The common Bic Biro, next to the pencil, is one of my favourite drawing tools but if you leave your Bic drawing exposed to the daylight it’ll go brown and eventually fade entirely.
This would have been horrific to many of my students who used to treat all their makings as potential museum quality art. Every piece that flowed from their hand Continue reading Illustration Development.
“Aye! Weel may ye sing o’ the maut, the meikle black deil, an th’ Exciseman, but…” You can read the rest on Maut/Malt and see the full illustration here: where the boatman speaks on to alert the happy singing smugglers that Exciseman Robert Burns and his dragoons are on their way and mad as hell because the schooner Rosamond fired grapeshot at them.
And he hopes their tide comes in in time.
Also included are the lyrics of Burns’s ballad The Diel’s awa wi the Exciseman.
While working out the caption and illustration for the above word Maut I got carried away with researching how Continue reading Whisky Recipe.
Tidying up my computer recently I found a wee set of web-pages I made in 1995 dedicated to helping people successfully communicate their message through the Internet.
I’ve now re-read them 25 years on and they seem OK to me so here’s a link.
If you’re a visual communicator you have the qualities universities boast of and employers want; research, critical analysis, imagination, problem solving, independent thinking, people skills, meeting deadlines, communication, comprehension and listening. And by taking words and numbers even further with visual literacy – more creativity. Perfectly suited to manage this moving image, visually rich, multi media, information heavy, networked world.
The advice always given to young writers by professionals is to read – a lot. Then the advice is; learn to recognise good writing and then read consciously so as to understand what the writer is doing and why. And always the technical (grammar, spelling, structure, editing) go hand in hand with the artistic (word choice, plot, dialogue, setting, character).
And not surprisingly my advice to young visual designers is to do the same. Look at Continue reading Advice for Design Students.