Roman Macrae Illustration

 

  When looking at my project it is clear that what I am doing is a form of satire. As an art form and as a platform for political satire cartoons have given artists a voice and give leverage on what can be achieved in their illustrations. Often political cartoons over exaggerate features of the person or event that the artist is conveying. This has been done since publication was available in history. One of my favorite political cartoonists, Kevin Kallaugher creates work in what today is seen as a standard for political cartoons but you can see that he actually has very good illustrative skill.  In his work he exaggerates the 'characters' features to make fun of them. I think this is something I should keep in mind when creating my work as I want to try and dehumanize these people to show how awful they are. I think that in my work also I need to try and stay away from obvious features that i could exaggerate but wont as they have specific racial/cultural history of portrayal...

 

  Elizabeth Bathory Bathory was a countess who lived in the Carpathian Mountains. She was one of the inspirations for Dracula. She was one of the most prolific serial killers in history having killed 650 girls. She believed that covering herself in human blood would keep her younger and fresher. She would make them eat their own flesh, drank their blood, cut off their hands, faces and private parts, burned them and bit into them. Her victims usually died of starvation, others were burned and some frozen to death. Truly evil human.   Adolf Hitler The chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. Adolf Hitler was possibly the most knowledgeable, productive, and cruel dictator of them all. He was mainly accountable for the holocaust and the Second World War. He thought that the Jews were the source of all problems and set out to eradicate them. His actions ended in the death of over 50 million people. Pol Pot Pol Pot was a Cambodian Dictator, he turned Cam...

  As I am making a bestiary I thought it would be good to look into some bestiary's that have been made for monsters and creatures. This bestiary on Tolkien's work by David Day is one of my favorites.  In this bestiary it is a lot less common than the others favoring  more of a book style than a journal. The illustrations are beautiful and capture the world. Another journal which was a big part of my childhood was the Field Guide from Spiderwick, the books and the film have amazing illustrations in a journal style way. These pages use colour to their advantage keeping it very light and almost washed out colours to look like watercolor in a sketchbook which I love, I am still undecided if I will use colour in my work. Some work that I really like is by an Instagram artist who took the world of The Witcher and made a bestiary around it. The off white colour of paper and stained paper is something I want to bring into my work, as well as the kind of medieval font used. I rea...

 

  When researching anger I really wanted to look more into the punk movement and culture as it was really fueled by anger and outrage. I watched this documentary on Punk Rock to start to get a real feel for what it is about. As I researched more I started to find out that punk rock had a lot of D.I.Y attitude which I really enjoy and think would be really good to look at in this project. Since I started to listen to Punk Rock and enjoy being apart of the punk culture I have flocked to artwork and illustration done in a D.I.Y manner and especially when looking at band posters and gig posters I find them extremely inspiring. I would really like to perhaps do some testing in the style of these gig posters and see what I can do.

  When starting this project I was trying to think of a topic or theme or some kind of semblance of what I could do. This in turn started to enrage me that I was taking so long to find an idea. That's when I realized that what I was feeling could be  something I look into. Anger. My ideas have started in my sketchbook looking into anger and what it can be used for and what it can achieve. I looked into punk culture and especially into one of my favorite music artists and person Henry Rollins from Black Flag. Looking into his ideology and what he has said about anger is something I find very interesting. One of my favorite quotes from Rollins is this, 'I am driven by a lot of really ugly anger'.  His interviews and his views will be something I look into more as the project goes on.  I've also been looking into postcards and an idea about flipping the narrative of postcards to be more hateful and anger filled, which you can see more about in the research tab of my blo...