Researching the Practise and Visual Heirachy

Any style of practise we want to develop, has to be researched if we want to be successful, we need to analyse the audience, the style, pretty much every aspect of it, and the best way to do that is to look at existing works of similar type. As an aspiring illustrator, more specifically in comics / graphic novels, I know the style and work of most of the successful artists, because I have read their work and i continue to read new issues every week. This is essential for me because I can see how comics have developed over the years, and what direction they are taking and why. For instance, Osamu Tezuka, called the godfather of japanese manga, started the boom of manga at the end of the second world war almost 70 years ago, one of his most popular pieces is called Astro Boy. It was remade a few years ago by a very famous artist called Urasawa Naoki, and even though the target audience is still the same, (children and teens ranging from 10-18) I find it interesting to analyse how the art has developed so much over the years and why?

It could just be a natural progression of art in the same genre because of the technology we now have access to, all Tezuka had were the bare essentials, dip pen, paper, white out ink and very few variations of tone. I have a program on my computer specifically for making comics which has all of those tools built in and hundreds of other features. This doesn't necessarily mean i could produce better work, but i could do it alot faster and easier. This is why the majority of professionals in comics nowadays use computers for about 50% of the time and because audiences are so used to special effects and photoshop on nearly everything they see, it's expected for comics nowadays to have amazing art and effects;

This artist Hiroya Oku has gone through his process and listed the way in which the comic is created;

1 - Hiroya Oku draws up a rough draft known as the "name".
2 - His assistants create 3-D models on the computer based on the sketches.
3 - He then uses that as a backdrop to draw the actual art on top of.
4 - Once all the character art is penned, it is scanned into the computer. This caused the lines to thicken and mess up the balance of edges and contrast, so the 3-D computer created backgrounds are reduced to simple lines.
5 - Character and background art is complete, and tone is added.
6 - Then the sound effects and text bubbles are added.
7 - The image is printed out and they discuss the finishing touches.


The majority of the work is done on the computer, not that that is a bad thing, each artist has their own ways and techniques; Another artist i admire is Takehiko Inoue, who does all his work by hand;

 

Both artists are amazing in my opinion, yet they use completely different styles. Because i have researched how the various styles of comics are made I can hopefully incorporate these different aspects and techniques into my own work, and hopefully this should allow my work to grow.


In our current project, a large portion of how we set layouts and page designs is dictated by a visual hierachy. This basically means, when we go about putting anything on a page we have to think about what the audience is going to look at first, or more importantly what we want them to look at first. If there is no clear hierachy, the page won't make much sense or the information won't be conveyed in the correct order and in worst cases that could make the information completely ineligable. Most basic examples of this is in a newspaper, the headline is what you read first, it's big, bold and instantly its the first thing your cognitive brain looks at, or maybe we've been conditioned to read it first because we want to know if what we're going to read has any appeal to us personally.

There are a number of ways we can dictate where a reader will look first, we have alot more freedom with a magazine than with a newspaper because we can use color and organise the layout with alot more options than a paper. The simplest way would be, just have the one thing we want to convey on the page, completely blank otherwise. It would definately grab attention because you would wonder why it's the only thing there, what makes it so important? This wouldn't be very effective if we had alot of information to get accross. Another technique would be using colour;

Because of the contrast your eye is drawn directly to the bright yellow dress, then either the magazines name, or the woman's name. I think that after that you would read the small headers, but again there laid out so that you go to the color first, so that you read the articles that seem more interesting than the ones in the black font. In order for our magazine to be successful we have to analyse what is the most important information and how can we make it stand out more.