Showing posts with label ‎ Chronicle Books LLC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ‎ Chronicle Books LLC. Show all posts

Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic by Lisa Congdon (2019)

, 8 Oct 2022

This is a very enjoyable, simple-to-read sound book with great advice for artists (from beginners to emerging) on how to develop our artistic voice. It delves into what an artistic voice is, why is important having one, how to find it, and the struggles to get one. 
 
The book inserts ten interviews with renowned professional artists (mostly illustrators and mostly women) and asks these and other questions to them. They also discuss the creative process in general. The artists interviewed are: 1/ Sean Qualls & Selina Alko. 2/ Andrea Pippins. 3/ Fin Lee. 4/ Kindah Khalidy 5/Andy J Miller 6/ Danielle Krysa 7/ Kate Bingaman-Burt 8/ Libby Black 9/ Ayumi Horie 10/ Martha Rich. My fav interview was, Kate Bingaman-Burt's. 
 
Ireally love Congdon's delightful humorous illustrations spread throughout the book.
Our artistic voice is the art that we make when we listen to our inner truth and convey it to the world in our personal way. Our artistic voice is made of "all of the characteristics that make your artwork distinct from the artwork of other artists, like how you use colors or symbols, how you apply lines and patterns, your subject matter choices, and what your work communicates." (p. 7).

Congdon says that to find our voice we need to show up, make art every day, be disciplined, practice-practice-practice, 'positivize' boredom and embrace our fears and self-doubt. We also need tons of patience because, as mastering a musical instrument takes years of hard work, so does Art. Embracing our fears and doubts is especially important for beginners, and, that being the case, we have to have compassion and patience with ourselves and our mistakes, with the disasters and the ugly pieces, because they're the stepping stones on which our artistic voice is gonna be built. For the rest, all the interviewees agree on the fact that hard work and expressing our personal truth, who we are, are the recipe to find our artistic voice. Except for some 'geniuses', most professional artists have to work at it. Congdon says, "The unfolding of your voice requires showing up and working hard. It requires being willing to create failures, to ask for feedback, and to go back and try all over again. It requires staying open. It requires moving outside what’s comfortable and being vulnerable." (p. 119).
 



STRATEGIES TO DEVELOP YOUR VOICE
Congdon recommends twelve strategies for developing our own artistic voice, and they are:
1/ Make art every day, even for a few minutes. 
2/ When things get hard or tough don't stop; keep going. 
3/ Embrace monotony and boredom to break through and experiment. 
4/ Create challenges and stick to them, no matter who's paying attention to them, even if it's just ourselves. 
5/ Learn to practice mindfulness when we go outside into the world to notice new things, new colours, curious weird stuff. 
6/ Find a space to be alone to create. 
7/ Find a feedback partner or critique group. 
8/ Take classes. 
9/ Brainstorm. 
10/ Develop your vocabulary of interests, knowledge, and ideas. 
10/ Support other artists and learn from other artists. 
11/ Stay open to all experiences.
 MIND
The book is intended mostly for artists who want to have an artistic career or are professional artists. Yet, the advice is great also for everyone, even beginners like me, who want to have a distinctive voice and express their own world view through Art.

THINGS I MISSED
The interviews with other artists are very interesting, but I see them fitter for a blog or art magazine. Besides, some of the most important points they make could have been summarized for the reader without the need to go through the whole interview. Also, I would have loved having the invited artists' artwork featured in the book (like 2-4 medium size images per head) as well as their website and social media accounts listed.
      
 
 

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Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang (2016)

, 8 Sept 2022

Some images simply work, they feel right to us. We don't consciously know what makes images work because many times, when we look at an image, we attribute value to what we like. However, an image works or doesn't regardless whether we like it or not. So, which elements or principles make an image work?

This is the premise for Picture This. Molly Bang asked herself this question 25 years ago, dived into the world of imagery and then came up with a series of principles that make any image work and give it more or less expression and emotional content.

 
BASIC PRINCIPLES SUMMARY
These are basic staple principles that Bang lists and are grounded in our instinctive positive or negative responses to the world. The concepts are always used in combination and within a given context.
> Smooth, flat, horizontal shapes give us a sense of stability and calm.
> Vertical shapes are more exciting and active. Vertical shapes rebel against the Earth's gravity. They imply energy and a reaching.
>  Diagonal shapes are dynamic because they imply motion or tension.
>  The upper half of a picture is a place of freedom, happiness and power; objects placed in the top half also often feel more spiritual. The bottom half of a picture feels more threatened, heavier, sadder or constrained. Objects placed in the bottom half also feel more grounded.
>  The center of the page is the point of greatest attraction.
>  The edges and corners of a the picture are the edges and corners of the picture-world.
>  White or light backgrounds feel safer to us than dark backgrounds because we can see well during the day and only poorly at night.
>  We feel more scared looking at pointed shapes and more secure or comforted looking at rounded shapes or curves.
>  The larger an object is in a picture, the stronger it feels.
> We associate the same or similar colours much more strongly than we associate the same or similar shapes.
> Regularity and irregularity—and their combinations—are powerful.
> We notice contrasts as contrast enables us to see.
> The movement and import of the picture is determined as much by the spaces between the shapes as by the shapes themselves.
I LOVED
> The book  feels fresh despite this being the 25th anniversary of the first edition.
> The book is short and sweet and gives artists some tools to consciously create images and scenes that work. Some of these rules might sound simplistic, but most of us would not come up with this conclusions when looking at any sort of artistic imagery. //
>  Bang explains everything in simple language and using minimal imagery that shows, without a doubt,  how and why images work.  
> The initial chapter "Building Emotional content of Pictures" in which Bang uses simple shapes, basic colours and an exploratory approach to build an image for Red Riding Hood. as she verbalizes her art process. I also loved the example she gives at the end of the book, with imagery from her illustration book When Sophie Gets Angry—Very, Very Angry, exploring her depiction of the arch of feelings in the book.
> The  exercises mentioned at the end of the book. Even if I haven't done them yet, because the advice given is sound when creating an effective picture. One of my takes from this section is also the fact that, sometimes, we tend to focus on the details in a picture, but the question is, are the details necessary and contribute to enhance the feeling or message or emotional impact of the picture, or a distraction? 
 
 
DOWNSIDES
> The epigraphs font size is too big and there is no gradation in sizing when there are sub-epigraphs or big sections. That's an edition problem that can be easily fixed in the Kindle edition.
>  Bang mentions that the principles are a work in progress. Since these principles were explored and listed 25 years ago, I would have loved Bang mentioning if any others can be added . 
 > I would have loved having some famous paintings being analyzed following each of the principles listed, so that we could see them working in action. This would have rounded the book beautifully and it is easy to do digitally. 

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