U6: Hato Competition

The task for this project was to create a body of work studying something mundane on a  daily basis, and translate this into an A3 Riso printed booklet, that makes my chosen subject interesting for the reader. I chose to study my daily commute to work via the London Underground, focusing on the people I see. My concept is to illustrate the people and movement of the underground, looking at characterisation and capturing the busy atmosphere. As I don't have access to a Riso printer, I will complete my final outcome using a normal printer, scanning and printing my work in heightened colour; in order to fit the brief I shall be considering Riso print throughout, translating my designs into separate layers for each colour in grey-scale, as required. I feel as though in previous projects I have relied heavily on black line and use of fine-liner, therefore my personal aim for the project will be to explore a range of different drawing medias; coloured pencil,. ink and paint.

I began by completing life studies during my commute, creating quick sketches in pen and pencil, capturing the postures and movements of other commuters. Although I felt these studies provided an accurate representation of the people I saw, I felt that in order to make them more interesting I would need to look further at creating my own characters that came to life. To develop my initial drawings I began by researching tube photographers, finding the way they captured people interesting, I wanted to explore how I could create a similar effect through drawings. To do this I focused on capturing particular characters, looking at how facial expression and posture could bring these characters to life. I used my initial life drawings as skeletal forms for the more developed cartoonist style drawings.











Although I was happy with these studies I felt they could be developed further to capture the more interesting people I saw during my commute, and how these people interacted with one another. For example in the drawings below I illustrated a man eating a bag of crisps, and the silent reactions from the people around him.




 Beginning to think about final treatment of my designs I began by looking at a range of print artists. Artists such as Tess Smith Roberts, befitted from overcrowding her designs in her series, A City at Night, in order to recreate the liveliness of the city itself. From this research I wanted to similarly overcrowd my deigns in order to recreate the effect of the busy and bustling underground.  I also looked at how the use of text could make my design noisier, looking at how I could look at phrases on the intercoms and notice boards, to create a sensual representation of the setting. Looking further into how I would develop my designs into the final treatment piece required for the brief I began to look at use of colour and paper folding. During this process I used tracing paper to show consideration of how these designs would be printed with Riso, as each colour would have to be on a separate paper to be printed and layered multiple times.








The feedback from the tutorial I got was to think of how I could incorporate some of my initial continuous line drawings with the neater cartoonist style drawings in my developed experiments. I thought this was something I wanted to try as it would add to the overcrowded and busy effect. To begin doing this I went back to creating life drawings, and began to incorporate these in my larger pieces. I began to create large prototype designs on A3 in preparation for making my final piece, throughout this process I experimented with folding and cutting, referring to collected samples of underground maps. In creating a purpose for my final piece I wanted to create something similar to a tube map, but illustrating the life which goes on within the underground, I want my audience to be people how travel on the underground to help them see the people they may miss.








There are key elements in this piece I find particularly effective, the hands holding the handle bars and tapping the oyster card gate seem to flow into one another which gives the effect of a map. I also think creating sections of block colour around the sketches of people, mimicks the train's windows, giving an effect of the reader being able to look into the carriages. I think the text on the left hand side of the above image is ineffective as it seems out of place, in the final design I want the text to wrap around the images representing the movement of the words and to correlate with the tube-map style. From these designs I began to experiment with printing the piece. Without a Riso printer I decided to photocopy my designs and edit the printer setting to select and heighten colour, the below experiments are to explore which colours photocopy most effectively. I found blue and red are the most effective once printed, however yellow is too light for any integral detail to be used. For this reason while designing the final piece I decided to use yellow for minor detailing, not text or actual human forms, in order to keep the characterisation bolder and more eye catching.



Below is the final final design.


I'm extremely pleased with the final design, I think each element flows effectively into one another. However in printing I will heighten the colours to make the piece more bold. I created a series of tracing paper pieces for how they would be printed using Riso, and also created several black and white hand outs.

During the final printing I didn't think printing on white paper looked professional, so decided to print on cream paper instead, I also felt this complimented and highlighted the colours I used. I was happy with how my final piece turned out, I think I effectively responded to the brief, creating something interesting out of something that is commonly considered the most boring part of your day. If I had more time and resources I would have liked to experiment with different printing techniques including Riso.