What kinds of things can lift objects up?

Breaking the idea down into fine sequential steps was difficult at the outset because I didn't know the demands and conventions of the program sufficiently well enough. However, the more I worked at it the more easily I found that I could plan strategically in detail. I'm not a great lists person but I found that breaking sequences down into a list of tasks really helped me to work efficiently towards the end.

As a first attempt, I was quite pleased with the end result. However, if I were to work on another project of this type I would try to find a way of planning the position and scale of the typography against the other elements in adavance of taking it to screen.

Adam learnt some of our names too, which was nice.

I just hope that I don't forget some of the technical steps before I come to use it again. A little practice here and there wouldn't go amiss.

Heroes & Heroines

Ian Beck

Ian Beck is one of the UK's most popular illustrators of children's books and his work appears frequently in magazines and advertisements. This must be his 5 millionth visit to NCBF and we couldn't imagine him not appearing..he's a big fave!
Ian Beck was born in Hove on the Sussex coast in 1947. At the age of thirteen, after seeing an exhibition of drawings for the Radio Times, he was fired with enthusiasm about illustration and began attending Saturday painting classes at the nearby Brighton College of Art. Ian left school at fifteen and went immediately to Brighton to study art full-time. There he was taught by both Raymond Briggs and John Vernon Lord.
Ian has worked in many fields of illustration. He's been involved in the record industry, and painted the cover of one of the most popular records of all time: Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. He has had many commissions from the Conran Design Group, including packaging, greeting cards, calendars, interior design panels - even murals for a restaurant at Gatwick Airport!
Ian is probably best known for his many bestselling picture books, four of which have been shortlisted for the Best Books for Babies Award: The Teddy Robber (Transworld), Round and Round the Garden, Ride a Cock-Horse, and Little Miss Muffett. Ian has had many exhibitions of his work, and regularly gives talks and lectures on the creation and development of his books.
His beautiful collection of night-time poetry, Stories and Songs for Bedtime, publishes in October 2004, and will make the perfect Christmas gift.
He lives in South-West London with his wife, Emma Stone, and their three children.

Heroes & Heroines

Ross Collins

Born in Glasgow 1972 with a natural sense of rhythm. Ate an apple and core at age of three when left alone. Ran through a plate glass door at age of eight. Holidayed each year in St Ives, Cornwall where Ross glued a fifty pence piece to the pavement and watched people struggle greedily. Used to have trouble pronouncing rs. Cured.
At art school forced to draw with twigs and find inner self. Rejected this and made a lot of friends. In his last year at college, Ross won the Macmillan children’s book prize, using treachery and witchcraft.
Lived in London for two years touting his wares. Decided his wares were touted and returned to Glasgow to draw Children's books and eat deep fried foodstuffs.
Exciting news! Wendy Cope, from The Telegraph has chosen The Three Grumpies by Tamra Wight, illustrated by Ross Collins as one of the childrens picture books of the year!
She writes: ' "I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning," she begins. "Grumpy, Grumpier and Grumpiest were waiting for me." In Ross Collins's pictures, the Grumpies are subversive looking blobs with bulging eyes and protruding teeth. They are funny rather than sinister, and that is the whole point. The central character spends all day trying to get rid of them, but only succeeds when she begins to laugh at them. This is suitable for children of three and over, and might just help when they have the Grumpies.' — Wendy Cope, The Telegraph.

Heroes & Heroines
Chris Ware

Franklin Christenson Ware (born December 28, 1967) is an American comic book artist and cartoonist, best-known for a series of comics called the Acme Novelty Library, and a graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he resides in Oak Park, Illinois as of 2006.
Ware's art is eclectic in its influences, and largely reflects his love of early-20th century American aesthetics in both cartooning and graphic design, transitioning through dozens of artistic styles from traditional comic panels to advertisements to cut-out toys. Although his precise, geometrical layouts may appear to some to be computer-generated, in fact Ware works almost exclusively with "old-fashioned" drawing tools such as paper and pencil, rulers and T-squares. He does, however, sometimes use photocopies and transparencies, and employs a computer to color strips.
His work shows tangible influence from early cartoonists, like Winsor McCay and Frank King (creator of Gasoline Alley); especially in its layout and flow. Outside the comics genre, Ware has found inspiration and a kindred soul in artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell, both men sharing a need to capture items of nostalgia, grace, and beauty within "boxes." He has been called "the Emily Dickinson of comics." [1]
Ware has said of his own style: [2]
I arrived at my way of "working" as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I "draw," which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world. I figured out this way of working by learning from and looking at artists I admired and whom I thought came closest to getting at what seemed to me to be the "essence" of comics, which is fundamentally the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them. I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don't really "see" anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together. Unfortunately, as a result, I guess sometimes readers get a chilled or antiseptic sensation from it, which is certainly not intentional, and is something I admit as a failure, but is also something I can't completely change at the moment.

Recurring characters and stories
Quimby the Mouse was an early character for Ware and something of a breakthrough. Rendered in the style of an early animation character like Felix the Cat, Quimby the Mouse is perhaps Ware's most autobiographical character. Quimby's relationship with a cat head named Sparky is by turns conflict-ridden and loving, and thus intended to reflect all human relationships. While Quimby exhibits mobility, Sparky remains immobile and helpless, subject to all the indignities Quimby visits upon him. Quimby also acts as a narrator for Ware's reminiscences of his youth, in particular his relationship with his grandmother. Quimby was presented in a series of smaller panels than most comics, almost providing the illusion of motion ala a zoetrope. In fact, Ware once designed a zoetrope to be cut out and constructed by the reader in order to watch a Quimby "silent movie". Ware's ingenuity is neatly shown in this willingness to break from the confines of the page.
Ware is currently at work on Rusty Brown, a series ostensibly about an action figure collecting manchild and his somewhat troubled childhood, but which, in Ware's fashion, diverges into multiple storylines about Brown's father's early life in the 1950s as a science fiction writer and his best friend Chalky White's adult home life.
Ware recently finished work on "Building Stories," which first appeared as a monthly strip in Nest Magazine. Installments have since appeared in a number of publications, including The New Yorker, Kramer's Ergot, and most notably, the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Building Stories appeared weekly in the NYT Magazine from September 18th, 2005 until April 2006.
Another recurring Ware character is the Super-man (not to be confused with Superman). In interviews, Ware has expressed the thought that were Superman real, he would probably indulge his every desire, growing fat and selfishly taking advantage of the world around him. Ware's Super-man resembles the way Ware drew God during the early part of his career, even wearing the same caped costume and domino mask and possessing the same slightly sadistic personality; it is unclear whether God can be distinguished from the Super-man in Ware's work. The Super-man also turns up in Jimmy Corrigan as an ambiguous and somewhat abusive mentor.

Heroes & Heroines

Lars Von Trier

Lars von Trier (born Lars Trier, April 30, 1956) is a Danish film director closely associated with the Dogme95 collective, calling for a return to plausible stories in filmmaking and a move away from artifice and towards technical minimalism.

Phobias
Von Trier suffers from multiple phobias, including an intense fear of flying. As the director once put it, "Basically, I'm afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking." His fear of air travel frequently places severely limiting constraints on him and his crew, necessitating that virtually all of his films be shot in either Denmark or Sweden, even those set in the United States or other foreign countries. Von Trier has had a number of his films featured at the Cannes Film Festival over the course of his career, and each time has insisted on driving from Denmark to France for the festival and back.

Trivia
He has described himself in Interview magazine (June 1989) as "a melancholy Dane dancing in the dark to images on the silver screen."
He is heavily influenced by the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer and the film The Night Porter.
Like many auteurs, he uses the same regular group of actors in many of his films. Some of his frequently used actors are Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier and Stellan Skarsgård.
While accepting an award for his film The Idiots, Von Trier called fellow filmmaker Roman Polanski a "midget". Trier later apologized and said he was referring to Polanski's character in Chinatown and not the director personally.
In a 2003 interview with The Age[5], von Trier claimed not to watch films anymore, saying his hard-drive was full. Instead, he prefers video games. He also enthusiastically endorsed Prozac and pornography.

Filming Techniques
Lars von Trier has said that “a film should be like a rock in the shoe”. In order to create original art he feels that filmmakers must distinguish themselves stylistically from other films, often by placing restrictions on the filmmaking process. The most famous restriction is the cinematic "vow of chastity" of the Dogme95 movement with which he is associated, though only one of his films, The Idiots, is an actual Dogme95 film. In Dancer in the Dark, dramatically-different color palettes and camera techniques were used for the "real world" and musical portions of the film, and in Dogville everything was filmed on a sound stage with no set where the walls of the buildings in the fictional town were marked as a line on the floor.
Von Trier often shoots his scenes for longer periods than most directors to encourage actors to stay in character. In Dogville he let actors stay in character for hours, in the style of method acting. The rules and restrictions are a break from the traditional Hollywood production, though directors such as Robert Altman have long been using such techniques of working with actors. These techniques often put great strain on actors, most famously with Björk during the filming of Dancer in the Dark.