For this term at Uni I would be working towards producing a Zine as my final outcome. The theme of my zine had to be based around “Food Culture”. We had to explore how text and image could work together as a piece of work. Exploring digital lettering and hand drawn type – whilst also looking at a number of different mediums.
To initiate our work for the project, we were set an brief; which involved responding to a news article associated with our chosen theme.
We had to produce a piece of artwork with a dimension of 80mm x 120mm.
We also had two days in which to produce this & submit digitally to our lecturers.
I really wanted to explore collage for this brief, as I had been researching Hannah Höch. My article was about the benefits of eating insects – I tried to explore the comedy behind the idea of consuming insects – but also try relay the idea of the article; that insects may very well be something we have to rely on as a source of food in the future.
Here are a number of developmental pieces:
Final Submission:
I decided on this piece as the final image, as it was quite simple. I wanted the idea of “eating insects” – to be quite a subtle suggestion, I didn’t want the idea to be immediately obvious – I guess I liked the idea of the audience having to study the image a bit more to realise what’s being prepared on the stove. I used the image of the child exploring the pans because it conveyed the idea of discovering new sources of food. Yet ir maintains the level of humour I wanted to create within the image – the idea of a child seeing what’s for dinner, only to be greeted by a meal – that doesn’t look overly appetising.
I also liked the font I developed within these series of images – using a dip pen and ink. I like the illustrative quality of handwritten font, and find it gives the piece character & personality. Handwritten font is something I’d definitely like to explore throughout my project.
OllieJohn Illustration 