Ellen Harling BA Illustration Year 2

Ellen Harling BA Illustration Year 2 at Norwich University of the Arts.

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Final Drawings

First image - I realised that I needed to use a reference to draw the girl for this image. I found a suitable one and now think it works so much better, as I preferred a more realistic look to a cartoony one for these illustrations.

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Composition Experiments

I liked the original sketch I did of this illustration, but when it came to doing the final piece I really didn’t like the finished version. I think a lot of this came down to the fact that I didn’t really draw from a reference and therefore the girl looks very stylised and cartoonish. I also just felt that the composition was quite boring and felt too staged. In a tutorial, I was advised to try cutting up elements of the drawing and collaging them to create something a little more abstract and surreal. This did help me to think about the piece in a looser way and to make it more dynamic.

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Street Composition

Inspired by Bill Bragg, I wanted to experiment more with creating atmospheric scenes and using pencil. This was originally just a quick sketch of a New York street but I really enjoyed doing it and it ended up becoming part of one of my final illustrations. I think this worked quite well because it was on a smaller scale than the other drawings I’d been doing and therefore the shading was more effective.

I then photocopied and cut the drawing up to think about making it a bit more abstract and to make more use of negative space. I wanted to add a figure into the composition too and so did this both by drawing onto the collage and digitally.

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Compositional sketches

Trying out composition ideas for another image. Thinking about keeping the objects in the scene to the minimum needed to create the scene. I struggled a lot whilst doing these compositional sketches, as I found it really hard to place objects in a room and get the perspective on everything right to make it look like a convincing space. I ended up becoming very frustrated whilst making these images which I think reflects in them as they became very stilted and over-thought.

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Colour Experimentation

I created a final illustration that I was pleased with. I used negative space around and through the drawing to create a feeling of isolation and coldness, whilst using the railings behind the characters to symbolise how Mrs Miller is trapped within both her own routine and life and this situation.

In feedback, however, I was told that I need to use colour more in my work. I do agree with this, as all my work has been quite monotone recently. I did still want to keep the dark look of the 6B pencil however and wanted to find a way to combine the two. I started by drawing on coloured paper with black and white pencil. However i found the image became lost and it didn’t have the impact I wanted it to. I then tried drawing the figures with coloured pencil. I quite liked this but I thought that it felt a bit too colourful and bold for the gloominess of the story. I therefore settled in the end on using watercolour wash, as this gave the hint of colour I wanted without overpowering the image.

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Orlando Weeks - The Gritterman

I found this book in a shop and was instantly inspired by it. It’s a book for children about a gritter going out to work for the last time - “As the rest of the world sleeps, the Gritterman goes out to work. Through the wind and the snow. Through the blue-black hours when time slips away, he grits the paths and the pavements and the roads.“

The book has a very melancholic feeling created by the illustrations. It uses a limited colour pallet of black, red and blue to create the cold feeling of winter. Each image also stands isolated on a white page, creating a feeling of coldness and loneliness. This is something I wanted in my illustrations. I was inspired by this to think about using negative space in my work and cutting out background elements in an image to make it feel more isolated.

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Bill Bragg

After finding his work on the cover of a book in a shop, I became interested in the work of Bill Bragg over the course of this project. The atmosphere in his illustrations is exactly the sort of thing I imagined for my own work. His drawings have a real feeling of darkness and lonliness, I think maybe because they only ever show part of a scene and the detail is never completely in focus but rather lurking in shadows. This eerie lonliness is something I wanted to recreate in my own work. I therefore started to think about heavy shading and soley using soft pencil to create my illustrations.

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More Compositional Sketches

In a crit, I got the feedback to try looking at the scene from a further away perspective to create more of a feeling of isolation and loneliness. Using reference images of 1940′s/50′s living rooms, I tried different compositions. I also started experimenting with how shading and colour creates atmosphere.

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Composition Sketches

After reading through and highlighting the story, I picked out the scenes I thought were the most important to the narrative, whether through atmosphere, character or action. The first scene I was drawn to was Mrs Miller sitting alone in her flat, as I thought this introduced the character and the setting well. I started to experiment with compositions. In these I wanted to introduce her and also show things in her room that are important to the story such as the bird cage and vase of fake flowers. However, I did feel that these compositions felt a bit too crowded and messy and didn’t have the lonely feeling of the story.

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Initial Sketches

I started off this project by sketching Miriam, as she is the most important character in the story. I found it difficult to draw a convincing child, as I’m used to drawing adult faces. Also, she’s described as having adult eyes. I tried to incorporate this with a childish face which was quite a challenge. These sketches helped me to come up with the idea of using a cold, minimal colour scheme of red, blue and white. I also played around with the idea of what Mrs Miller could look like.

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Final Poster Designs

I felt that something felt wrong with the colour on my poster. It felt too blocky and unrealistic. I therefore went back into the digital colouring, removing the brick red from the roofs and windows where the colour shouldn’t be. I much prefer this version, as it feels a little more realistic and has less of a zine aesthetic. 

I wanted to tie together the separate elements on the poster and therefore decided to take this brick colour into the portrait and the text. I highlighted certain points in the portrait that I felt could also be a red colour - taking inspiration from the 1992 film especially for the red hair. I also changed the text to a darker version of the colour which I think ties it into the rest of the image a lot better.

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Orlando’s House

I felt that Orlando’s house played a major part in the story. It is given to him as a gift from Elizabeth I to show that he is her favourite and symbolises him becoming a man. He then returns to the house throughout his life and it remains the only constant throughout the centuries. He always retreats there when he needs to just be himself. I think perhaps that the house could be almost what’s keeping him there.

I layered my drawings of Elizabethan houses, as I loved the description of the house as being like a small town. I therefore wanted to make it feel busy and rambling. I also wanted it to feel as though it has been added to and added to throughout the centuries as most old mansions have.

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More Composition Experiments

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Poster Layout and Typography Experiments

After deciding to used my collage portraits, I had to decide how I would turn these into a poster. I asked people’s opinions of the collages and chose the ones that were most popular with my peers and with myself. I then photographed them and played around with the positioning on Photoshop. I knew that typography would be very important to the final look of the poster, so I experimented with many different typefaces. I initially tried collaged letters to go with the collaged faces, however I found that this created too much of a zine-like aesthetic which I didn’t feel related to the book. I then decided that hand-written text would go much better with the feeling of the book.

I created a hand-drawn version of the Elizabethan printed type I initially used which I liked the look of but ultimately felt didn’t make contextual sense, as I thought it would be better for the writing to look like Orlando’s handwriting as it’s quite an important plot point that Orlando himself writes a lot. I began my copying Elizabethan handwriting, as this would have been when Orlando learnt to write and therefore the handwriting style he would have. I then developed some of my own typographic styles based around this.

I did struggle with the layout, as I kept feeling that the elements weren’t working well together and that something was missing from the composition. As typography became a big focus for me, I tried using some in the background. I chose some samples of handwriting from Queen Elizabeth I, as she is quite a major character at the beginning of Orlando and helps to set the plot of the book and Orlando’s life in motion. However, I still didn’t feel that the composition was right and that a different, more detailed background was needed to offset the simplicity of the portrait and typography.

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Aziraphale’s Bookshop in Soho

“Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshipped books.”

Although Aziraphale is an angel, on Earth to keep an eye on humanity, do good and thwart the wiles of his demonic counterpart, it could also be argued that one of his primary reasons for being on Earth is his rather large book collection, which he cares for with all the tender consideration of a fiercely overprotective parent. The bookshop that he owns in Soho is his way of keeping all of his books conveniently because “if he were totally honest with himself he would have to [admit] that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them” .

The bookshop can be cited as one of the things that can cause Aziraphale to act very un-angelic. His typically serene and more passive nature appears to get abandoned quickly in favor of aggression and hostility whenever someone approaches his shop. He rarely sells a book. In fact, he uses “every means short of physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours — he was incredibly good at it”. There are people who come to the bookshop on occasion trying to convince him to sell the space, but Aziraphale seems quite talented in getting rid of such solicitors.

As an angel with a love of the written word, “Aziraphale’s books didn’t have illustrations. They had old brown covers and crackling pages”. The areas that Aziraphale specializes in when it comes to his book collection include Oscar Wilde first editions, prophecy books, and “a complete set of the Infamous Bibles, individually named from errors in the typesetting”. Among these misprinted bibles is one known as the Buggre Alle This Bible, in which he himself added to the Book of Genesis regarding his “misplacement” of his flaming sword when he guarded the Eastern Gate of Eden. It reads thus:

“25 And the lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying Where is the flaming sword which was given unto thee? 26 And the Angel said, I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next. 27 And the Lord did not ask him again”

The back room of his bookshop contains a table, chairs, and likely someplace to store copious amounts of alcohol, as he and Crowley have a proclivity for going back there for the sake of getting completely plastered and waxing philosophically on whatever suits their fancy. The shop appears to have a kitchenette probably coming off the back room, where Aziraphale can make himself tea and cocoa when he feels the need . The shop also appears to have a second floor above it, but what the rooms above might be used for is unknown as Aziraphale doesn’t sleep or appear to need the room. Aziraphale’s shop is located in an area containing many small bookshops like his own, and it is also known that his neighbor next door runs a bookshop called Intimate Books, and that people frequently mistake the entry of his shop for that one.

The bookshop contains a slow computer (Aziraphale is apparently the first angel to ever own one), which he uses “religiously for doing his accounts”.

I think Aziraphale’s bookshop is a real personification of the character himself. It shows how he has become a part of human life - he owns a part of the Earth and things that humans have made. His hostility towards customers also shows the idea of him not being ‘absolute good’, as this is a particularly unfriendly and selfish things to do.

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Contemporary & Post War British Art Auction Photography

For my past few weeks at Gainsborough’s House, I have been assisting the Reviving An Artist’s Birthplace project, which aims to raise the money needed to create a massive expansion for Gainsborough’s House. In particular, I’ve been helping with the Contemporary & Post War British Art Auction and Autumn Art Fair, both of which are events selling artworks to raise money for the museum.

I’ve been cataloguing artworks and artist’s details for the auction over the past few weeks. This week, I assisted with the photography and cataloguing of final details for the auction catalogue. The photos were taken by friend of the gallery photographer Anne-Katrin Purkiss. I’m a fan of Anne’s artist portraits, so it was great to get to work with her for a few days and learn how to professionally photograph artworks and sculptures. My tasks during this process were to unpack artworks, take measurements and note important details, set up the artwork to be photographed and then re-pack it. Although this was tiring work, it was wonderful to be able to handle these artworks so intimately and study them closer than I would usually be able to. It was also interesting to learn the process of holding an auction and preparing work for it, as I’m interested in the idea of art dealing. It’s also given me more of an idea of worth of certain artworks and how much can be expected for certain things! The whole process has really shown me my interest even more in art history and the art world in general.

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Flaming Sword

One of the objects most associated with Aziraphale and that plays an important part both symbolically and plot-wise is Aziraphale’s flaming sword. This was given to him at ‘the beginning of time’ to use to protect the gates of Eden. However, Aziraphale gives it away to Adam and Eve for them to use for warmth and protection. Right from the beginning, this shows Aziraphale’s rejection of the rules set for him and his like and compassion for humans. This act also seems to start the acquaintance of Aziraphale and Crowley, a major component of the novel. Despite him giving it away, the sword follows Aziraphale throughout the story. The flaming sword is something I’d like to include in my illustration of Aziraphale, as I think it symbolises both his beginnings as a powerful angelic being and his rejection of this in favour of humanity. 

I wanted to design my own flaming sword. I wanted it to feel as though it had come from the early times of Christianity in Britain, as I want it to feel both ancient (as Aziraphale was given it at ‘the beginning) and English (as this is a major feature of Aziraphale). I also wanted it to feel very mystical, as it’s a celestial sword. I was inspired by some of my own personal sketches of gargoyles (bottom), as I feel that these have the feeling of early mysticism and superstition that I wanted to capture. By turning this into the hilt of the sword, I think it creates a feeling of a mystical Anglo-Saxon/medieval sword, as having mythological creatures for symbolic purposes on swords was popular in these times.