COP: Part 2 (Practical)

Initial Thoughts

- My overall theme is Analog vs Digital and if or not the incorporation of digital elements in the creative process is helping or hindering the artist. 

- My personal interests lie within commercial work, like branding or promoting, so to incorporate these would be key. An event? A product? A campaign that encourages people to do something?

- In my tutorial, we spoke about how creating artwork using digital methods is almost like mass production, and is alot less human. So I am hoping to perhaps challenge this idea of devalued art, because of the way it appears and exists on a screen. At the moment, my instincts are telling me just to make something digitally, and then print it out so that it becomes a physical artefact, but I still feel that this doesn't add as much value to the work that it deserves. 

- Printing on to real money?(slightly absurd, but conceptually this would add value to digital artwork in a sarcastic and tongue in cheek way. Feel like the outcome would be very fine art though, which doesn't really relate to my practice)

- (Add value to it by making limited edition prints and deleting the file?) Is it perhaps the 'undo button' that devalues any kind of digital work? 

I'm afraid that I am currently going off preconceived ideas, as I have not reached this stage in my theoretical research yet. 

Action Plan

More research into attitudes towards digital art

Methods of mass production/Printing

David Hockney - What was the response from his digital iPad drawings?

Really relevant articles that outlines a lot of my points about the Value of Digital Art:

https://www.quora.com/Is-fine-art-worth-more-than-digital-art-Is-there-a-way-to-market-digital-art-so-that-it-can-be-sold-at-an-equal-value

http://veodesign.com/2012/en/07/16/the-value-of-digital-art/

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Another Idea?

As I am currently trying to sway my practice towards existing inside a commercial context, I don't think i'm really that concerned with the value of illustration. In advertising/branding/promotion, the success of illustration is measured in how it communicates. 

Milton Glaser 

"In a culture that values commerce above all other things, the imaginative potential of illustration has become irrelevant... Illustration is now too idiosyncratic."

I found this quote from Milton Glaser when looking into the current status of Illustration for my essay. It has been speculated that the Illustration industry is dying because of this very reason, and is competing with photography in terms of communication.

"Graphic design's ability to deliver explicit messages makes it a major (if little recognized) force in the modern world: it is embedded in the commercial infrastructure. Illustration, on the other hand, with its woolly ambiguity and its allusive ability to convey feeling and emotion, makes it too dangerous to be allowed to enter the corporate bloodstream. Our visual lives are the poorer for this."

For this idea, I could perhaps focus on existing photography based advertising campaigns (where communication is key), and perhaps improve them through illustration? prove that illustration can convey a direct and to the point message?

Unsure if this pathway is too irrelevant to my essay, as I am ultimately writing about digital v analog, however I find this topic a lot more interesting and relevant to my practice?

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Other Ideas 

- Look into how to make my own digital photoshop brush? Make images using it? 

- Attempt to incorporate textures, collected from real life, into my images in order to add more value and humanity into my work? However how could I add context to my images?

-  Make a set of one off images digitally, and print them onto hand made paper/screen print them, incorporating texture through photoshop brushes?

- Use my illustrations towards branding a product that is connected with money? comment on worth of digital art?

- Make an advertising campaign consisting of a range of limited edition printed posters? Challenges the idea of a  disposable flier, communicates a message about the brand?

Essay Chapter Structure

To what extent are the invention of Digital Design Tools a threat to the Illustration Industry? (9000)

Intro (1000)

Technology (1000)

• History of Technology (Industrial Revolution)
• Birth of the digital age/Digital Revolution
• Statistics
• Attitudes towards growing use of technology (Luddites)

Status of Technology (2000)

• Attitudes towards technology in Digital Age
• Technology in creative industries

• Adobe Creative Suite - Chronological Development
• Statistics
• Hockney - iPad Art
• Kyle T Webster - Pioneer in Digital Brush design
• Made You Look - attitudes towards tech in creative industries “”
  "what are we losing in this super clean, time irrelevent medium? do people want to see evidence of use?"

Status of Illustration - Declining? Dead? (1500)

• Definition of Illustration - drawing for A JOB
• History of Illustration
• Normal Rockwell (Rockwellian Era)
• Competition with Photography - “No space for wooly ambiguity of illustration in society”/ “Illustration is no longer the only option for colour images”
  “prior fluid identity with illustrators and illustration”
  Milton Glaser "In a culture that values commerce above all other things, the imaginative potential of illustration has become irrelevant... Illustration is now too idiosyncratic."
• Development in Technology
• Where illustrators position themselves in today’s society
• It’s Nice That - Liv Siddall “Sometimes I feel like the world of illustration is a little bit laughed at” - Not moving forward
• Death of freelance illustration - “Generalist freelance illustrators are anything but scarce”
• Unillustrated Harry Potter books

Digital Design Tools - A Threat? (1000)

• Quality/Value of work - Hand made vs Digital - To make work more efficiently? Can they afford not to?
  “It became harder.. For illustrators to keep up with the urgent deadlines and economics of ‘small jobs’”
• Hobbyist/amateur competition - How important is creative education to being a professional artist? - Will Terry

Illustration Vs Design (Merging of Roles) (1500)

• “Now graphic designers can assemble ersatz style collage by themselves”
• Plasticity and speed of technology is making roles become merged (GD/Photo/Illust)
• “Grey Area creatives”
• Howard Pyle + Will H Bradley

Conclusion (1000)

David Hockney: The Lost Secrets Of The Old Masters

An interview in which Hockney explains the basis of his book about technologies that were supposedly used to aid the creative processes.

“Artists would use any tool available - Why wouldn’t they?”

I found this interview/book really interesting and relevant to my argument. Although in the interview he is referring to the tool Camera Obscura, I found that this attitude could be applied to any addititon of technology to the creative process. The way that it can be viewed as 'cheating' displays an attitude that technology devalues the efforts of the artist.

Graphic Design vs Illustration

http://designobserver.com/feature/graphic-design-vs-illustration/4857

"The outcome of all this was that designers seemed to lose the habit of commissioning illustration, and most illustration was relegated to mere decoration."

"Milton Glaser has said: "In a culture that values commerce above all other things, the imaginative potential of illustration has become irrelevant... Illustration is now too idiosyncratic.""

"We seem to have reached a point in Western culture where the abstract is no longer tenable."

"Graphic design's ability to deliver explicit messages makes it a major (if little recognized) force in the modern world: it is embedded in the commercial infrastructure. Illustration, on the other hand, with its woolly ambiguity and its allusive ability to convey feeling and emotion, makes it too dangerous to be allowed to enter the corporate bloodstream. Our visual lives are the poorer for this."

Interesting comments on the current state of illustration in comparison with Graphic Design, and reasons for why the roles are becoming merged.

"So maybe, if someone believes illustration is dying, they might want to think about the possibility that the majority of illustrators are simply not evolving with the time. "  

"Illustration has, and always will be the red-headed stepchild of design and perhaps art in general."

- Comments in response to the article. Interesting to see other opinions.

COP3: Tutorial

Technology

Is the invention of graphic art software a threat to the illustration industry?

To what extent has the invention of graphic art software merged the roles of

designer and illustrator?

Lacking human quality?

Status of the technology – impression that technology has made things easier.

To what extent does the media matter what is the status of digital software

within the practice of illustration?

How does the medium relate to the message. Technology of production.

Perceptual hierarchy of techniques – handmade versus digital.

Hockney

Shrigley

How those skills relate to product and making a living in the current climate?

Student Action

Handmade is a selling point

Digital is associated with mass production less human – cheaper methods

Design process

Loss of skills

Ludites – industrial revolution – machine smashing – fear of technology

Accessible to hobbyists – amateurs – public taste. (vernacular)

To do:

Walter Benjamin – the work of art in the mechanical age / Berger - ways of

seeing – mechanical reproduction and the status reproduced images.

Does using digital technology compromise your standards / ethics to make a

living. Naomi Klein – No logo chap consumerism vs citizenship

1. Focus the question further

2. Identify foru theorists

3. Collect contemporary articles examples – illustrators – kyle Webster.

4. Practical – commercial / digital – status / value of images / reproduction

5. Fill in practical proposal

6. Chapter structure

7. 1000 words of first chap

Some really good ideas came up in my tutorial that I think have much more of a focus. I'm really interested in the idea of how the roles of creatives are being merged by advances in technology.  

http://theaoi.com/varoom-mag/article/varoomlab-visionaries-a-new-breed/

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/should-illustrators-be-treated-like-designers-opinion

Alan Fletcher 

Leanne Shapton

Rachel Lillie 

COP3: Working Question?

In preparation for my first tutorial I've come up with a few working questions in order to focus my research alot more:

Is the Invention of Graphic Art Software threatening to the Illustration industry?

By graphic art software, Im referring to Adobe Photoshop/GIMP/PIXLR and other computer based programmes that are used to make digitally rendered images. I feel this question is good because it poses an attitude towards photoshop that it is in someways hindering artists in the modern age. 

What is meant by the "illustration Industry"? Commercial? Editorial? All artwork in a commercial context is technically illustration. 
has adobe made the price of photoshop so expensive, to separate the professionals from the hobbyists?

How has the invention of Graphic Art software effected the Illustration Industry in the last 16 years?

Aiming to focus on how ever developing graphic art software has changed the illustration industry since the turn of the millennium. (The digital age)

How has photoshop developed? what features has it gained in order to make image making even easier?

Going back to an article I found http://www.brittonmdg.com/the-britton-blog/drawing-a-comparison

It raises the question of if or not roles of illustrators/graphic designers/photographers are being merged...

"The “speed and plasticity” of design software subtly de-emphasized the prior roles played by photographers and illustrators" 

COP: Theorists

Walter Benjamin
Labour Theory of Value
Aura

Roland Barthes
Authorship

Richard Sennett: The Craftsman

"“So we need to turn a fresh page. We can do by simply asking through the answers are anything but simple- what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves. Learning from things requires us to care about the qualities of the cloth or the right way to poach a fish; fine cloth and food cooked well enables us to imagine lager categories of “good”. Friendly to the senses, the cultural materialist wants to map out how pleasure can be found and how it is organised."

“Craftmanship” may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society-but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names and enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on the objective standards, on the thing itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stand in the way of the craftsman’s discipline and commitment: schools may fail to provide the tools to do good work, and workplaces may not truly value the aspiration for quality. An though craftsmanship can reward and individual a sense of pride in work, this reward is not simple. The craftsman often faces conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to do something well for its own sake can be impaired by competitive pressure, pressure, by frustration or obsession.”

“Since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, the machine has seemed to threaten the work of artisan-craftsmen. The Treat appeared physical; industrial machines never tired, they did the same work hour after hour without complaining. The modern machine’s threat to developing skill has a different character.”

“These Steel grinder and painters had evidently not sat in on the design sessions at the start, using their experience to indicate problematic spots in designs plotted on-screen. Bearers of embodied knowledge but mere manual labourers, they were not accorded that privilege. This is the sharp edge in the problem of skill; the head and the hand are not simply separated intellectually but socially.”