Market Multiples

Here is the most recent completed piece of work; another book in the experimental however-many-I-achieve-before-April-project:



Market: a story of multiples.
Unintentionally, due to my own love of nature and all things frest and living and flowing, the intended illustration of commercialism, consumerism and capitalism has become this. Cute, magical and full of fantasy characters. The narrative drove what I illustrated, and therefore I had the freedom of conducting the image making in a way I wanted.
The proposal I set for myself, as far as media was concerned, was: "Working with very fine continuous lines I will work up in the drawing, rendering from the floor to the sky the five-page narrative I have developed. It will be interesting to see the outcome of working this way, as the five consecutive images form simultaneously. The beginning scene must be very geometric, and this will be a challenge, as I find it a lot more pleasant to draw organic, flowing forms. I am certain of the abstracted form of the figures involved, but not of the scenery surrounding them. We shall see what happens." And indeed, with the Copic 0.03, the metal ruler and the 15x75cm Khadi cotton paper, this was how the illustration of the concept was carried out.

Also, nothing to do with the aforementioned, but here is a Flickr set of the delightful naivety of Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts! The book (compiled by Peter Murray Jones) begins with the Juliana Anicia Codex, the oldest recorded medical manuscript of early 5th Century Byzantium. It relies on observational documentation and classification of the natural world, and these realistic drawings of life help communicate what fresh ideas were being worked out and taught to a select few about the fasciniating world.
Later, I learned of the copyists working in monastic scriptoria, meticulously copying manuscripts handed down through generations. Often, like Chinese Whispers, the words and images would become abstracted and stylised. Naïvety and a distinctive 'Medieval' look arose from this faith in the older manuscripts.
This book displayed illustrations made before the time of mass production via printing (earliest known printing press 1440). Individuals produced the images, and were allowed considerable artistic license. Before the separation of science and religion, myth and fact, illuminators were working under the instruction of authors, and often did not understand the concepts they were directed to communicate. This was fine, however, as the authors themselves had limited understanding of how things worked.