OUIL504 Illustration 1 Part 1 - Summer Brief and Presentation.

Over Summer, we were asked to research into a series of authors, specialising our research on one author. I initially looked at Lin Yutang - a turn-of-the-century Writer and Translator from china, and Haruki Murukami, a popular japanese writer well known for his surreal and fantasy literature. The writer I eventually chose to narrow my research down on was a woman called Naomi Klein - a journalist and activist writer, who poses critical views and opinions on things like extreme consumerism, disaster capitalism and the social and environmental impact globalisation has made. I really loved her writing, and I liked the fact she had the balls to write about things most people are often frightened to be critical about - I also felt given my interest in Editorial Illustration, I thought dealing with some actual, in real life issues would be beneficial to my practice down the line.

Our first task coming back was to present our research to our peers in small groups via a presentation, detailing what sort of work our authors did -

After we presented, we then were asked to sit down and condense as much of our research as we could onto an A2 piece of paper

After brainstorming all the factual stuff, we were then ask to draw some things relative to the authors work. I found this a bit of a struggle, given how far-reaching her work tends to be - so I chose to look at the work in the more recent book of hers i'd read, The Shock Doctrine.

I was trying to be too illustratory with these, I found it difficult to draw and come out with things. I also felt like they were going in too much of a political direction and homing in on stuff too early - but these were the first things that came out of my head, so I figured they were worth recording.

To summarise, we were then asked to identify themes in the authors work, and also to make a directory of lines in 3 weights ready for use in the next session -