AOI Talk thoughts

Reflecting on the talk we had from Association of Illustrators, in retrospect I found it really helpful in letting me know that there is a support network there for us when we leave. I have never considered things like tax forms or contracts, but they are things that will be vital to me being able to eat when we leave uni. The talk was very honest and informative, which I found refreshing as nothing was sugarcoated for us and we were told exactly what we need to be doing in order to succeed. I'll definitely be signing up to the AOI as it seems like a really worthwhile service they provide for us, and its great to know that we aren't just totally alone when we leave.

Industry Research - Iakov Chernikov

 Through my work for Responsive and 505, I came across a Russian designer and architect called Iakov Chernikov. He operated in the late 1920s onward, pioneering Constructivist architecture.
The definition of Constructivism is: a style or movement in which assorted mechanical objects are combined into abstract mobile structural forms. The movement originated in Russia in the 1920s and has influenced many aspects of modern architecture and design.

I have been recently using block shape and colour to make abstract designs, so these visuals have been massively inspiring. This is something I never even considered I'd have been looking at when we started on this course, but now this shape based design is making up for a large chunk of my practice.

"My aspiration was to completely avoid the real world and give myself over to utopias, illusions, and the ephemeral." - Chernikov, 1927.

Chernikov saw visual communication as a tool for artists to express their imagination and fantasy, and thought that realism was pretty much pointless, as it already exists, so why make it again?

This philosophy is something that aligns with how I see illustration now, I don't really see the point in super realistic drawing and I'm a lot more focused on how the artist can tell a story or explain an idea just using image.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me

 This is a book I actually bought for CoP, but my project there has gone in a different direction than I first had planned, I was going to write about how visual communication changes how we perceive events in history, but I've ended up going for a more contemporary take on the idea, thinking about how visual communication changes how we perceive each other through mediums like social media.
I bought this book specifically to investigate how perceptions of black communities has altered since the 20th Century to today. The author writes the book as a letter to his teenage son, so the whole thing feels very personal and honest.

The unique way the author illustrates the story of his life and experiences growing up has made me think about alternative methods of telling a story. I've found a lot of inspiration recently towards illustration through the medium of books, especially books centred on telling a story, as that's what I'm basically trying to do in my own work.

Podcasts + BrainScran

For about a year, podcasts have been a great way for me to absorb content I'm interested in through the medium of comedy. These podcasts basically do through audio what I want to do visually in my practice. They all use a wealth of otherwise useless pop culture knowledge to come up with comedy scenarios, which is literally what I do in my life all the time.


Do Go On centres around a weekly report on a topic, during which the two presenters who aren't reporting spend the episode derailing the report and infusing comedy into whatever subject they are talking about.


Shut Up A Second is similar, but a lot more bizarre. The topics for each episode are purposely vague as possible, focusing on things like Bugs or Jelly. The openness means that the topic can be interpreted in any kind of way and often ends up in a completely different place to where it started. This one is how I want to think about my ideas, just letting completely loose and firing out as many funny things as I have time for.


The Weekly Planet was the first of these shows I started listening to, as it appealed to the wealth of useless pop culture knowledge I have stored in my brain. It frequently reassures me to listen to this show and find that there are other people out there thinking similar things to me in relation to popular culture such as films and tv shows. Popular culture is what got me into drawing in the first place, so it will always be a massive part of my practice.


Plumbing the Death Star is another show with a way of thinking I want to start incorporating into how I think about my own ideas. The premise each week is to solve a fictional problem with real world considerations, such as how Hogwarts would perform in an OFSTED examination, or whether or not Muppets are second class citizens. This is one of my favourite shows and the completely mad situations coupled with their actual knowledge of the topics is really interesting week in and week out to listen to.

Inspired by all these shows, I've recently started writing on my friend Tom from Foundation's blog about music and film, Brain Scran. I don't have a lot of time to be frequently writing on there, but it is a good experience to put my feelings about certain things out there through that medium. Hopefully in the summer I'm going to start posting there a lot more regularly.
https://brainscran.wordpress.com/

Industry Research - Skottie Young

In keeping with my departure from conventional comics, I've leaned hard into the weird stuff that Image is putting out, namely I Hate Fairyland by Skottie Young. I came across his work last year when I saw some of the variant covers he was producing for Marvel, but he never illustrated full issues so I wasn't really that familiar with his work.
 His style combines super deformed childlike cuteness with scenes of often horrible and biologically accurate scenes of carnage. After reading I Hate Fairyland, I now realise why he wasn't illustrating full issues of the Avengers, as any child audience would have likely been scarred.
His combination of children's illustration and horrible gore appeals to an audience who understands the juxtaposition. I really enjoy this series because its a creator writing and drawing exactly what he wants, and that's refreshing to see in comics for me, as I was so used to formulaic superhero comics last year.