Illustration With Sam

Today Sam Tate, the Illustration tutor for this course, gave us a talk as an Introduction to Illustration, in order to introduce herself and the 4 key areas of illustration that she will be covering with us throughout this first year of the course. I found the presentation really useful and it gave me loads of ideas. I have always thought that illustration looks really complicated and I guess I've been a bit wary in the past, but it showed me that it doesn't have to be that difficult to make an illustration look good, and it is just a means of expressing your ideas visually. The presentation also told me and made me realise the importance of illustration within my portfolio of work, as often this is the first thing that a future client will look at, and their first impressions will count! This made me realise that I need to practise and get into the habit of being more visually expressive in my work. So for this reason we have been given the task of carrying out an ongoing visual research folder throughout the course, to act as an inspirational tool to use in future projects.

As a starting point, Sam gave us a list of websites that feature archives of various illustrators to begin gathering images that we like, in order to build up our research folders...


http://www.heartagency.com/
http://www.inkhead.co.uk/
http://www.eastwing.co.uk/
http://www.debutart.com/
http://www.centralillustration.com/
http://www.bigactive.com/
http://www.zeeganrush.com/
http://www.stateillustration.co.uk/ (Sam's own website)
http://www.peepshow.co.uk/



Above are a few illustrations which I quite like from a google search 'illustration'. The second image is by Tamara Mamula, a 2nd yr Graphic Design student at the University of Salford. (She has her own website: www.toastyghost.co.uk/tamara)

I began by looking up the artists featured on the heartagency.com. Below are some of the ones that I really liked...

** Jason Ford - very graphical, bold shapes and colours, cartoon style, pop art-esque

** Michael Gilette - real mix of graphical styles, uses bright colour in many pieces, some fashion references

** Josie Jammet - very realistic illustrative style, often uses portaits of public figures

** centralillustration.com -
Sara Hayward
Susan Burghart

** bigactive.com - Good for fashion illustrators :
Kate Gibb - photographical
Jasper Goodall
Klaus Haapeniemi
Filipe Jardim
Kristian Russell

Also from the websites above (but can't remeber which came from where!)
Andy Martin
Jimmy Turrell
Joel Lardner - really love his style!
Shonagh Rae

** zeeganrush.com -

Akari Inoguchi - love her illustration over photographs and colourful prints