Category: Visual Storytelling

Click this link to view the completed project: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/27275454d2.html#page/1

These are all the finished images I used, I made them with watercolour and pen:

In summary the story is about an old fox who is with his family and friends and he shows them a photo album of his life. I worked a lot on creating an interesting narrative structure. The structure I chose has 3 layers, the present scene, the photo album and the memories. The narrative starts with the current scene then jumps back and forth between the photo album and the memories and eventually returns to the current scene. I think the last page is particularly important for the narrative as the present scene becomes a photo in the album.

I chose the title as it immediately explains 2 of the key themes in the story, time and family. Also, it has simple words that can be under- stood by young children. The brief wanted the story to be aimed at children and young adults and I think I achieved both. The story is lighthearted and fun, when this is combined with the colourful and warm illustrations I think it would be appealing to children and help build their visual literacy skills. The style I tried to achieve is heavily inspired by the children book illustrators I liked growing up such as Beatrix Potter and Axel Scheffler. I wanted the style to be nostalgic for young adults and remind them on the picture book they read as I child. The story is about family, belonging and love, these are all timeless themes and are relatable to people of all ages as my narrative covers a character’s journey from being a baby to being and adulthood.

The format I chose to make was a digital book. I wanted to combine traditional mediums and digital software to create my story. All the illustrations are made by hand with watercolour and pen. I chose these mediums as I like combination of the bright, warm colours and the strong black lines. I then scanned all the images and made any small corrections I needed using Adobe Photoshop. For the format I used Adobe InDesign. By the final stages I had all of my layout described but I still had to make decisions about the background as I needed to make a clear visual difference between the 3 different layers of the narrative. As well as different background I used different visual assets to help make the difference clear such as tape for the corners of the photos and bubbles for the memories. The next step for this story would be to actually get the InDesign document that I made printed into a physical book to help give the story a more tactile experience.

After completing the sessions on the 3 possible briefs I have decided to do the Visual Storytelling project. I will draw inspiration and ideas from from the other briefs where I can to strengthen the project. Wordless picture narratives are the type of narrative I enjoy viewing the most and it has the strongest link to my personal career ambitions.

Pitch: I want to create a wordless picture narrative all about the power and love of belonging to a family. I want to explore how family dynamics and how your ‘chosen family’ may change overtime. The narrative will have a fun and warm tone as I want it to be a celebration of family. It will be a viewpoint narrative as it will be a chronological journey through 1 main character’s life. I plan for the characters to all be animals, specifically the wildlife you’d see around England such as foxes, badgers, hedgehogs and squirrels. I think this will help make the narrative more fun and visually engaging. I plan to creat 20 images, so 5 double page spreads probably in landscape orientation. Each page will depict a stage in the main characters like and a moment where they felt love from someone or a group that they can call his family. In terms of the visuals I want to use watercolour with little details of pen and coloured pencil to depict these beautiful natural scenes to try create a world that these animals live in. I will be taking inspiration from the likes of Beatrix Potter, Luisa Rivera, Evgenia Malina and more.

Beatrix Potter:

Luisa Rivera:

Kit Chase:

Evgenia Malina:

Here’s a mood board I made with visual inspiration from different illustrators:

The third potential brief we where introduced to was about creating a wordless picture narrative, this is a narrative that is entirely expressed through illustrations. In summary it is to create a viewpoint narrative in the form of a wordless picture narrative exploring the themes of identity, belonging and family. From the beginning of this module I’ve had a stronger interest in this brief compared to the other as it’s more something I general enjoying creating and engaging with. Below is the criteria for this brief.

This page contains some of the research I did before the session to familiarise myself with the topic and some of the examples I looked at to get a sense of the style. Wordless picture narratives is a style of illustrated book I really admire as it takes great artistic and storytelling skills to convey an entire narrative solely through images.

‘The Snowman’ is a wordless picture book by Raymond Briggs made in 1978 and was adapted into an animated television film in 1982. This is a childhood favourite of mine as I always loved how to story was told through just beautiful visuals and well chosen music. Following a night of heavy snowfall, a young boy named James wakes up and plays in the snow, eventually building a large snowman. At the stroke of midnight, he sneaks downstairs to find the snowman magically comes to life. The story has a sad ending as James wakes up and finds the snowman melted in the morning. The story has similar themes to that of our brief such as family and belonging. My favourite thing about this piece is the hand drawn quality of the visuals.

Another example of a wordless picture narrative is ‘Cormorance’ by Nick Hayes. This is the story of a girl and a boy and and a deserted reservoir. The girl wants only to impress her mother, and finds the perfect challenge to prove herself. The boy suffers a tragedy, becomes fixated with a lost memento and makes it his mission to find it. The water is where, one day, the two will meet. What I particularly like about this example is the strong use of colour. Hayes has picked a very simple colour palette of just 2 complementary colours, blue and orange. This helps create the mood of the piece and is a technique I will consider using.

John Mcnaught has a similar visual style for his wordless narratives, very minimal colour palette and cartoonish characters. I think for wordless narratives, reducing the colour palette to 1 or 2 colours with lots of variation is shades is very effective as it easily translates mood and emotion to the visual reader.

This is the cover from Liao Boyd’s story titled ‘Flashlight’. She uses colour in a very interesting way. We usually associated lots of bright and warm colours with children’s books but Lizi Boyd takes it in the complete opposite direction. The majority of the book is black with just simple white outlines. Only small sections are in colour, these are the bits the character is shining his flashlight onto. I think this is a really clever way of controlling and limiting your colour use to engage children with your narrative

For the session we had Luisa Rivera come in to speak to us about the topic of wordless picture narratives and her work. She is a London-based artist originally from Chile, working primarily on paper with water-based media, exploring our relationship with the environment through multiple layers of interpretation. She draws on storytelling to create narratives that are inhabited predominantly by women and natural elements, covering themes such as ecology, feminism, and personal memory.

These are 2 of Rivera’s pieces that I particularly like. I love the delicate water colour style combine that she uses and is able to get intricate details it’s. The colour aren’t too bright, they have a nice muted look. I like the thematic combination between fantasy and reality with all natural and real elements but combined in an almost magical looking way.

Luisa Rivera also took us through her creative process from when she is applying to get the work from the client to its final submission. The images below show the progress from a rough thumbnail sketch to the final outcome. She starts with a thumbnail sketch for ideas then moves onto slightly more detailed sketches, mapping out placement. Then she tests out colour and finally uses a light box to transfer the sketch onto the right type of paper and starts using her medium of choice, usually water colour.

These are some of the things that Rivera said are the key things to think about when planing a wordless picture narrative.

These are some examples of wordless narratives in other forms, editorial illustration and animatics. I will look into these as they will all be helpful in enriching my knowledge of wordless picture narratives so I’m able to construct my own.

I really enjoyed this session and learnt a lot about this type of narrative from my own research and the talk we had with Luisa Rivera. The next step is to choose which of the 3 briefs to develop on.

The second of the 3 choices of briefs is about Expanded Narratives. This is a term I wasn’t very familiar with prior to this session so I was able to learn a lot. An Expanded Narrative challenges linear narrative structures such as Joseph Cameron’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ that we looked at in week 1. Another traditional linear structure is the 3 act structure, act 1 the setup, act 2 the confrontation and act 3 the resolution.

Expanded Narratives have a non- linear structure. The events are presented out of sequence, sometimes out of chronological order and may include multiple timelines running parallel. Above are some of the differences between linear and non-linear narrative structures.

Below are some simple diagrams illustrating the structure of a linear and non-linear narrative.

One format for expanded narratives is an interactive storybook, sometimes referred to as scrollytelling. A great example of this is The Boat by Nam Le created using digital software. As you scroll and move around the page the images appear, move and disappear, putting emphasis on the actions of the reader. This is a modern way of enhancing the traditional storybook into a digital and interactive format.

An important term that I learnt was player agency. This is where an Expanded narrative gives the illusion of control to the player/viewer. This makes the players feel like they’re driving events although their actions aren’t actually having an impact on the end result of the narrative.

When looking at Expanded narratives its important to consider digital games as these this type of narrative is commonly seen in video games such as Red Dead Redemption and Minecraft.

Then we looked in more detail at different interactive story structures. There are 2 broad categories for interactive stories, guided experience and open world. A guided experience gives the user choices at certain times to define the path but the choices are limited but an open world gives the user the freedom to engage with the narrative in any order. Within these 2 broad categories there are many different structures which are listed and drawn below:

In groups we where given different Expanded Narratives to explore and then review. I was given the interactive story ‘The Temple of No’ by Crows Crows Crows.

We then looked at all the other ones and ‘The Temple of No’ was my favourite one. I really like the silly and light hearted atmosphere of it couple with the fun illustrations. My main criticism is that no matter your decisions it always ended the same way and I would’ve liked to have multiple options of endings.’ It would give the reader more control of the narrative and cause more people to revisit the story to see the other possibilities.

Now it was our turn to design a non-linear narrative structure. We made a map on one in classes in groups but I decided to do another one at home because it was a fun exercise. The map has to highlights the major plot points and show a non-linear structure.

My interactive story focus on one a main character who’s actions the viewer gets to control. The main plot of the short story is that he goes to visit his new neighbours and find out they’re fairies. Below is the complete map of the plot points. The story has a branched structure. Some decisions are irrelevant to the ending of the story, I did the as I enjoyed this element of The Temple of No. However, unlike that story this will have multiple endings so some of the decisions really do affect the outcome of the story. I wanted the story to have a humorous and silly tone.

Then we used an interactive story telling software called Twine to create our narratives. I had never used a software like this before but I didn’t find it too complicated. They key thing to remember was the syntax listed below. These act as a coding system to allow you to create different functions.

Then I stared creating the story with the statement parts and the different options. You can see clearly that the narrative has 3 possible endings depending on which choices the reader makes. You can also see the options which don’t really affect the story and just loop back into the main narrative.

In these images you can see in more detail what I put into each statement and choice.

I enjoyed using this type of software and would like to explore it further in the future. Although my interactive story was short, I’m happy with how it flowed and the narrative structure worked well. To improve it I would include more images and more detail to the story.

After visiting the Guston exhibition I made an image in response to his work. I had very mixed feelings towards the work he did across his life. I wanted to take some of his key thematic elements into my own piece such as the use of figure drawing and cluttered compositions. However I went in the opposite direction in regard to colour and keep mine black and white. Guston’s work shows a narrative (known as a tableaux), so I wanted to try capture that idea of representing a whole story in 1 image. His work was often centred around serious political or social issue so I tried to tackle the feelings of anxiety and pressure. Guston’s work was predominantly done in oil paint, a very traditional medium but I did mine using more experimental digital techniques.

The idea behind the piece was to depict 1 figure and centre the narrative around them. Around the figure would be seemingly random objects and hands, 2 things Guston used a lot in his work. I wanted to combine traditional and digital mediums.

A did a few charcoal figure drawings to get the main character. I chose charcoal as it has a nice gritty texture which translates well to digital media. I wanted the figure to be in a hunched over position to suggest struggle and pain. To try reflect the physical effects to depression and pressure.

I ripped around the figure and scanned it. I like the look of ripped paper and I think it helps to make the figure look small and compressed, furthering the theme of being trapped by these negative feelings.

I have been experimenting with scanner and like the effect it gives to get hands I decided to scan mine. I tried it in different ways, some pressed against the scanner and some hovering above. It gives a really interesting texture that I think contrast the hand drawn charcoal figure well.

Then for the third part of the composition, I randomly scattered needles, nails and pins onto the scanner and scanned them. This is taking inspiration from Guston’s clustered use of objects. The scanner pick up metallic objects very well. The reason for the choice of these object is that each of them are designed to fix and hold things together but when used wrong they can be dangerous and destructive. I think this goes well with the themes I was trying to represent.

Then I started to digitally combine them. I used Photoshop and spent lots of time editing the layers in different ways, ordering them and adjusting the overlays.

I found that I liked dramatically adjusting the contrast and brightness on the objects to give it a printed stamp look. Also I liked having 2 layers of objects and having one light and 1 dark and 1 infront and 1 behind the person. I wanted both the hands and objects to be overly large in comparisons to the person, this is something Guston did in multiple pieces.

I preferred the one where the hands where hovering over the scanner as opposed to being pressed on the scanner as they’re more subtle and less distracting from the figure. Also I think it works more for the narrative that they’re almost just constantly looking over the figure in the background.

I tried different formats and liked it better landscape as I feel it made the hands look more like them where coming to get the figure. Furthermore I think the figure looks better placed at the bottom of the page, not in the middle because it makes it look smaller and more scared.

I chose to use this figure and not the other one because it looks more like she’s shielding herself from the hands and objects which fits the narrative more. Also it has white bits which help bring out the white in some of the objects and I think just overall ties better in the composition.

This is the final image. I made some adjustments to the edges of the figure and made some of the objects look like they’re piercing the figure. Overall I’m happy with the outcome. I think the texture and layering of digital and traditional media was successful. Also I think it has the narrative of a person struggling from negative emotions and external pressures represented by the objects and hands. I like the subtlety of the hands compared to the boldness of the objects. I was able to incorporate elements of Guston’s ideas. I chose to use more of his compositional style rather than his visual style.

This week we visited the Philip Guston exhibition at the Tate Modern. Guston was a Canadian-American painter, print maker, muralist and draftsman. He predominantly worked using oil paints. His worked has been a part of many artistic movements such as abstract expressionism, modern art, figurative art, neo-expressionism and social realism. Prior to visiting the exhibition I didn’t know of him but did recognise a couple pieces of his work.

Guston links into the visual storytelling module as his work usually presents a narrative. His artwork often functions as a tableaux, this is a term I learnt in the first week. A tableaux is a narrative presented in a single image. This makes his work useful to study for this module.

One of the things about the exhibition that really stood out to me was how it was presented. As you walked through it you viewed his work in chronological order. This was interesting as I was able to see the changes and developments in his style and approaches. I certainly like some sections more than other. The images below are in chronological order staring from his earliest work.

The piece, ‘Female Nude with Easel’ from 1935 is one of his early pieces. The first 4 images are all from the same period and have a similar style. I really like the technical quality of these, the forms and shading are all perfect and you can see the start of themes that become more common in his later work such as the human figure and clusters of objects. I really like this style, it’s one of my favourite periods from his career.

This piece titled ‘Nude Philosopher in Space-Time’, 1935, draws inspiration from surrealist painter Lorser Feitelson whose influence can be seen in the dreamlike image. Similar to the image above, a nude is partnered with an array of objects. At first glance the objects may appear random with helps to make the viewer more intrigued. Upon closer look the objects suggest the form of a person. This idea of deconstructing the human form into seemingly random objects is seen in the image above as well. With the legs of the stool representing legs, the easel being the body and ball being the head. The atmosphere of these paintings in dreamlike and almost eerie as they are made up of normal everyday objects yet feel really unnatural. Also it’s marks the beginning of Guston’s exploration into playing with objects and composition.

This piece called ‘Bombardment’ from 1937 is a particular favourite of mine. It has the same style as the previous pieces but it far more dynamic so there’s a lot more to take in. I like how clustered in appears and the choices of a circular canvas helps make the subjects feel like they’re leaping towards you. Guston really began to create narratives in his images. From a technical perspective it’s a brilliant example of foreshortening and using a vanishing point.

This piece from 1940 called ‘Gladiators’ shows a slight shift in style. It still has the chaotic composition of people and objects but has taken a slightly more abstract approach. I actually really like this style and think by reducing some of the detail and realism it becomes more dynamic and eye catching.

This piece from the 1950s shows the dramatic change in style. The work lost all realism and themes of people and objects. It became all about colour. I personally am not a fan of this period of his work as it doesn’t have the elements that I enjoy about his other work. It doesn’t have the same sense of storytelling and narrative. The one part I do like about it is that you can see this experimentation with colour aided his later work.

This piece was made in 1969 and is titled ‘The Studio’. This marked the move away from abstraction and back to the depicting figures. However the style had almost completely changed. It’s a far more cartoonish and technically simple painting style. The colour are more bold and forms less precise. This painting is widely recognized as an early meta-self portrait, in which Guston presents himself, laboring at his easel in the hood that he will continue to employ as a motif in future Klansmen works. As with a lot of his work, this is a response to a social/ political narrative, in this case the Civil Rights Movement and the racism seen in America. In many of the paintings features the hooded figures, Guston depicts them doing regular things, highlighting how racism is all around and while it’s obvious people let it go unnoticed.

‘Painting, Smoking, Eating’ from 1972 is done in the same style. You can clearly see how this new style has evolved from his previous ones. It has the themes of people, objects and narrative storytelling from his early work combined with the chaotic use of colour from the abstract experimentation. I find this style interesting but still prefer the early work simply because it’s more refined and detailed.

’The Line’, made in 1978 is my personal favourite of his later works. This piece is an example of a tableaux as it tells a story in just 1 image. It’s composition is less busy and has a more reserved colour palette than many of his other pieces but I think this helps you focus on the key parts of this painting. The hand is descending from the clouds, resembling a lightning bolt. It’s drawing a single straight line with what appears to be a stick of charcoal. To me it seems to represent the power of art and artistic creation. The hand appears to either by guided by something powerful or a God like being as it descends from the heavens. I think this piece has the right amount of detail without being realistic.

Overall I found visiting the Guston exhibition a good experience as I was able to learn about another artist and enrich my understanding of narrative storytelling in images. His work was interesting as it went through many different styles which are all visually very different but in some way are connected. I personally like his early and late work but am not so keen on the work in the middle.

The first of the possible briefs that we explored was the social engagement narrative. A social engagement narrative requires you to construct an educational workshop pack that invites a recognised target group to explore and create narratives. These can contain pamphlets, performance activities, image making tuition and technical training.
We looked though some social engagement narrative examples and then has to think about issues that we’re interested in. I wanted to do it based around nature. From this topic I decided to go with the question ‘how to get more children interested and observant of their natural surroundings?’

To get some initial ideas we completed a crazy 8s activity which is for brainstorming. Then I researched some existing companies that tackle a similar problem to see how they do it.

Then I began to plan out ideas for how I would carry this out. I thought that the best way would be to diversify engagement by doing activities/ experiences, physical products and digital technology. This would help reach a wider audience and engage more children in the cause. Then I thought about the audience I wanted and how I was gonna go about attracting and appealing to them. The other thing to decide on was what I wanted the interaction to be between my idea and the audience.

I started to think about branding decisions. I thought about some potential names such as ‘Plant the Seed’ and ‘Growing with Nature’. Below are some examples of colour scheme ideas and some typography choices.

These water colour and pen sketches are an example of a possible style for the illustrations. They are done in a sketchy style with not too much detail but a focus on colour to make the engaging and recognisable to children.

In our first Visual Storytelling session we went through the Module handbook and I made notes about the deadlines, assessment criteria and assessment deliverables.

We had a lecture where we went through some of the basics of narrative theory and narrative devices. As well as some key individuals and their ideas of narratives. I made notes from this and plan to research some of these points further. I particularly found Propp’s idea of the 8 character roles interesting as I could see each of these roles in a lot of the movies and books that I like.

The Hero Myth Cycle:

This task was given in preparation for the visual storytelling module. The task was to produce a wordless picture book for a famous story of our choosing. I wanted to work on a story that I’m passionate about so I chose my favourite book, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. Brien. Although I’ve read the book multiple times I needed a refresher of the story so I read through notes and summaries of the events. Then I was able to choose what I thought where the 6 key plot points that I could also create interesting and varied illustrations with. These are Timothy’s illness, Mrs Frisby getting advice from the Owl, Mrs Frisby going to meet the rats, the rats explaining their back story, Mrs Frisby escaping Mr. Fitzgerald’s cat and the mice’s freedom.

These are my initial thumbnail sketches for each of the 6 scenes. I gave the scenes each a 1 word title, sickness, advice, secrets, experiment, trapped and freedom. I varied each of the illustrations size and shape as well as compositional arrangement to keep them interesting. I look up any illustrations and visual media for the book that I could find to use as inspiration. The style I chose to go with was a black biro sketchy style. I really enjoy working with this medium and think it’s translates well to book illustrations.

Then I developed the initial sketches to include more detail and finalise the compositions.

These are the first 2 of the finalised images. I’m happy with my choice of style as I was able to get lots of texture and depth with the cross hatched shading. I also think this images represent Timothy’s sickness and Mrs Frisby getting advice from Mr Ages well.

Sickness:

Advice: