FICTION: Narrative fiction

The Sniper

As I start my first analysis to this short story, I point out some interesting and fundamental pieces of information such as time, sound or the emotions/feelings of the main character throughout the story. These made me separate the text into different perspectives and approaches one can have when illustrating.

Another interesting fact about The Sniper is how the author Liam O'Flaherty used dichotomies as a representation of the city and war, such as Free Staters vs. Republicans, Noise vs. Silence, etc. This made me realize that this existent side-by-side tense oppositions created by war distorted the landscape, turning a city into a battlefield and made life used into death.

As this short story is based on a real happening, I should make some historical contextual research and see what that inspires me to do.

BA2a Library Session 1 (Fiction)

This task helped me a lot in a inspiring way and taught me how to look at things more differently.

An object in a story doesn't have to necessarily be a physical object, it can be a person objectified to a certain situation by the audience or population in a more general way as seen in Image 1.

A location doesn't have to be a physical place where a scene occurs but a mark made by a character that can symbolise how the landscape changes the audience's view of that character or vice-versa. How the character changes the thought of location depending onto emotions, attachment and/or empathy. How location transforms and distorts the perception of character and how it deeply affects its' appearance and mood. It doesn't have to be about place but about what the character leaves to enrich or not a specific location. (Image 2)

A character can be visualised through an object that, as character, changes through time. An object if it's created to be ephemeral goes through changes, transformation and evolution (Image 3). Like a character in fiction or even real life, it has it's own development shown throughout the plot and story line.

This session was important for me to get a different approach for what is what and how those aspects cross over in a narrative that can be born out of a range of different forms of art, from literature or a set on stage, to a moving image or a building.

IMAGE 1 - Designed by Gerard Hadders

IMAGE 2 - Paul Sahre

IMAGE 3 - Andy Goldsworthy,

Bones/Sand/Ball/Tide 2008

Book cover research

In my quick research on book covers (plus one magazine) I found out what I think my preferences for the outcome may be. I searched mainly for crime/war themed fiction books and realised I was more attracted to those using strong typography, colour and texture. Those gave me a feeling of what the book may be about.

I'm really interested in linocut has a handmade process and uniqueness of it, it transmits a distinct feeling from an only digital design.

I cannot make decisions at this point but I can direct my thoughts on the theme I want to project for my audience and what kind of approach I want to give to the short story.

Test Illustration

I decided to make what I called a test illustration. I wanted to visualise the whole story in a unique image, forcing me to decide upon style, concept, and details to put in and leave out.

This image resembles all the anger and sadness the main character feels when he discovers that the enemy is his brother. How his wicked and evil looking eyes transform into a waterfall of extreme pain and regret.

At this point I don't know if this is going to be one of the four inside illustration or part of the cover but what I got from this early illustration was mainly the style I want to use throughout the project. Weird silhouettes or the texture of vertical lines perhaps.

Ideas & Decisions

The hardest part of any project for me are the decisions I have to make throughout but the most difficult ones have to do with the direction I want to take the project from the start. I came up with some questions to direct my thoughts and organise my ideas:

- What do I want to transmit with my illustrations? What perspective I want to show to the audience? Come up with a theme.

The perspective of how war makes people take risks to win or to survive, makes people loose their sense and their values, etc. I've decided that my theme is going to be the non-sense of war and the consequences of it.

Nihilism and Anomie are some of the concepts used within the Dadaism art movement on the 20th century to explain the non-sense and anti-art in a period of war (in this case relative to WWI). The image on the right by Hannah Hoch translates the Dada attitude towards war: That it is chaos. That the world has gone mad. That war itself is craziness incarnate destroying humanity.

I want to use this concept throughout my illustrations for my short story.

- How will the cover illustration be different from the 4 inside illustrations?

I want the cover illustration to transmit a feeling/emotion incorporated in an object or location using texture, colour, composition and type to convey my concept. And for the inside illustrations, I want them to relate to a specific moment throughout the story without showing the precise scene.

- What techniques am I considering and why?

I'm considering hand-processed techniques because of its uniqueness and feeling. I'm thinking about linocut for the cover and hand drawn illustrations for the inside using traditional media but without loosing the sense of linocut into them. I want to choose something in common for all the illustrations for them to group together.

Development of book cover

I decided to start with the book cover because I thought it would be easier to illustrate the rest of the book when I have the cover in my hands. My ideas were more directed to lino cut but time wasn't on my side for me to be able to sculpt an image so I thought on developing a style that would mirror the feel we get from lino: all about the texture.

My illustration resembles a specific emotion the main character has when he just shot the enemy. A feel of guilt, sadness and revolt towards the consequences that war has on a living being. I wanted to convey the main feel of the story on the cover without giving it away.

Also as the drawing is incomplete, I used that topic for how war and everything we, humanity, loose in it turns us into incomplete beings without homes, brothers (referring to the story and families and loved ones and general) or most importantly, values. In the story, the main character confuses the feeling of joy of not being killed (on a situation that you kill or you're killed) with the actual meaning of killing someone. How that confusion makes him angry is what I tried to portray in this piece.

Diana Naneva

Diana Naneva is a Bulgarian illustrator in which I found a lot of inspiration for my work within this project. Her illustrations are often dark but really conceptual, using composition, texture and colour sheme to convey the feel of what she's trying to tell.

Her characters and sense of environment is absolutely gorgeous, making one image tell a story for itself.

First illustration?

As until now I've only made illustrations that had to do with character, I wanted to experiment a bit with location and perspective and what the theme of void in location can be perceived as. War as a time that doesn't exist anymore, just on the memory of people that experienced it and on history books.

I made quite a lot of options to chose from including the original drawing without colour. The red line resembles death and blood, as the end of life and the smoke connects with this moment in the story where the main character kills two Free State supporters.

I'm a bit unsure of what type of illustrations I want, if this kind of images as the void the war leaves behind as a motif (including the non-sense concept) or I make only spot illustrations like the test illustration I did before. Or maybe even mash those 2 types together. Next step will be to find my way through making more work and see where it leads me to.

The concept is non-sense and what I use to portray it is void.

James Jean

James Jean is one of the artists than I'm looking into right now. It gives me inspiration as his work is really intricate and diverse, not only with colour but with composition too. This shows how to compose an image even if it seems to have a lot of information going on.

His artwork although complex, demonstrates a flow of ideas as if we're in the artist mind.

Lora Zombie

The Russian self-taught artist Lora inspired me a lot for this project in terms of concept. Her war-themed paintings provoke the audience, most of times bringing the topic to a sarcastic tone through mainly her brave use of colour and use of antonyms on her art.

Most of her work is based on real-life issues as war, environmental issues, species extinction, etc. Her themes are consistent and resemble real world problems in which humanity can relate. This inspired me on my non-sense and void concept.

This shows that serious themes don't have to be necessarily dark or full of austere objects.

Omniscient denouement

I determined on my way through the project that I wanted the audience so feel the image that the text, in this case, I feel doesn't provide much. In the last scene of the story we get to know that, whilst the shooting was occurring, the main character laid down next to the enemy's corpse in which he finds out that the enemy was his brother. But we don't get an image of the surroundings of that moment, we just get confusion and fast images going through our head. Which is great because we get to sense a more dramatic ending but I feel that if this was portrayed as a film, maybe it would show a perspective of an omniscient person, somehow a character that feels and knows what the character is going through but in a not physical form. That's what I tried to convey with this illustration. Turning the audience into that omniscient character.

In this image we can see what surrounded that happening maybe after the shooting, in a more calm tone. The two red strings represents not only the death of his brother but the death within himself. Almost as if, by the nonsense, he lost a part of him.

Unknown enemy

In this illustration I tried to convey the meaning of the unknown one that the story has. There are 5 character mentioned along the story and just the main character was described physically, not the enemies.

This brings us the fact that in state of war, people instantly are introduced on either on your side or enemies, even if you don't know who they are. The enemy could be anyone else. And that was exactly what I tried to portray in this image. The colours meaning life and death, as any moment is crucial for survival.

State of mind

I ended up using the test illustration as one of the inside illustration for mainly two reasons. The first being about how strong this spot illustration is in a sense of emotion of the short story. The second reason is because it was a bit more different as the others and it might create a bit of diversity throughout the audiences' reading.

The colour palete I used throughout this imagery making was all about how it connects to life (blue), death (red) and the moment/declared war.

Cover solutions

Finally for the cover I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it but I wasn't too sure about the size and colour of the image/text.

The title reflects the hidden personality as well as literally hiding and going undercover as a sniper does. And because I wanted to give some diversity to the image in a sense of type and font, I chose to have a bold sans serif type for the title but a soft serif font on the authors name - as in a more classic way.

In this tutorial with the tutor Mathew and 2 other students I understood what had to be done to finalize the project, even though I had my ideas in place already.

We talked about how the red line is a constant used theme throughout my illustrations and how it should be used in that sense, since my third illustration didn't had it.

How I use the frame in a particular way and why, since it's recurrent in my illustrations except on my forth one and it made it look a bit out of context. Should I reconsider my approach on trying to fit the frame in all of them? Or should I make all the images full bleed since I don't have a particular explanation for the frame in the first place?

We talked about the my choice of fonts for the cover and how the author's name wasn't readable. Since my choice of design for the title incorporates the idea of reading as either two words or separate letters, I could give a hint from that perspective into the author's name, perhaps to choose another font and to space it a bit more between letters.

Overall it was a helpful tutorial and made me make some final choices and decisions for my project, evaluating what's necessary, what's meaningful and what's not.

Tutorial 13.10

Graham Rowle's lecture/workshop 17.10

This guest lecture/workshop was really hopeful for me to be able to finalize my illustrations and think about them as a complement to the narrative text as an expanded form of illustration can be. He talked about how visual elements (and us, illustrators) are meant to add something else to the story and to the audience's experience on reading them both as an equation of 1+1=3, as there's something more to the background. He also talked about some basic components of storytelling, i.e build a story, understand its' ups and downs and point out the end, because there's no story without a purpose/ending to it.

A really encouraging lecture and workshop as a wrap up for the first project and a start for the second one.