Amplify

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THIS BRIEF TASKED US WITH EITHER CREATING AN A5 PUBLICATION OF 28 PAGES OR ALTERNATIVELY A 10-15 SECOND AUDIO-VISUAL PIECE, WITH THE FOCUS ON “SOCIAL CONSCIENCE”.

> SOCIAL CONSIENCE

THE STATE OF BEING AWARE OF THE PROBLEMTS THAT AFFECT A LOT OF PEOPLE IN SOCIETY AND WANTING TO DO SOMETHING TO HELP THESE PEOPLE

I CONSIDER MYSELF PRETTY ATTUNED TO THE KIND OF CONCEPTS THAT THIS BRIEF LENDS ITSELF TO. IM HEAVILY INTRESTED IN BEING ABLE TO HELP PEOPLE WITH MY WORK AND BE ABLE TO BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN PEOPLE WITH AN IMAGE. ITS WHAT I FOCUS ON THE MOST WHEN CREATING ANYTHING.

ITS HARD TO CONVEY WHAT YOU WANT TO PEOPLE THROUGH WORDS, LORD KNOWS I STRUGGLE HEAVILY WITH THIS. TO PROPERLY COMMUNICATE WITH PEOPLE ON SOMETHING EVEN VAGUELY POLITICAL IS HARD AT THIS CURRENT POINT IN TIME. i talk about this at the bottom of the page.

i then went straight into topic generation. there was a lot of things that i thought i could look into better.

i will say that i had almost immediately already made my mind up on doing the a5 zine. i thought that i could get a lot more out of it rather than a short animation. and i dont like animation all that much. it has always taken me ages to animate and im almost never happy with the final product.

i honestly could fill a whole extra page with ideas. there was a lot that i want to delve into, and i realised early on that i would have a hard time picking.

ill rip this straight from the mindmap:

> honestly, i want to tackle something hard-hitting. i want to change peoples minds; have an impact

> this is the only way for society to move forward

i became somewhat obsessed with this sentiment. but alongside this also somehow being able to make the actual illustrations mellow so that it doesn’t shock people. id rather tell a story that people learn from than something totally up in your face, even if i see the value in doing that.

i managed to narrow it down to two:

> what are you passionate about? (asking the reader)
> heirlooms (the lack of) and diaspora

people hide what they like; its seen as embarrassing and childish to care a lot about something. theres a facade to hide behind. capitalism forces us to be professional at all times, and whatever frivialities that we choose to indulge in are to be kept at home under lock and key. it really links to the social consciousness theme too.

and then i went to look for books. i like reading. i like writing too if it wasnt already apparent. i found this book tucked deep into the “art” section of oxfam. i wasnt really looking for an answer, but just for something to bounce ideas off of. you can read these thoughts below:

$20,000 by bill drummond

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developing the idea

i got the idea for the whole “heirloom” concept when i was watching one of those antique restoration shows on tv. i drew a short comic about it while i was on the train the next day. use arrows to scroll

i had just wanted to get all the weird alienating feelings i was harbouring out onto the page. it was completely foreign for me to see people talking about their relatives and their distant family, as i only have my parents and my two younger siblings. i thought itd be nice to make it into a zine but never got around to it, so developing it further for this project wouldve been nice. and i liked the sentiment of patching up the gaps in my own lack of heirlooms with the current memories of my family that i ended the comic with.

i didnt take a photo of the first side that i did sadly, but you’ll be able to get a sense of it through the scan of the full zine.

for the other side, i took a more tangible approach

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the heirlooms sent to me

i asked my friends to send me pictures of their own “family heirlooms” and a bit about them. heres what i got back:

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developing the idea – reprised

continuing on from where we left off – i took these objects and drew them on the other side of the canvas with black ink

there are a couple objects unaccounted for:

and so i cut it up and binded it. heres the final zine:

after binding, i decided to add in the text. i’m not sure what compelled me to do this, but it felt right in my mind.

my tutor viv asked me to analyse the book more closely, to allow the meaning to resonate more. to ask myself why the words i chose were those ones. to think more about the grit and grain of the textures i created in it. and to explore the emotions that i felt from the stories i was provided with that i put into the page.

i chose to make another zine to look more into representing the anxiety and fear that comes with migration

i just kind of went at it, with the focus on emulating the worries of those leaving their homeland for a better life.

the image below is a halfway progress image

after i finished this side, i had no idea what to put on the reverse. i wanted contrast, something calming and serene to contrast the messy first side. i initially thought about contrasting it with emotion too; calming green fields in open air and skies. but i wasnt really set on that. i didnt think it would turn out how i would want it to.

i decided to just draw in my sketchbook, focussing on the elements that i added into the first side and see where it would take me. i ended up with this illustration. it kind of made sense; this was exactly the kind of person who would have the struggles that i was channelling when i was doing the first side.

i looked at the moon in the sky in this illustration and decided that i wanted to put the sky on the other side; the sky that everyone shares, no matter where they are.

after seeing the result of this one, i liked the first one a whole lot more. the way the pages got cut up abolutely ruined it in my opinion. it was a shame but its something i have to live with; it’s not like i can change it. i also spent a long time with the acrylic background painting patterns of buildings and grass into it, but they are so easily overlooked in the overall piece.

however i loved how the spray paint stars looked. the grain and smoky-ness of them made them feel very atmospheric. it made me think that i would rather change the first side to contrast the second than vice versa. i guess planning these things helps more than running off of the emotion-driven sketches of a mad man (me).

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sound and vibrations

for this, we were assigned a track and were tasked with responding visually through an animation. i was assigned track 5: The End of the World _by SKEETER DAVID

i liked the song a lot, i’ve heard it before. it has an ethereal quality to it, the type that older songs have with the noise in the background and angelic vocals that are soothing to listen to.

as this was based in animation, i first picked the portion of the song that i wanted to put image to. honestly this was easy for me; i loved the start of the second verse.

> why does my heart go on beating?
> why do these eyes of mine cry?

so i opened up procreate and started sketching things out that i thought fit the song. i ended up drawing an angel to fit the song. not to represent the vocalist, but more that i thought that this character would also resonate with the lyrics. that whatever story they have would fit with the message of the song.

i made the angel look at the camera, it made sense as it was asking a question to make it seem like the vocalist was the narrator. the process for making the droplets was odd. i added in the blocks of colour and then smudged them around before adding a colour dodge layer on top to skew the palette. i do this often when drawing digitally, it helps to create contrast later and do the detailing first. it gives me more control over the final piece rather than going in with the final render straight.

i didn’t finish the animtion in time for submission, so here is a combination of the keyframes and the final animation.

animation is grueling to do. it is a lot of effort for a few seconds of movement. but it is nice to see things slowly come together. i had fun doing it. although the animation didn’t end up relating to my overall theme of heirlooms, i did get a lot out of trying to form images to match the lyrics, which will help further on when i start drafting the storyline of my zine.

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plotline musings

i start to think about the storyline i will be telling through the zine.

initially i rewrote the base comic plotline just as words, and how that would translate to 28 pages. i was thinking about how to balance it. the plotline is heavy in anecdote at the start and transitions to metaphorical at the end. and while i did like it, it felt unbalanced.

the story of my anecdote is relatable to those who are in the same situation as i am, but it limits the audience. i want to be able to reach more than that, because everyone’s personal relationship with their heirlooms are nuanced. there are stories behind them that i will never be able to predict.

regardless, this overall storyline would be hard to stretch over 28 pages. it’s short and snappy. straight to the point. i thought about what i could fill in the gaps with; i know i could just have emotion pages, like those that i did in my embracing the child zine, but it didn’t feel right. i wanted each page to flow together like a real book and a real story.

so i pivoted from this approach to something wider.

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identity limbo

identity limbo is a heavy thing to think about. to have no real tangible sense of self. it wasn’t a term i got from somewhere else, i just picked it out from my mind when thinking about everything i was writing about. it’s definitely how i feel when thinking about my ancestry and my lack objects tying me to my homeland.

i went to the library to look for some material to help further this line of thinking.

i photocopied a passage that really stuck with me. it is an analysis of a photograph; figure 47 in the book taken by Ahlam Shibli in al- Naqab, Palestine (2002–3). it’s a 38 × 57.7 cm, Gelatin silver print

The black and white photograph captures a domestic scene set in the unrecognized village of al- Qurein. All of the figures appear slightly blurred, owing to the photograph’s shallow depth of field, and the middle person’s face is blocked by a piece of paper held up by the woman to her right. Adding to this sense of visual obstruction, the faces are shown clouded in darkness, so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to gather any sense of their expressions or, beyond that, to find an entrance into the emotional setting of the scene. The austere, enigmatic photograph, disjointed and unwelcoming to the viewer, frustrates exposure in more ways than one, thereby troubling the very basis of documentary’s logic. Rather than rescuing the unrecognized from invisibility, the shot redoubles the opacity of the image, preventing identification, defeating whatever ethnographic revelation the photograph might otherwise offer. It is as if the figure who is denied political recognition (as in the work of Emily Jacir) can only appear as a specter beyond or on the edges of the onlooker’s gaze, exiled from the field of vision. The tension between these two images, which counterpose visibility and invisibility, the representation of politics and the politics of representation, runs right to the center of Shibli’s project.
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i felt compelled to try and redraw the glass sitting on the table in the image. it severely lacks in it’s abiility to resemble the real thing. the image is blurry where the eye thinks to look, but in focus on the mundanity of life that lies on the table. it was an image that i was totally entranced by as it completely encapsulates the struggle that palestinian people endure during their ongoing genocide while showcasing the humanity underneath it all

“If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” With this question, the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir initiated the project Where We Come From (2001–3), soliciting requests from Palestinians living within or outside Israel and the Occupied Territories who face severe Israeli travel restrictions that prohibit movement to or within the country. “Go to my mother’s grave in Jerusalem on her birthday and put flowers and pray,” reads one plea. The corresponding text, presented in English and Arabic, tells us that the man who made the request, Munir, lives only a few kilometers away in Bethlehem but was denied access to Jerusalem by Israeli authorities. Consequently, he could not visit his mother’s grave on the anniversary of her death. Jacir could make the visit, because she held an American passport that entitled her to greater mobility through Israeli borders and checkpoints. A photograph presented next to the white panel on which the request appears shows her shadow floating over the tombstone as she carried out the task. Her image is a fleeting presence that is rather the sign of a painful absence. Although Jacir’s action fulfills a desire, its realization remains phantasmatic, vicarious, ghostly (see plates 8 and 9).
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i drew a fake idealised “permit” in response to the plea recived by jacir. to leave your roots and not be permitted back is cruel. and yet it is the situation that countless people find themselves in, all around the world. there will no doubt be things left behind. things that cannot be taken with you. which in this case is the grave of the plea-writer’s mother.

the shadow of jacir is stark against the rest of the image. demos comments encapsulate the feelings i had on it that i was unable to put words to. “fleeting presence” “painful absence” and the series of “phantasmatic, vicarious, ghostly” viscerally affect the reader.

they were absolutely the kind of feelings that i wanted to convey in my zine, so i took forward the use of shadow and contrast with me

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solidification of story

after getting more of a sense of what i wanted to encapsulate in my zine, i went back to the drawing board with the plot. i was having a hard time of visualisng the amount of pages i actually hard to cover (i cannot instantly imagine 28 objects in my head), so i drew out the amount of pages to get a better scope of what i was dealing with

i introduced a renewed version of the outline, stripping my anecdote and fleshing it out more:

external stimulus > introspection > insecurity > acceptance > self love > live on

i decided i needed to create a character to carry and convey the story to the reader. and i needed to thumbnail so that i could work out the flow and adjust things as needed. hence, i created a mock up version.

i wrote out the words that i thought fit, and the images that i imagined to accompany them. it helped me visualise what kind of layouts i could do over the pages alongside the written prose. but i was missing substance in these sketches. i decided that i needed to look into heirlooms themselves as a concept.

so i did more research:

i felt a lot more familirised after this exploration, but it also healed a part of me. reading both of these articles helped immensely. the paragraph that i copied over from lillios was something that stuck with me. what both of the texts talk about makes sense; obviously social inequality plays a major part in the transmission and preservation of items. heirlooms generally are thought to be expensive objects that your bloodline inherit, not the mundane things in our everyday. but the mundane often means a whole lot more to the human heart.

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the birth of a puppet

i created suha. i went through names for a long time to figure out what would be right, going through hundreds of names from different “foreign” cultures. suha was the one that resonated with me the most though, meaning “forgotten” and “overlooked” so i went with it.

i wanted her to not be perfect. more than anything, i wanted a character that people could project onto; someone that they could see themselves in rather than a character that had a large personality. “overlooked” and “forgotten” were 100% the words that i would use to describe her. you can see more of my design choices being explained in the image above.

i started slowly developing the layouts that i created in the mock-up. the ovals on the second page were created using an ink pad; i made them to use as an asset for when i edited the pages digitally

at this point, despite the earlier experimentation to figure out what medium to use, i started drawing pages using ink. i thought the linework would be nice to look at if it was crisp. i somehow reverted back past all the work i had done and started drawing using my default methods and techniques,

i used a dip pen and india ink in a pith sketchbook so that the paper could withstand the ink and a sharp metal pen tip. i knew that i was going to be editing these digitally after so some have multiple versions of the same thing, alongide multiple sets of text.

but after i uploaded the first page spread into the indesign template, i realised how off it looked.

in an attempt to salvage, i redrew the key aspects and edited them onto the crosshatch background. as you can see below, this did nothing. arguably it looks worse.

this wasnt what i wanted to convey at all. i liked the aspects of the image but it wasn’t quite “doing” what i wanted it to at all. it felt segmented, choppy. so i decided to reset and start over, just not on that page.

i first drew these hands, which easily trump the initial ink version. i layered graphite and used a paper blender alongside an eraser to create the detailing. i haven’t really used pencil for much more than sketching (which i do a lot!), so using for a full piece was somewhat foreign. i bought the paper blender maybe 5/6 years ago but the first time i used it was drawing these hands.

the graphite also lends itself to the ideas of shadows and blurriness that i wanted to channel perfectly.

i then started redrawing the pages in pencil

these are all the raw scans. after this i took them all into procreate to edit and format correctly for the indesign template

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do i know you?

here are the finished pages, formatted to fit the indesign template

flick through version:

raw pages formatted to the indesign template:

i edited a lot of them heavily in procreate. it felt necessary to get the right amount of contrast in. i like how the the last pages are light. and minimalist. joy is easy like that. i used the clone tool a LOT for the textures. i ended up completely reworking the first spread, and i love this version a lot more. the imagery fits the text way better than it did before.

there are things i would change. the 6^th spread with the versions of suha swirling together could’ve been executed in a better way honestly. the concept is good but because i did the swirling digitally, it lost a bit of the grit that it could’ve had.

the 10^th spread is lacking something severely. i’m sure i could’ve put something else there that would’ve had more of an impact, but i was so tunnel-visioned on what i drew in the mock-up that i let it be.

the 13^th spread is harsh and doesn’t convey the feeling that i wanted it to. it’s too dark for what it leads onto on the next spreads.

at the symposium a few people told me that the 6^th spread was their favorite. which baffled me. but it also made me wake up a little. people get different things out of different images. obviously i like the images i resonate with the most. and i can’t dicate what other people resonate with; they are free to find themselves in whatever works they want to. and to like what they want.

if i’m able to facilitate that for even a second, then thats more than enough.