It has finally come to be, after all the snow days that made scheduling for the Montserrat college, this year's illustration theme of 2015 had its opening last night. This year's theme was the literature themes of William Shakespeare, which was the largest submission of artwork from this year, featuring the variety to his memorable plays (featuring Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, King Lear, Midsummer Night Dream, Twelfth Night, etc) or the man himself that the artist visualizes him as. Honestly, Shakespeare itself seems to open a ton of opportunities to illustrating a narrative into its fantasy environment or a modern adaptation. One of the reason why I love to illustrate literature because it is an individual's perception and imagery that was created off the author's one imagery, alternating the original intend to being more memorable to the growing audience.
Again, these are all submitted and hand crafted over the winter break by Montserrat Students, the Teachers and returning Alumni's to participate, bringing together the illustration, fine arts, digital design community with this challenge.
This year, these are the two pieces I submitted into the show. The one on the left, a typography illustration of Macbeth's castle. From my evaluation, I was suggested that I use the learning from typography and try to have the use of design integrate with my illustration work. The idea was to use a specific quote from Macbeth: "Stars, hid your fire. Let not your light see with my black deep desires". The inspiration came from sample of graphic designers or illustrators use of particular typeface, letters and word to create the negative or positive spaces of cityscape. Original the first idea was the scene from Tempest when the ships sails into a whirlpool or a storm, the passage was going to be illustration the white caps or stream currents around the water sensation. However, I went with Macbeth castle since I felt there was more use of the letters shapes out of the building.
The one on the right is a small humor interpretation of the three witches of Macbeth, painted in watercolor and gouache medium. The story behind here was when discussions shakespeare's ideas, my sister was mentioning (from what I kind of remember) is how specific lyrics or words can be misinterpreted overtime, creating new words based on the origin sounding script. And it was then when saying "double, double, toil and trouble" into "bubble, bubble, toilet trouble". It was a nice relief to be working in watercolor and gouache again, looking much like a Mother goose illustration than an actually painting but it was really meant as comic relief again all the serious imagery of death and gothic themes. Also we had a guest artist come to the reception to judge of the pieces, known as Nicholas Kole. He is very talented with the digital medium and watercolor, as well as beautiful uses of color theory. He recently released the disney concept book of "The Curse of Maleficent". Check out his blogspot and website in the link below if you are interested, but I do recommend it.
http://nicholaskole.blogspot.com/
yay!
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