Lighting Darkness
Illustrating a sad or harsh topic can be really hard. An example is Genocide. How do you make good-looking but not too intense illustrations about such a topic?
Anna Steinberg talked to our class and showed us how she illustrated the topic using only black and white. She underlined a large number of people by making them look like they're going over the paper and to make them look dead she cut them apart.
We started with a simple task of cutting apart a symbol and collaging it together into new pieces. This immediately opened up doors for me. It's easy to cut apart objects to make them seem broken or hurt but also glue them back together to make them seem fixed.
For the brief, I decided to stick with the Domestic Abuse Topic. It's hard to draw or create something like this without it being too sad or harsh. I tried out coming up with different characters which have a funny or sweet look to them so I could make the topic seem less harsh. But then I conquered the question do I want to make it look less harsh than it is? Isn't it better to illustrate it in a way that people would look at it and immediately see how bad and sad domestic abuse is?
I guess this depends on what the illustration would be for. If it's a poem, for example, it would be better to kind of hide the roughness in the picture but if it's an informative text with facts the illustration should be straight up forward to really show the reader what the issue is.
