Illustration - Major Study - 2018

Andrew Jordan The Hermit’s Tales

Stories and Fairytales have always been used as a way of understanding the world around us. They give us warnings and help us to see things in a new perspective. Stories, legends, tales, mysteries, lore all create a person’s culture and identity. Wanting to explore how a person creates their own set of ethics built on the stories, interactions and experiences that a person has gone through.

I used Tarot cards as an anchor to link my stories together. Tarot cards, used for divination are a way of revealing hidden dynamics within a person’s life.  The link between these cards, the icons that they represent and the meaning they can hold fits with stories. Within fortune telling and divination practices people will fit their lives into what they are being told, I wanted to use and explore this phenomenon within my outcome. I have used small extracts, snippets and some abstract summaries of stories to allow the audience to mould and
manipulate what they are reading into something personally relatable.

The stories and illustration force people to think differently about the icons used and about how they relate to their own lives. The images are all somehow linked in the real world but it is not clear as to how they are. Within my twenty-two images, I have produced an artefact that relates to each story. The artefacts are all cultural tools used for storytelling, puppets, models, books, statues all have strong cultural significance in their own right.

I have explored Three-dimensional illustration in my previous projects so I knew I wanted to
explore this again. Within my practice, I always experiment a lot with materials and techniques and one of my strongest skills is in using a wide range of materials. As with my other 3D illustrations, the final outcomes become flat through the capture of a camera, this takes away an essence of the artefacts I am producing.

In recent visual arts history, many designers and illustrators are working with texture and tactile mediums, there is a push back against digital methods and I wanted to join the conversation in the same line as illustrators like Shaun Tan, Dave McKean and Chris Sickels

My philosophy of approaching image making is an interesting and ever-changing process. I often will start with an idea but not plan out what I will do I then let the materials tell me what they want to do, I do not try to force the materials to do what I want I use them in the way they want, the quilled paper keys developed into a distinct design for each key. Working with stone for the High priestess sculpture was difficult and a new process for me, the soapstone didn’t want to be slick and polished, when I spent hours polishing it and making it smooth it did not communicate in the right way so I re-filed and sanded again and it looked better somewhat unfinished.

My tactile illustrations bring a sense of touch with a contemporary dark twist on craft techniques, by using physical materials such as paper, sculpture, fabric and found objects. I have been inspired by both folk art and design crafts/ applied art for my images and concepts. Folk art was never ‘ Art for Art’s sake’ this helped me to finalise the objects I used for my images, by thinking about how these stories would have been told.

Throughout the project, I was worried about how to make sure all the images look like they are from the same project and how they work together as a series. They do all work together as a collection of images; no, they don’t all have the same visual elements or the same colour scheme but they all have my own style of image making within them. They all have a tactile, tangible approach, even the image for The World which was a digital collage, gold leafing that image adds a surprise and a new dimension to the book.