Image with darrenBlue Workshop

Today's session was aimed at generating ideas and illustrating them through collage.
Interestingly, the word collage stems from the french word...coller...which means 'to stick'. So if you can't remember the word for sticking various, seemingly unrelated images together in one place, you can always pick up ya french dictionary and look up the word stick (together).......... that's if you're anything like me :)

....anyway, the aim was to create a collage using a small 4"x6" card. We had newspapers and magazines to scamper thru and salvage what we could.
Initially, the work being produced was unsure and ill-confident, that changed after we had a few pointers thrown our way.
One critisiscm was how we were occupying too much of the negative space.
The negative space can make the images in the collage stronger drawing your attention to them. My first piece was cluttered and outside regulations. Second piece was better!

Looking back on this exercise, I enjoyed it, I felt like I learnt something from it. I think it's good to be able to look at other people's works and make strong, intelligent critics.

Just skimming thru his archives, found some really interesting works. THIS illustration really has so much detail and if you look in close you can see the level of detail, the time it must have taken!! I like the way he has taken some of the darker areas and given them some texture. The characters as well, the guy at the bar looks so threatening, u can really feel his presence in the picture.
The guys at the table seem to be looking at the camera, which makes u think that the illustrator was actually there capturing this piece. U can see how they feel uneasy about the picture being 'taken'

As you can tell by the date-stamps, been scampering through some books and had a look through some of the blogs trying to find a piece of work to pin up here. found one! :)

I stumbled across this artist/illustrator Rafael Grampa. If I'm entirely honest, this is the first time I've seen his work. What I like about his work is its'  intricacy. The picture of the figure below is promoting his upcoming comic-work. I'm really taken-back by the detail. The moment I first saw it I focused in all the different parts of the figure looking at the intense detail. There isn't  much colour but I don't think it matters, the areas where it's solid black makes sure it doesn't feel too cluttered! I suppose there is the risk doing a work with that much detail that it could feel a lil' too much and detracting someone's attention!

I've added another sample from his blog, which shows he can definitely work with colour as well.
beautiful subtle tones in the background. The figures themselves don't have much definition in terms of colour, shading in most areas seems to have been carried out using small clusters of dashes varying in amount according to the depth of the shadow :)

Group James consists of me only, since I wasn't in on Tuesday!!! See if I can do something to catch up... :(