Karrie Fransman talks! pt 1; History of Visual Storytelling...

I didn't know what to expect from my first lecture at LCC, would it be long and tedious about something I didn't feel was related to my course? Well no! It turned out that our lecturer was Karrie Fransman, a graphic novelist whose book ‘The House that Groaned’ was given to me on my birthday, and I L-O-V-E. Not only that but she was so overwhelmingly passionate about what she does, that it got me all inspired and wanting to work on projects of my own.

Visual Storytelling was the topic of the lecture, and she showed us a breakdown of the history of sequential art, which originated way back when with artworks like the Trajan Column, which depicts the victory of the Roman Emperor Trajan in the Dacian wars, in a spiral format, as you travel round the column the story unfolds.

www2.bc.edu (left) and www.historyforkids.org (right)

We also looked at the Bayeux Tapestry and Marriage-a-la-mode by Hogarth (large social commentary artworks which were subsequently etched and mass distributed to the public).

Both images from Wikipedia

Looking at the actual birth of the comic and framed format, she referred to 2 key pieces, the first being 'The Yellow Kid' by artist Richard F. Outcault and was one of the first Sunday supplement comic strips. It really reflects the political views of the time and at moments depicts some pretty prejudiced and racist ideas and characters, which echoes the views around at the time. It features an bald oddball kid with a yellow nightgown and buck teeth.

http://xroads.virginia.edu

The next piece we looked at really appealed to me and I want to look at more was 'Little Nemo in Slumberland', which followed the adventures of a little boy called Nemo throughout his dreams, and used a similar top-left to bottom-right reading format to today's conventional comic layouts. It was created by american cartoonist Windsor McCay. There's an essay of 'The best of Little Nemo' written by Bill Bedard which you can read here. I really love the delicate style of the drawings and the fluid way in which the images move, allowing you eye to slide across the page. The language is also hilariously quaint too, much more stilted and formal, reflecting both the time it was written and the process of experimenting with this new way of storytelling.

www.paulgravett.com

Looking into the more recent history of visual storytelling we then learnt about the origins of Manga, with the artist Osamu Tezuka (creator of hugely popular comic Astro Boy), and the way in which the Japanese adapted Western comic art which was brought over by American soldiers in the early 20th century, creating their own style of comics which contained a different set of symbolism and visual language. A good example of this is the textures used in manga which are used as a way to communicate how a character is feeling in their heads, despite what their facial expression may say. It is a far more complex and detailed way of telling a story and has become popular all over the world since its invention.

www.japanese-arts.net

Since there was a lot of information I'm going to create a part 2 on modern Visual Storytelling :)

-Grace x

Book swaps & raindrops.

So today was our first day of research and exploration in attempt to find design resources for our soon to be student guide. As a group we had brainstormed several ideas before today, those being:

- The Carnaby Street Book Swap; an LCF student founded project which encourages customers to bring a book and give a book for free,
- The Heygate estate; as a place for students to explore and interact creatively with,
- Columbia road in Hoxton; a quirky street that students could visit and draw inspiration from, and
- Cecil court; a small street near Trafalgar Square bursting with antiques and book shops.

We started the day off by visiting the Carnaby Book Swap, which we discovered was started in April and intended to be a 6 month long pop up, which provides a free book swap service. However due to the positive feedback from the area the pop up is being extended until November. Not so good when we are creating a guide for students next year then... It was lovely though!

Despite that fact that we can't move forwards with this idea, I still found the model of the shop really inspiring, and would like to go back and use it before it shuts.

We moved on to explore Cecil court which I found to be a lovely little street with older shop fronts, kind of like Diagon Alley in Harry Potter. It was great to see all the old books and shelves crammed with various different antiques which Julia found so inspiring. We even went as far as enquiring into the price of a bust....a lot more than we could afford it turns out.

Another idea occured to us as we were wandering around, which was to create a guide based on what magazines are good to read as Graphic Design students, and which are designed well. I find magazines to be a huge source of inspiration for my design, but have to weed out the poorly considered and poorly written ones. The guide might include the publications below as examples:

- Lula
- Oh Comely
- 1883
- Indie
- Material Girl
- Monki
- i-D Magazine

Creating a guide with the most useful and inspirational magazines would make the process a lot easier and form a start point for people who are unaware of what magazines are out there and what they focus on. We put this idea on the back burner for now as the whole group wasn't sure about it, but we may come back to it later.

We also discussed potential colour schemes and types of paper stock we might use. We decided we were all happy with the colours white, black and blue, and are all open to experimenting with the order in which those colours go, e.g. white and black on blue paper, or black and blue on white paper. Below are some swatches of the kind of blues I am leaning towards.

Based on what I saw on Friday's mini exhibition, the 3 of us all create smaller illustrative work, which I think will quite heavily influence the way in which we put together this guide. The magazine Oh Comely frequently features illustrators and designers with a similar style, as well as a regular illustrated quiz on the back page.

At the end of the day we sat down to collect our thoughts and work towards a more solid concept for the final guide. Our idea is focused on the central concept of places we are inspired by, and we are thinking of manifesting this in our guide through each choosing a street or area which inspires us and individually illustrating them.

Grace x