Week 2 - Reportage/Documentary Illustration

Reportage illustration is to document a place or time by visually recording and/or doing some observational studies of the location or environment. Life drawing studies is somewhat similar to these but focuses on a different subject matter.

‘Un Thé en Iran’, Olivier Kugler 

One of Olivier Kugler reportage illustrations. Visual language and artistic choices can heavily impact what and how the piece communicate to the audience. Stylistically the illustration is ‘loose’ in terms of line work which gives it a ‘natural’ feel, and the flat colour choices are simple enough to convey information about the environment/characters.

The use of colours can change how we perceive things about the location, i.e. grey colours suggest the location being dull, cold colours suggesting a cold environment, warm colours such as red, purple and orange depicts the heat or harsh weather/environment. Stylistic choices of producing the illustration of the scene/location can also change how we all feel about the place. Exaggerating objects and the change of scale are played around in a way to affect the communication to the audience of the overall image and sometimes the artist does this on purpose to put some humour, dread or atmospheric tone to the image rather than just simply drawing the location.

My visual experiment/reportage illustration based on my workspace in the studio. The image is to convey my workspace have the sense of “control”, with the art equipment being placed and tidied up, while the loose papers and random objects lying around is to convey the sense of busyness and a mixture of frustration. I approach the visuals using basic outlines and colours as I wanted to go for the strong, bold feel with the illustration.

I didn’t want to make the illustration feel uptight and so I decided to make the image feel a little loose with the outlines and colouring. I wanted to depict the workspace as “free” with the loose lines, while the flat colours represent the simple ideas I had been using in my previous projects/works, as well to represent the “creativity” where things always start off something “simple”. I think the illustration is slightly lacking detail in terms of objects and the surrounding area, which could have made the workplace look a little more interesting, although it would of conflict with the simplicity of the style and I did not want to steer away from that idea. Perhaps if I had made the drawing slightly bigger, I could of have fitted in more random objects on the table to attract more attention to the workspace, while having small things going around the space of the image so it would not be heavily drawn to.