My key words were:

Thinking about miniatures, I brought with me a small cactus I got at home. Actually, not the real cactus but a picture of it (too spiky to put in my bag) - a decision that would have lately conditioned my workshop outcomes. 

The first task was to illustrate the subject in either micro or macro dimension. By using my phone and a magnifying glass to enlarge the picture, I was able to depict details of cactus and make the subject almost unrecognisable, as if it was an abstract pattern.
For the second task we had to reflect in terms of time, before and after. I opted for a hand being stung by the plant as I thought would be interesting to give the action to another subject and leave the cactus as a static object. 

At the end of the workshop, having discussed with other course mates, I realised that choosing to bring a picture had its pros and cons. On one hand, it gave me a flattened image already, which made the visual representation easier. On the other, I had to use my imaginative skills to observe the cactus from other perspectives. I guess if I had brought the actual plant, the challenges would have been the exact opposite. The workshop made me overall think about the kind of source materials we use as creatives and how they can influence our research and documentation.

For what concerns the mediums, I firstly wanted to use analogue techniques (collage mostly). Later, when I realised each task lasted between 10 and 30 minutes, I acknowledged I did not have enough time to do so. Therefore I used Procreate programme for tasks 1, 3, 4 and oil pastels for task 2. Through these more immediate techniques, I could manage my time better, concentrating more on visualising and refinishing the details. 

In a small group, I was asked to select an object from the Japanese collection and spend an hour to record it. I chose a picnic set from the 1800s because I thought it had an unusual shape. 

With the set of pencils I had brought, I firstly reported how I saw it from the front, with all its elements (plates, jars etc.) and colours. I then reported the details, also with the help of some notes on the side. I noticed how the decorative pattern spread across all items, forming a bigger picture.

In walking around the set and observing it from other viewpoints, I found really fascinating how each item had a precise collocation inside the bigger set holder. Through an observing and drawing method, I imagined how it would look like with all items packed together, the purpose of each of them, the kind of food and drinks the set contained. 

I really enjoyed this process - just like I did with the picture of my cactus during last week’s workshop, here too I used my imagination to observe and expand the subject I was looking at. 

Very important was the text I added to the images. I think this is a relevant component in my note taking process because it permits me to expand my observations. 

Overall, this has been a very interesting workshop for me because it was not simply a copy from real exercise, but a more critical drawing experiment. I let myself recording and depicting my thoughts in a sort of visual stream of consciousness, which eventually lead to an unexpected narrative.

In my view, it would be interesting to explore carnival by the means of illustration because the costumes characterising the festivity have a long, folkloric history behind and usually have a striking visual impact.

To start my research with a proper method, I firstly set myself a series of questions to address to:

At the same time, I started making some visual research. Through the online UAL library, I found Artstor online image library (Artstor, n.d.) which was extremely useful. The website offered thousands of visual sources from any century I could analyse and re-use as reference. For instance, there was this manuscript on German carnival from the 16th century that revealed inspiring traditional costumes with curious patterns (Numberg Shrovetide Carnival, 1590). 

Other paintings and posters impressed me instead for their simple or graphic style, like the Emerson College poster (Emerson College, 1964). 

Following my tutor’s advice, I’ve also looked into Tauba Auerbach’s practice. I found “YES AND NO AND OR YES OR NO” (Auerbach, 2008) particularly clever in using coloured typography as element to play with - he final result is an abstract pattern which reminded me of some typical Italian carnival costumes we have. 

 

This lino exercise allowed me to further delve into the technique but also study the fashion items worn during Notting Hill Carnival. Indeed, the graphic and basic lines typical of linocut induced me to observe the costumes in their essential, geometric appearance. I hope I will be able to repeat this visual process also in other techniques that I yet got to explore.

I chose to do half of the journey on the bus and half by walk with a final stop at a coffee shop for sketching.

Travelling on the bus allowed me to move faster and observe things from above. An efficient way of saving time.

 At New Cross I got off the bus and walked towards Greenwich. Walking too was a useful method of my enquiry. It permitted me to get closer to the buildings and places I found more memorable and worth recording.

Having two hours to do so, it initially seemed a lot of time but when I got to the coffee shop to start drawing I realised I only had half an hour. This did affect my work, as I did not have the possibility to add colour to the drawings. 
The sketches featured the exact time I had passed next to the portrayed places. This gave a more realistic aspect to the visual reportage.

I am very satisfied with the experience. The whole process was for me very spontaneous and constituted an interesting occasion for self-reflection of my journey. 
It reminded me of the Drawing Waters workshops (Jaramillo, 2020) I red about on the article from our tutors’ suggestions. As the people involved in the article’s workshops, the visualisation of the journey towards Greenwich acted for me as a memory tool, a way to report and remember forever the interesting bits along the way. 

I decided to respond in the form of a visual map, with icons and symbols that represent the various aspects that carnival embraces. For example I used a megaphone as a symbol for politics, a drum for music, candies for food. Despite not being finished, the use of pencils gave a more coloured and hand-made aspect to the composition. 

I made a small concertina booklet where I sketched some costumes and patterns I saw in artworks from all around the world that I have seen in these weeks. Drawing constituted a great way to study the patterns, while the concertina was an effective format for immediate comparisons. 

I wanted to focus on food and how it constitutes either a secular tradition for some carnivals (e.g. Italian carnival) or an occasion to reconnect with a community’s heritage (e.g. Notting Hill carnival). I took inspiration from some Notting Hill carnival pictures (Wills, 1996) and by using paper découpé I portrayed some Caribbean skewers and drinks. The overall collage appeared very bold and impactful. From confrontation with other students, I realised this was the best work out of the three. I think people particularly appreciated the sharpness of the elements. This gave me more confidence in pursuing collage-making in the next works. 

Using the iPad programme, I then created the collage final image with the addition of key-words. Lucio Schiavon’s lettering in his work for Watch company in this case was an inspiring source (Schiavon, 2022).

Overall, this self-directed work constituted an encouraging exercise. Firstly, because I practiced hand-lettering and digital collage - two techniques I feel I am still not confident. But most importantly, because I now have a clear visual map of the themes around Carnival I have found in these past weeks which could turn useful for the next steps of this unit.

I firstly copied some costumes detail from “Carnival in Venice” book (Rowen and Rowen, 1989). I did not like the first results as I found them too messy. 

Despite the not so exciting outcomes, I appreciate we did this session so I could experiment with a new technique. As an aspirant illustrator, I think it is important to try new things out and see if they are relevant to one's practice. 

I guess it was because of the type of wood, but when it came to carving I found it extremely easy, more than carving hard linoleum for sure. This allowed me to work faster and without too much struggle.

I tried to get into very details, not sure how deep I had to carve. With lino you got to carve a lot to be sure that part won’t show in the final print. So I cut the background twice to be sure. For the small face decorations I could not do but one superficial carving, hoping for the best. 

With wood it was easier to control the thickness of the strokes too, allowing me to create a varied pattern design for the collar and cloak.

I would love to explore this technique further. With its simple block-y appearance, woodcut expresses my visual language adequately.

 According to the author, carnival is not a spontaneous revolution against the oppressive establishment but it is a transgression actually permitted by the ruling Power. It is not censored, he points out, but instead marketed and sold as a show business. 

Eco suggests carnival does not pursue a real transgression of the rules but a reminding of the existing rules, eventually leading towards a law reinforcement.

I don’t fully agree with Eco’s rather cynical viewpoint. 

Carnival may not be recognised as an effective form of revolution. After all, it’s still always a form of costume party, not comparable to more serious demonstrations. But, as I have seen from the paintings and artworks in these past weeks, carnival has nevertheless the power to raise awareness on certain social and political conditions. Through the act of dressing-up, the participants still point out a situation of social instability (Rivera, 1936), ethnic minority suppression (Homer, 1877), religious domination (Bruegel, n.d.) or social inequalities.

Therefore, I believe the correlation between carnival and political issues cannot be denied, nor the effectiveness of the celebration itself. Raising awareness towards a specific issue through crafts, fashion, music et cetera is still considerable a relevant political and creative statement. 

Nevertheless, Eco’s essay aroused my curiosity and persuaded me to research more about theoretical studies on carnival, what it truly means to disguise oneself, to use masks and act subversively.

using one of the prompts suggested, “erase”.

 I firstly reflected upon the erasing and hiding of one’s identity through masks during carnival. I then used an image provided by my tutors to create a sort of headless men. The face of the man appears on a mirror he’s holding. In this way, just like carnival masks and costumes, the mirror creates confusion on the true identity of the man.
 

I think this is a strong piece conceptually speaking. Despite not being the best in terms of technicalities (I only had 30 minutes to make it), it still raises interesting questions and might constitute a starting point for a more developed illustration.

I then continued the work at home. For the cheeks and the dress, I used some craft and plain paper previously coloured with crayons and pencils that I then cut out in the shapes I wanted.  I then uploaded everything digitally and finalised the image on Photoshop and Procreate. 

To show the two characters singing, I also added some notes I cut out from a music sheet I had at home, firstly doing some tests with real paper and then the final composition on digital. I think this addition works very well in terms of concept and also composition, because it gives a sort of movement to the still image and character to the subject.
 I titled it “Papagena” in reference to the famous character in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” opera (1791) who is dressed up as a bird.

I think overall, this is the strongest piece so far. I did not have anything in particular in mind and just followed my instinct to created a coherent and well constructed image. What I realise now is that this instinctive approach works well with my collage and paper cut technique, because I can easily juxtapose the pieces until I’m fully happy with it. I would like to pursue this method for my future illustrations.

I started my first illustration taking inspiration from some images I found on the Internet (Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia, n.d.) about la bauta which is the most common Venetian mask.

Considering the final images, they’re not the best illustrations  I've ever made but this is because I did not have an image already prepared and so I improvised it directly on the stone, without the possibility to erase it (the worst part in litho). The collage bits, however, I think they reflect my general visual language and also the randomness of carnival.

Because you cannot erase your mistakes, I understood litho is a technique that requires a preliminary material before transferring it to the stone. It is also a very long process and it may take lots of hours to make a simple image. This long and premeditated process that leaves no space for trial and error might not reflect my methodology and way of working, which is based on a quicker and more approximate approach. Therefore, unless I use consolidated illustrations to print, I don't think this could be the main technique for my practice. 

However, I very much enjoyed the workshop and learning another analog technique I had never tried before.

Kitch inspires me to pursue with this multi-surfaced/geometrical visual language in my future illustrations. 

Thanks to this book I fell in love with Šašek’s geometric, stylised drawings. Even though he uses gouache and watercolour (two traditional painting techniques), he yet has a block-y/cutout approach (for example in drawing the cars or the titles on the covers). For this reason, I am sure I will use his artworks as main reference in my future experimentations.

Interesting use of the mask which does not cover the face but it’s placed on top of the actor’s head. I think this gives the mask a more archetypical characterisation. 

Looking at activist movements like Extinction Rebellion (Martin, J. et al., 2019) and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (Beautiful Trouble, n.d.), I can see that carnival’s fundamental principle have indeed been used many times in the past for protesting.

I think this is a crucial point, an aspect we don’t usually think about when speaking about carnival. I would very much like this aspect to be my Project 2 main topic as I think it would be interesting to explore it visually. 

The first step was about ideating the visual concept. I individuated the key words from the quote (carnival, rank, abolished, equal) and linked everything that came into my mind to each of them, either abstract or concrete terms. In a short time, I created a mind map of interconnected ideas. 

After a few sketches I then came up with the basic idea for the illustration. I felt satisfied with the result, confident it would communicate the message clearly, but also excited about how it would have developed. 

My idea was to portray a group of masked people having carnival on a weighing scale. What did not work was drawing so many detailed characters in a small scale.

It was an important moment for me because I understood my practice is more drawn towards portraying big, essential elements/characters. I therefore decided to only portray one Carnival character, the most iconic one, Harlequin.

To give more substance, I also decided to add a pattern.

Even thought I did not used it for the final image, the litho print I made during the Technical Pathway these past weeks served me to study the composition of the various elements.

At the end of this step I felt I was gaining more critical consciousness over the Project, understanding better what worked and what didn’t. For instance, I realised the pattern in the litho print was too random and confusing, making the image too difficult to read. It needed a structure.

Starting with my litho print as reference, I then worked on the pattern composition, making it interacting with the character. In this sense, the digital tools worked really well because I could edit the illustration endless times. 

Seeing the work printed in an A2 format for the Peer Review made me realise some aspects that had to be improved. The colours had to be brighter and the other side of the weighing scale needed to have another character in order to communicate the sense of equity better. So I completed and refined the illustration adding Columbine on the right side. 

 

From the feedback I got from the Peer Review, I understood tutors were expecting a more experimental outcome.

I instead saw Project 2 as an opportunity to practice editorial illustration. Because this is the field I would like to focus my career on, I feel this project’s outcome as a relevant step forward for my practice. 

Both by speaking with my course mates and with my tutors I realised that I should do more experimentation and more trial and error work instead of polished and final images. They explain to me this is what the course is aimed to.

I think as an illustrator and in general as a person this has always been a sort of limitation for me. I always tend to overthink and control what I'm doing, planning in advance where my work should be headed to and partially limiting me from taking risks. 

This is probably due to the fact that I feel the pressure of becoming a professional and make a living out of my own practice. 

What I found interesting was also the fact that I was the only student who chose to show two visual references out of the five images we got to present.

I did this to demonstrate that I was doing some research and that my work is not purely from my own imagination but has consistent visual and theoretical backing.

However, it also shows that I tend to give lot of importance to research before picking up the pencil and start making - once again a limitation in spontaneous making.

Therefore, I think the biggest challenge for me in the next months and for this MA is going to be to overcome this problem, start making things without thinking too much about the purpose of them, just enjoying the process and seeing what comes out of it. Only by learning to let myself go I will be able to finally find my voice and thrive as an illustrator.