Exercise 4.1: Identifying tools and materials

Brief

Find a range of illustrators who use a particular medium. You may focus on the traditional such as pencil, watercolour, paint, gouache, coloured pencils, oil or acrylic paint, coloured pencils, collage, prints or on the more obviously digital processes – including digital collage, photography, digital drawing and painting.
Catalogue the illustrators according to similarities in the way that they use tools and materials. How do they distort or exaggerate the representation of elements in their work? How do they communicate through use of metaphor or symbols?
Choose one image which you most appreciate visually. In your learning log write about the way that the illustrator works. It often helps to begin by describing a picture. Ask yourself questions as you write such as: How is the image composed? How are colour, tone, and texture used to evoke mood or convey an idea? Has the illustrator distorted the content within the imagery and how does this work for the purpose the image fulfils?
Go back to a visual you created for an earlier exercise and now render it using the same tools and materials as your chosen artist.
Now choose a very different artwork and repeat the process.

Key words:

Find a range of illustrators who use a particular medium
Catalogue the illustrators according to similarities
Choose one image
Write about the way the illustrator works
Go back to a visual you created for an earlier exercise and now render it using the same tools and materials as your chosen artist

I decided to make my research based on the Illustrators, who use collage as a medium.

What is collage?

Collage is an art form and technique in which individual pieces or materials—think of pieces of paper or photographs—are assembled into a new and autonomous artwork with a predominantly two-dimensional character.

We stress the two-dimensional character of Collage Art, hence its three-dimensional sibling: Assemblage Art. In this case, the artist creates

Traditional collage artists

Pablo Picasso
Robert Rauschenberg
John Baldessari
David Hockney
Man Ray
Henri Matisse
Martha Rosler
Max Ernst
Kara Walker
Richard Hamilton

Contemporary collage artists

Laura Romero
Marvin Owczarek
Ilaria
Yvonne Coleman Burney
Claire Gill
Murat Akyol
Resin Acir
Theo Caloyer
Alex Contreras
Gary Hoang

Analysing an image

After looking at the collage artist, I got interested in Gary Hoang’s work. So decided to do more research about him.

Gary Hoang was born in London, England in 1991. He works in the medium of digital collage art, and focuses predominantly on contemporary and vintage surrealism. He enjoys incorporating the notion of fantasy and dreams in his work, particularly through images of space and vintage photographs. Gary completed his BA in English Literature at Westminster University in 2013. After graduation, he immediately left London to go to Seoul, South Korea, to become a teacher. During his time in Seoul, he discovered collage art and experimented with it. He has been making collage art daily ever since, and has been creating his fantasy world.