DEFINE AN AREA AS SAFE AND USE IT AS AN ANCHOR

Resized correctly for OLIO, and with bleed, this is the final image I settled for. There is a slight off-white to the background, the levels are fairly high contrast, there are isolated areas of colour, mostly blue and yellow, and a slight bit of pink/brown.

FUN AND GAMES ON PHOTOSHOP

The next thing was adding a sort of mirror for the collaged photo on the left-hand pane to help the thing compositionally in terms of balance. This I eventually achieved by scanning a ripped bit of black tissue paper and collaging it in in photoshop. I cut out the window for the life drawing and inverted some of the advertising on the wall to bring it out against the black. I ended up doing more of this than I would have liked and don't think it's really possible to achieve the same level of spontaneity and outcome as when collaging by hand.

However, this was the result:

With this I felt I was getting somewhere near the end of it, which was good.

The final hurdle to overcome was the levelling, colour balance precise layout and scaling required to hopefully help the thing come out well and fit properly etc.

Of course, doing all this on photoshop presented a myriad of different approaches here all of which looked good depending on what time of day it was and how much time I'd been sitting in front of the computer etc. I tried elements of colour:

duotone:

black and white:

And printed them all out and looked at them for a while.

RE-COLLAGE

Having had the initial collage approved there remained some work to do to have it fit better onto the OLIO page size. The main consideration was wanting my man leaving university to be stepping out of one page and onto the other; when the initial collage was put into inDesign he was well over on the left page as the 'post uni' scene was dominant. This meant re-collaging to make an entirely new left panel. I wanted also to remove Jonathan Cooper's drawing as it seemed to clash with the rest of the piece and was fairly unsubtly integrated. I found it hard to enter quite into the same spirit of the piece as the rest had been done a good two weeks earlier. Nonetheless, scavenging through my bits folder I produced this:

New elements included some students moaning about job opportunities outside the building (this was collaged from print outs of the Mark Fisher essay Capitalist Realism), a new university sign from yellow paper, a life-drawing scene (using a life class advert from an art magazine) and various bits copied and re-collaged from the original image.

(n.b. parts of this at the bottom and top are missing due to not being able to find the original scans - it had to be pieced together from several scans at it is larger than A3. This wasn't an issue when making the final image as I did other scans at the time)

This was then able to slot alongside my unadulterated right-hand page to produce this:

This required a good bit of pushing and pulling, stretching and re-collaging on photoshop to fill the OLIO frame. I was working from about 6-7 different scans due to the fact that the image was in two parts and needed to be scanned in in various different ways to get all the information (it was on card, so could't be put through the big FCH scanner). This was, in short, a bit of a nightmare. It perhaps highlights the ideal method of producing a piece in the correct size initially.

In the end, I probably spent longer on the computers tinkering to line the thing up correctly and scale it etc than I did producing the initial collage. I shall avoid this in future. Anyhow, I wasn't displeased with the final outcome. Not that it was quite the final outcome, as we shall see.

UNI COLLAGE

The bulk of the final image came from a collage I made and drew based around the idea that had been floating around my head for a while; some kind of depiction of university as the 'safe' place and the student emerging into the 'real' world or using the university as an 'anchor' somehow. I wanted to include elements which would suggest that the university was being threatened by external (and perhaps internal) pressures i.e. the process of marketisation, overwhelming bureaucracy, student apathy, etc. Easy.

I had some sort of nightmarish environment envisioned for the student after university, with limited employment opportunities, the burden of debt, public and political indifference or malice, and so on. I also wanted to include some staggering drunks as some kind of allusion to hypocrisy of some kind.

Also lots of things went in that I had not intended, which is just as well.

The collage elements I included came mostly from two magazines we had to hand in the studio - Art Student and Campaign, copies of which were strewn everywhere, also a spiralling black and white design I photocopied from a student's A4 ring binder. Elements I can identify are as follows:

• Several adverts for art materials and shops (the paintbrushes and bottles of ink)

• Something by (I think) Simone Lia which i drew over and became a cafe

• The businessman with oversized tennis racket standing in some kind of paradise environment comes from a photograph by the German mixed-media artist Friedrich Kunath. This seemed to represent to me a rich/poor dichotomy egregious in modern late capitalism; the international financier living in the lap of luxury, spewing meaningless blasé - 'Join the queue chum'.

• Jamie Tobin's car - this became the cab/limo of the evil capitalist vampire

• Jonathan Cooper's troubled man which became an advert for the university help zone

The image was not initially intended as my final OLIO piece so was not done quite in the correct OLIO proportions or with the double-page considerations in mind. This created some problems later when I did decide to use parts of it in the final piece. 

STEADMAN/ GROSZ

The two artists I was really thinking of when making this piece, as with my research project material, were Ralph Steadman and George Grosz.

In particular, Steadman's collage work for Will Self's Psychogeography columns (the Independent) and books, which are more fantastic than these rather rubbish small jpegs off google. One of his best 'tricks' is taking a photo and blending it into his drawing, using it as a reference and continuing the scene in paint, collage and line. One can see where the photo starts, but it all ends rather differently. I find the technique strikingly effective:

This is just a picture of Will Self, because I think he's great:

I was also thinking of emulating some kind of the spirit and the mad disjointed structure of Grosz's drawings and paintings of urban life, with elements of futurism, cubism, traditional satirical drawn caricature, social juxtapositions, signs and symbols:

Later, it was suggested I look also at the work of Saul Steinberg, another who has used elements of collage in a dada fashion to create surreal works of graphic satire. Which I certainly shall do:

ROUGHS/EPHEMERA

ROUGHS/EPHEMERA

Including Jamie Tobin's car (below) which ended up in there as the taxi cab for the evil vampire capitalist:

Actually most of these roughs were drawn after the majority of the final image (whoops) as I decided to try and redraw it to make it slightly easier to read/ for compositional purposes and the double-page spread so the student didn't end up in the gutter (not literally, at least.)

I ended up scrapping the redraw as I simply didn't have the power, having done it once already and being overall not unhappy with elements of it. I recollaged instead; see the rest of the blog! Here are the roughs and also the alternative idea rough:

Compositional rough: figure (in red) moves through the scene:

The 'university' is presented as a separate entity here:

Some hurried compositional ideas:

OLIO INTRO

This is my blog for the 2013 'OLIO' publication.

OLIO is the annual Cheltenham Journal of Illustration, produced to showcase work from 3rd year students on the illustration BA at the University of Gloucestershire.

This year we were all given a sentence to illustrate under the overall theme 'oblique strategies'

The phrase I pulled out of the hat was:

'define an area as safe and use it as an anchor'