In the Lighting Darkness workshop we had illustrator Anna Steinberg come in to talk to us about her process and the industry in general. I found the talk very informative and interesting. Anna shared tips on her creative process from when she is approached about the project to sending of her work. One thing in particular that stood out to me was how she recorded her initial ideas with thumbnail sketches. Anna created a set of illustrations for a poetry book about genocide which is a very difficult topic to work on as there’s lots of technical and moral questions. She taught us good way of handling topics like this and we where able to put these into practice is the afternoon.
Below are some of her illustrations. The style is very minimalistic yet conveys strong messages. This idea is something I wanted to carry into my work in this workshop.
We where given as choice of 2 texts to work with and I chose the one about domestic violence. To begin this activity we read through the text to understand it and all the themes and ideas in it. We did a warm up activity involving collating shapes and altering them in different ways. Then we moved onto the main activity. One of Anna pieces of advice was to work with inanimate objects rather than people when dealing with sensitive topics as it often makes it easier to communicate the message. So for my idea I chose to use tea cups as they’re an easily recognisable silhouette and are quiet fragile therefore easily broken so worked well with the topic of domestic violence. I tested out a couple different versions but both involved the idea breaking the cup silhouette and loosely stitching it back together. This is a technique I’ve never tried before but really liked it so it’s something I’d like to further experiment with. For me this shows the damage that domestic violence cause and how it can break people. I thought is was a good metaphor and a more powerful way of communicating it than a more literal depiction of domestic violence.
I took inspiration from the Japanese term Kintsugi which is an art form about repairing pottery. What I found so interesting about this art form was how it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise so leaves them visible.
This is a piece I did at home continuing on with the theme of domestic violence. I wanted to develop on my idea of attaching something broken using thread. This time I chose a rose and I wanted to make a more mixed media piece by incorporating an organic element. I think this piece successfully represents the theme as is more visually striking than my previous attempts due to the powerful red of the rose.
Samuel Green Illustration 