Exercise - Using Black and White

For this exercise I chose the word ' sea' to illustrate.

I have watched many 'sea' based documentaries on the television and also the film ' The Perfect Storm'.

I decided that the illustration should involve a fishing boat being tossed around on a stormy sea, possibly with a large tidal wave about to engulf it.

I wanted some help with a large wave, so I looked at Hokusai for inspiration.

I used this picture as the basis for my wave shape, although I had to simplify it as some of it would not come out in the cutting out stage.

Also these two reference photos were used in the illustration, the top one of a fishing boat, ' The North Western' from a documentary called ' The Deadliest Catch'.

Once I had drawn out a rough sketch, then I worked on the final idea.

I had one problem to overcome, I cannot print out A3 size illustrations, so I had to find a different way or only produce and A4 drawing/illustration.

I asked at my local photography shop as I knew they could photocopy to A3 size, but they did not have an invert button, so they came up with the idea of doing it on their computer and printing it off.  This they did at the cost of £6.80!

I cut out the pieces I wanted, but discovered that the black image was slightly smaller than the white image, so I had to come up with another solution-I used Tip Ex to whiteout any black lines left in view after the Black had been placed, not ideal, but it did work.

I chose to place quite a lot of the black on the white because it makes the image look ' Stormy', just the right setting.

I checked the image before I stuck it down, and all so in the mirror when it was finished.

Despite the problems I had getting a final image I have managed to finish the exercise satisfactorily, but if I had have got an A3 size printer, it would have been much simpler!