Final Spread

Here is my final spread, going from lineart, to coloured, to shaded:

While I am pleased with the end result, there are some things I dislike about it and that I would change if I I could do it again. The most major of these being the lack of texture. I had been planning on adding a watercolour texture to my work, but at the last minute I found out all of my texture files
had been corrupted.

I also think there is not enough contrast in the shaded image. If I'd had more time I would have liked to add more solid black to the character's shadows. As it stands I feel like the background is too dark in comparison to the people, or the people are too bright. I would have liked to add some more contrast to the image.

I also feel the far right of the image doesn't really serve a purpose, just being a bit of table with nothing on it or behind it. If my submission didn't have to be a certain size I think I would have just cropped it off.

Further development

I played around with the composition a little bit. In this one I move Ned Ludd to the right side, and I added a new character to take his place:

This new character is based off an article I read about the Rebecca riots, where the rioters were said to have been visited by an English nobleman, dressed all in white and on horseback who pledged his support to their cause. Considering I could find no other mention of him in anything about the riots, or even find the original article I read, I don't really think he was all that important of a character.

I also felt that Ludd leaning over Swing like that made him seem like the leader, and while the movement took it's name from him, he was just a simpleton who broke a machine in a fit of anger.

This one is just a simple re-arrangement of the original trio, but I think it solves all the major problems with my first draft.

Steve Bell - Research

Steve Bell is a political cartoonist, with his most well known strip 'If...' appearing in the Guardian since 1981. I've been looking into his work because my work was compared to his during my Olio Pitch. The first piece of his that I looked at is 'The Promise of the Past', published in the Guardian on March 25th, 2009:

This is a reference to this old propaganda poster, which implied that men who didn't fight in the war would be fraught with shame years later when they have to explain themselves to their children:

By depicting the father in a military outfit, he turns the original poster's message on its head into an anti-war message, implying that the men who did fight in Ghaza would be ashamed of themselves in the future. There is also another subtle change between the two, changing the toys that the boy is playing with. In the original they seem to be regular soldiers, but in Bell's version the soldiers are shooting a cannon at an ambulance.

Here is a cartoon that was published in the Guardian on the eleventh of January 2007, 'George Bush's television address on Iraq'

The background of this is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the elder, called ' The Triumph of Death':

'The Triumph of Death' depicts a horde of skeletons destroying everything and killing everyone in sight, from the lowly commoners to the king himself. By using it as the background of a piece about George Bush's address on Iraq, it speaks more about the bloodshed than any caricature of Bush could.

Bell uses watercolours to a great effect, often having only a day or two to produce his paintings. And while I can see some similarities between mine and his work, what I'd like to emulate the most is how quickly he can produce his work, and how he still keeps the same amount of quality to it all.

Pitch Feedback

I presented both of my ideas to two of my tutors, and was given feedback on both of them. They said that my Luddite idea was the better of the two, and I should produce that spread for the olio book. The main problem with my second idea (the message in the bottle) was that it wasn't as well developed as the Luddite one. That was intentional as I was trying to have two different ideas, but It didn't pay off in the end.

As for my Luddite idea, the main problems were the composition and the lack of any detail in the background. The biggest issue being the characters of Rebecca and Ludd being too close to each other, making it difficult to see that Rebecca is raising his arm to cheer, and also obscuring a lot of Ludd's body.

As for the lack of background, I am thinking of framing the entire picture in shadow, with perhaps a few background details being picked out by the weak light, such as a shelf or something.

My work was also compared to that of the political cartoonist Steve Bell, so I'll be looking at his work in greater detail in another post.

Second Idea

My second Olio Idea was much simpler than the first. I wanted two wildly different things to pitch, so I tried to do the opposite process of my first idea, jumping almost straight into the first draft with only a bit of research.

My idea was to show a hand throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean in some indeterminate time in the past on one page, and on the other there would be a robotic hand pulling it out of a polluted sea.

As I said, I didn't do much research for it besides looking at mechanical hands

Meeting of the Luddites - First Draft

This is the first draft of my first idea for the olio brief: a group of luddites meeting to write threatening letters, with Captain Swing on the right and Ned Ludd and Rebecca on the left.

The Rebecca rioters were a group of Welshmen who wore their wives clothes, to protect their identities when they destroyed an English run toll-booth.

I based his design on this political drawing, as well as this illustration depicting some poor Victorian women:

Ned Ludd was supposedly a textile worker who broke two stocking frames in a fit of rage. After his outburst other broken machines were jokingly blamed on his temper too. His name was taken by the Luddites over thirty years later, with them claiming to be lead by a General or King Ludd.

I based my version of the man on possibly the most famous depiction of him, where he is standing as tall as a giant and inspiring the luddites at his feet

My version is considerably smaller, but I kept his sash as a clue to his past as a textile worker. I also made his hair wilder, and tried to give him an odd look in his eye as a hint to his mythical temper.

Character design and First Draft

I had originally wanted to base my version of Captain Swing off of politcal cartoons depicting him, however the only ones i could find weren't much help, either depicting him as an an anthropomorphic mass of explosives and flammables:

Or a greasy little tramp:

Both of which didn't convey what I felt the character of Swing should be. I imagined him as a farmer driven to desperation, who let his righteous anger go too far. And considering that no one knew who he really was (or if he was even a real person), I figured it would be wise to depict him wearing a mask of some kind. One thing I found interesting was the isolation hoods worn by Victorian prisoners. I figured one of those would be a fitting means of disguise for him, as six hundred swing rioters were incarcerated and five hundred sent to Australia.

So I tried to base his looks on a farm labourer and prisoner

Some early sketches:

I further explored the layout of the spread, focusing on the idea of Swing and the Luddites gathered around a table.

I much prefer the second one. Less characters crowing the page, and barrels of explosives to add to the background. I was originally considering making the two characters to the left of Swing just his cronies, but I will instead be making them other folk heroes, namely Ned Ludd (The original Luddite) and Rebecca (Of the Rebecca Riots).

Captain Swing - Development

 My very early ideas for my Captain Swing double spread:

The luddites around a table, drinking and cheering as Swing writes his letters

Captain Swing nailing a letter to a door, and then standing back to admire his handiwork as everything is consumed by fire

Luddites looking over Swing's shoulder as he writes, with a closeup on his letter

The third idea is the one I have the most problems with. The first page seems fine, but the closeup on the letter seems incredibly boring. The second seems visually fine to me, but I don't like the narrative making Swing seem like a misguided idiot. If he was real he would likely have been a destitute and desperate farmer, out of work and probably angry he could no longer provide for his family. Of them all I think the first idea would probably work best, the only real issues I can think of being the lack of anything in the background, and too many people around the table crowding the image.

First Idea - The Swing Letters

The first idea that came to my mind was to do something involving Captain Swing - A Luddite folk hero who sent threatening letters to land owners.

In the 1830's farmers began to use threshing machines. Threshing was a job generally done by labourers around winter time, so many lost their jobs at the worst time of the year when these machines were introduced, leading many to riot and dismantle the threshing machines. The riots were largely bloodless and sentences for rioters were quite lenient, until arsonists started joining in, often by burning ricks.

The name Captain Swing comes from threatening letters sent to land owners:

 

It's likely they never was a Captain Swing and he was in fact just a group of people, but I'd like to think of him as one person, purely for the narrative's sake. My main idea would be to draw Captain Swing writing some of these letters, perhaps with others egging him on.

The Letter

The brief for this project is 'The Letter', asking us to use the theme of a letter written from someone to someone else to create a double paged spread for the Olio book. We all started with group work, looking at the ideas behind a letter: