Jacob Phillips Unit X L6 @jacobphillipsunitx - Tumblr Blog

Alongside this miner project I have been running a collaborative video project called “Creative Spaces” in which I have been interviewing creatives in their studios about what they do and the surrounding arts culture of Manchester. The first video was with One69A, a screenprinting studio situated in Islington Mill and is almost completely edited now. These photos are some process shots of the introduction I made for the videos

Here are a few examples of page layouts from the Bradford Pit publication. I have tried to emulate what I was doing with the illustrations in the typography with the worn down, imperfect, broken up look to it which I think works quite nicely. I also chose Helvetica as the type face for the text because it is quite a heavy, industrial looking font without being overly designed and remaining easily readable.

Above I have also included a mock up I designed for the front cover which I would like to feature a cut out silhouette of a miner with a texture beneath on the inside page.

Printing

I have now finished the illustrations for this project and have 5 full body portraits completed along with around 7 head shot portraits that I am happy enough with to print and showcase.

I am going about this in a number of ways, the first of which is large scale prints using the wide format printers. These will be of the full body pieces which I am currently in the process of printing around 6ft tall. i am incredibly happy with how these prints are coming out and the scale really gives them the impact that I was going for. These will be used within the Bradford Pit exhibition in the Sport City Library as well as for the degree show itself.

Along side this I will have a number of A3 prints of the headshots which will be wall mounted as well as going within my portfolio.

On friday I will be going back on the Risograph machine to print a small 20 page publication that I have designed which features a number of these illustrations as well writing by Jenny Walker about the Oral Histories project that I have been working on to contextualise the work I have produced. This will be published under the Mancunian Way magazine that I was working on in the last project. I am currently working on ideas for the design and layout of this publication.

I have also been studying the work of Ryan Thompson who creates these dark portraits using charcoal and paint. I love his use of limited tone in many of these portraits. He is able to keep the overall darkness of the image whilst subtly picking out details on the subject’s face

Today I discovered the work of photographer Martin Wilson. Wilson’s work is similar to mine in a number or ways, most obviously the way he uses photographs within the works themselves. He creates these three-dimensional sculptures which are roughly moulded into a bust shape which he then sticks photographic elements to in order to create these distorted portraits.

I really like the physicality of these works with the visible fingerprints within the clay and the ripped edges of the photographs.

For this third full body image I used what I learnt from revisiting the last image in terms of the weight and distortion of the figure by oversizing the legs and boots as well as the hand and shrinking the head slightly.

For this image I also decided to include the mock etching of a miner’s lamp that I created which is similar to etchings that would have been made of the object 100 years ago. I think that this creates the illusion of combining found imagery with my own drawing but allows me to have complete control of the image.

I revisited this full body image to try and get the exaggeration and distortion back into the image. By cutting up and scaling areas of the image I was able to create a new sense of weight to the image, particularly in the legs.

I have moved on from the headshots I was creating and begun working on these full body pieces that will be printed around 6 foot high using the wide format printers to be displayed in the exhibition. Although I really like these images I feel that the forms have lost some of the distortion I was beginning to bring into the headshots.

I have used photographs of the faces of the models i created in both of these images

I decided to make a second sculpture, this time slightly bigger. this made it easier to make the sculpture itself and add more detail as well as making it easier to draw from later.

I have begun to create these A3 charcoal studies from the sculpture i made which I may cut up and use in my digital illustrations later

After looking into Giacometti I decided to create my own 3D model of a bust trying to capture the raw roughness of Giacometti’s sculptures within my own. I created this sculpture using oven bake Sculpey that I then spray painted gold. I plan to use this model to draw from as well as collage in elements of photographs into my illustrations.

I was beginning to see correlations between the work I was creating with the textures that Giacometti created with his statues and began to look into these works. There is an incredibly raw feel to the works that I would like to recreate in my work, the statues have the feel that they were formed organically within rocks and Giacometti simply cast them in bronze.

I thought this would be an interesting idea to bring into my work, the idea that the miners were at one with the earth and the coal that they were mining. Looking back at the work I have created I feel that this is already quite evident in the textures I have created but I think the idea could be pushed and explored a bit more.

Yesterday I went into the Letterpress room to print some quotes from the audio interviews with the miners that I had selected. I want to use these quotes as an additional element of the portraits I am creating, giving them such context.

I chose to do this through letterpress instead of digitally because of the imperfections that you can get that are impossible to recreate digitally to the same standard. I feel these imperfections give the text a grittiness and realness that suits the themes I am exploring very well.

When left in black the letters give the impression that they could have been written using the soot of the mine where it looks patchy which I think is a really interesting touch.

The final image here is my first attempt to incorporate the type into a portrait. I am not completely satisfied with the out come of this but I think this is because the image itself was not designed with the text in mind, the text was simply added to an image I had already created. Next time I will construct the image using the text as a design element from the start.

Here are a collection of more portraits that I have done playing around with various techniques

I have begun to explore the ideas expressed in cubist paintings within my work still using a combination of different techniques allowing different angles to be used within one image to create a warped effect that can show movement, conveying the life of the miners I am attempting to portray

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Jacob Phillips Unit X L6