Project #3
Instant Annihilation
25.4cm x 49.5cm Pen and Watercolor Paint on Illustration Board October 2018 Exhibition Text Instant Annihilation is a play on words of Dance Gavin Dance's album Instant Gratification, whose album art was created by Mattias Adolfsson, a Swedish freelance Illustrator with a unique art style. This piece was made to be satirical towards the idea of war and the futility of making massive and unnecessary weapons to destroy one's enemies. |
(Click to enlarge pictures)
Planning
Inspiration
It was rather difficult to actually decide on what to do for this project. I felt determined to go about a bit differently in deciding on my inspiration. Earlier in the year, I had bought some sheets of illustration board, and I have been waiting to find the right time to use them. I then planned to base this entire project off of the basis of using the illustration boards and pen ink. Another idea that I had was to test out paint again; not acrylic, but watercolor paints. I have wanted to use watercolor paints for a while, but I never really found a decent set or a good project to use them on. For this project however, I was determined to make use of them. As per usual, I planned to use my overall theme of Conflict to tie everything together, but this time I wanted to go back to a more literal version of conflict: War. Another thing that I wanted to do was try and find something that might connect back to my personal life. The first thing that I did was go look throughout my music playlist and find an album art that interested me, as I've wanted to use album art in my inspirations and music is a very important factor in my life. One band's album art that has always caught my eye was Dance Gavin Dance, and the artist Mattias Adolfsson. Adolfsson is a Swedish freelancer Illustrator with a rather interesting art style who has done most of DGD's albums. I looked through his website and through many of his sketchbook collections to find the works that interested me the most. His works that I was most drawn to were 'Dance Gavin Dance: Instant Gratification', assorted works from 'Sketchbook July 2016' and 'Sketches and Drawings - Spring 2017'.
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(Click to enlarge pictures)
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Planning Sketches
This first planning page was made to lay out all of my ideas and concepts for this project. I discussed my idea plan for my theme in this project. As mentioned previously, I planned to work with my theme of conflict and branch off into war again, as I felt that there was more ideas that I would be able to touch on. I also had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to go with for this piece. I wanted to try some form of satirical form of expression to help convey my ideas on this topic. All of these ideas lead me to choose Mattias Adolfsson. I found his unique art style, which tends to over-exaggerate or satirize something in his work, whether it is a person's features, a building, or some sort of weapon. This all fit in very well with my plans for using ink and watercolor paint as my medium, as the majority of his work is done in that medium. The remainder of the page highlights different concepts and drawings from his works listed in the middle. I tried to stick with looking at some of his more weaponized drawings with bizarre looking guns and robots, along with a few others just to get a feel for his designs and become accustomed to his art style.
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This next planning sketch was my first idea on the overall design of this project, and ended up being my final design that I chose to go through with. This idea was as follows: a full scale battle/war scene in the style and layout of Instant Gratification, except with a few key differences that would relate to me more. I wanted to add more absurd and exaggerated elements within the piece. There were a few simple things that I needed to do in order to change it enough from the original piece. Instead of there being just robots versus animals, I wanted to mix some humans into it, getting around a 50:50 ratio on each side to robots and animals. Another thing that I planned to do was change the amount of mounts/tanks on both sides of the field, decreasing the amount on the animals and increasing the tanks on the robots side. One thing that I had seen somewhat commonly in Adolfsson's art is rowboats, which I felt would be kind of cool to incorporate into this piece. This prompted me to add a miniature pond/lake in the center with rowboats on the left side and an over-exaggerated battleship on the right, which I saw in 'Sketchbook July 2016'. I had also decided to change the buildings on each side into something that I felt would fit a bit better with my ideas.
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This was my final planning sketch for this project for the overall design of this project. I did not go through with this idea, but I fell as it could become another project sometime in the future. The idea for this one is as follows: a large illustration in a style of a military parade with more exaggerated weapons against the canvas of small people/robots/animals (perhaps children or babies). I got the idea from a drawing in one of his sketchbooks, where there is a group of generals overlooking a line of tanks with elongated poles, with miniature weapons posted on top of them. I wanted to use that as the base idea, with a few key changes. I liked the structure and parade idea, but I wanted to shift the perspective of the drawing, where you would look down the line of tanks into rolling hills and hundreds on tanks, soldiers, and weapons in a destroyed surrounding. However, I decided against it in favor of my other concept for this piece.
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Process
Experimentation
There was a significant amount of experimentation that I put into this piece in comparison to my other works. The first major set of experimentation that I went through was with different colors of watercolor paints. I had a large variety of watercolors that I borrowed from a friend: 24 separate colors in total. After inking everything in on the board, I got about to mixing my colors. I wanted to go one color at a time starting with blue and ending with some light green-tan color. I also tried to overlap my colors a bit more than I would with my acrylics to help form a bit more depth and shadowing. I would have to say that there was far more experimentation in the actual design of each individual character/creature throughout the piece. I copied a few of the robots and animals from the original piece to get started, but I had to conceptualize many of the others myself. This proved to be a bit challenging for me, as I have never worked with the style of illustrating before. Adolfsson's characters are never realistic, with the human having more exaggerated body shapes and facial feature, the robots with some elongated body pieces, and the animals as more humanoid representations of the respective animal rather than just being four-legged creatures. My initial planning sketch was helpful to get me in this artistic mindset, but most of my characters ended up being created on the fly and completely random and bizarre. One other thing that I also experimented with but did not go through with at all was adding some sort of aerial combat on the top of the piece. I drew a few designs of some Adolfsson-esque biplanes, winged creatures, and robotic vehicles, but I decided not to because I thought would make the piece feel a bit too crowded and unbalanced.
There was a significant amount of experimentation that I put into this piece in comparison to my other works. The first major set of experimentation that I went through was with different colors of watercolor paints. I had a large variety of watercolors that I borrowed from a friend: 24 separate colors in total. After inking everything in on the board, I got about to mixing my colors. I wanted to go one color at a time starting with blue and ending with some light green-tan color. I also tried to overlap my colors a bit more than I would with my acrylics to help form a bit more depth and shadowing. I would have to say that there was far more experimentation in the actual design of each individual character/creature throughout the piece. I copied a few of the robots and animals from the original piece to get started, but I had to conceptualize many of the others myself. This proved to be a bit challenging for me, as I have never worked with the style of illustrating before. Adolfsson's characters are never realistic, with the human having more exaggerated body shapes and facial feature, the robots with some elongated body pieces, and the animals as more humanoid representations of the respective animal rather than just being four-legged creatures. My initial planning sketch was helpful to get me in this artistic mindset, but most of my characters ended up being created on the fly and completely random and bizarre. One other thing that I also experimented with but did not go through with at all was adding some sort of aerial combat on the top of the piece. I drew a few designs of some Adolfsson-esque biplanes, winged creatures, and robotic vehicles, but I decided not to because I thought would make the piece feel a bit too crowded and unbalanced.
Process
My first step was to cut the illustration board to the size that I thought would be appropriate for this piece. The original shape of the piece of board was far too square for my ideal shape, which I wanted to be longer and thinner to fit with the shape of Instant Gratification. I used a ruler to measure and mark the dimensions that I wanted to cut it to. I then used a box cutter to slowly cut a straight line and split the board in two. I later decided to use the remainder of the cut board to help gauge an idea of how the watercolor interacts with it. One thing that happened was that the board did not cut very cleanly with my method. However, I did kind of like the ruffled/damaged edges that formed and considered to do it all along the edge but decided against it just to be safe.
After cutting it all to the right size, I got to do a simple and rough sketch of the general shape of the layout in pencil in case I messed up with the pen. I had considered using the square method to assist in recreating the sketching process, but I chose not to because of two reasons. First, I thought that the proportions on my initial sketch were a bit too unrealistic for my taste. Another reason was the simple fact that I wanted to go a bit wild with my planning on the board and not be mentally constrained by my first layout. After deciding that, I sketched in the buildings on both sides and the pond in the center. I quickly finalized my design for those separate aspects and moved onto the characters and creatures themselves. For this aspect, I made smaller X's for characters and larger X's for vehicles and mounts in random places wherever I wanted something to be. I then went through each and every X, designing each new part and alternating between animals, robots, and humans for each one. One of the last things that I chose to do in this part was creating an inner border wrapping around the entire scene, similar to how it looks on the original piece.
After finishing the overall sketch in pencil, I got into inking each and every aspect throughout this entire piece with my fine point pen. This process went by rather quickly, as I already had my overall design mostly finalized and didn't need to add much of anything. I started with the border, buildings, and the pond, as I had absolutely no desire or plan to change anything with those at all. The characters themselves took a bit more time because I did not want to mess up any bit of them. After finishing that part, I went through and added a character in the occasional place that felt a bit empty. I then used my pen to create the shadows beneath them, with the sun coming from the top right corner.
From there, I got into my watercolor paints and started experimenting with a few different colors before actually applying it to the final product itself. As mentioned in the experimentation, there was a lot of experiments and testing of the different colors for every character and facade on the board. I followed a similar pattern to my inking pattern, starting with my buildings and pond first, then moving outwards one by one. I did try to keep a general color scheme for each side to help define the difference in each side. After finishing the ground, I went in with my pen to clean up and minor mistakes that I could and add some marks along the ground as seen in the original piece.
After cutting it all to the right size, I got to do a simple and rough sketch of the general shape of the layout in pencil in case I messed up with the pen. I had considered using the square method to assist in recreating the sketching process, but I chose not to because of two reasons. First, I thought that the proportions on my initial sketch were a bit too unrealistic for my taste. Another reason was the simple fact that I wanted to go a bit wild with my planning on the board and not be mentally constrained by my first layout. After deciding that, I sketched in the buildings on both sides and the pond in the center. I quickly finalized my design for those separate aspects and moved onto the characters and creatures themselves. For this aspect, I made smaller X's for characters and larger X's for vehicles and mounts in random places wherever I wanted something to be. I then went through each and every X, designing each new part and alternating between animals, robots, and humans for each one. One of the last things that I chose to do in this part was creating an inner border wrapping around the entire scene, similar to how it looks on the original piece.
After finishing the overall sketch in pencil, I got into inking each and every aspect throughout this entire piece with my fine point pen. This process went by rather quickly, as I already had my overall design mostly finalized and didn't need to add much of anything. I started with the border, buildings, and the pond, as I had absolutely no desire or plan to change anything with those at all. The characters themselves took a bit more time because I did not want to mess up any bit of them. After finishing that part, I went through and added a character in the occasional place that felt a bit empty. I then used my pen to create the shadows beneath them, with the sun coming from the top right corner.
From there, I got into my watercolor paints and started experimenting with a few different colors before actually applying it to the final product itself. As mentioned in the experimentation, there was a lot of experiments and testing of the different colors for every character and facade on the board. I followed a similar pattern to my inking pattern, starting with my buildings and pond first, then moving outwards one by one. I did try to keep a general color scheme for each side to help define the difference in each side. After finishing the ground, I went in with my pen to clean up and minor mistakes that I could and add some marks along the ground as seen in the original piece.
Reflection
Overall, this would have to be one of my overall favorite projects that I have ever created. I genuinely enjoy illustrations in general and also Adolfsson's art style in particular. I think that I will definitely be sticking with this artistic medium for the rest of this semester and for any other projects that I may make on my own time. One thing that I am rather pleased with is my detail with the pen ink on most of the aspects throughout the piece. I also feel that I created a strong feeling of of balance and unity throughout this work through the amount of characters that I was able to create on both sides. I also think that this was a good experiment in using watercolors, as I have not used them since middle school. I don't think that it went amazingly, but I still think that its decent for my first use. One specific thing that I definitely need to perfect for the next project on the illustration board is how I cut it to size. I will definitely need to use something other than a box cutter so it doesn't have a rough and frilled edge on the bottom.
ACT Responses
1. Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause-effect relationships between your inspiration and its effect upon your artwork.
Mattias Adolfsson has a very unique art style with his illustrations, which I mimicked throughout this entire piece. I also followed the mediums that he works in, using pen ink and watercolor paints to form these interesting artworks.
2. What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
While Adolfsson does not make anything abundantly clear on his views on my topic. I feel that he would feel similarly to myself because of the way that he portrays some his designs.
3. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, cultures, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
Throughout the scope of my research, I came to the conclusion that some war are truly pointless, with one side just being able to unnecessarily obliterate the other for done real reason other than just general disagreements.
4. What was the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The theme that I have been trying to stay with throughout my work is Conflict, with this piece branching off into the more literal idea of conflict: War and its futility.
5. What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
Overall, I inferred that war can be more complicated than most people realize, but I still feel that it is rather unnecessary if we are to come together as a people like so many desire.
Mattias Adolfsson has a very unique art style with his illustrations, which I mimicked throughout this entire piece. I also followed the mediums that he works in, using pen ink and watercolor paints to form these interesting artworks.
2. What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
While Adolfsson does not make anything abundantly clear on his views on my topic. I feel that he would feel similarly to myself because of the way that he portrays some his designs.
3. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, cultures, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
Throughout the scope of my research, I came to the conclusion that some war are truly pointless, with one side just being able to unnecessarily obliterate the other for done real reason other than just general disagreements.
4. What was the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The theme that I have been trying to stay with throughout my work is Conflict, with this piece branching off into the more literal idea of conflict: War and its futility.
5. What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
Overall, I inferred that war can be more complicated than most people realize, but I still feel that it is rather unnecessary if we are to come together as a people like so many desire.