Your Initial Brief: Questionnaires and Concepts

I find I am generally a very referential illustrator; I like to see an image in front of me, then work from it – be it for inspirational use or as a source of reference. So I found this brief quite tricky at first.

We were given questionnaires  to fill out over the weekend concerning our personalities, interests etc. We were asked to swap these with another member of our illustration course. I traded questionnaires with Janin Pineda and we both spent a bit of time interviewing each other to get a better sense of each other’s answers. 

(The Information I gathered from Janin)

Following this we chose 8-10 words that came across from the interviews and set about making 64 quick conceptual images (on an A2 piece of paper) based on them. In the time given I managed to create 36 – just over half a sheet, using different tools such as biro, Sharpie, pencil and gel pen. I realise now I’d given myself rather vague words to draw such as ‘Happy’, so when were asked to create another 64 images I honed my words to make conceptualising easier. For example; ‘Happy’ became ‘Feelings’ 

(The first sheet of concept images)

This time I created 56 images – an improvement on my paltry 36 images of the last sheet. However I had still failed to complete a full sheet. I found that after a short burst of ideas my inspiration petered out – this is something I will need to work on over the course of my career – speeding up my ideas and putting them on paper.

We were told that we now had to produce an additional two sheets of 64 images (128 in total) with images that now incorporated the letters of my questionnaire partner (in my case J and P). We had until the end of the week to do these.