Exercise: Writing a brief

Exercise: Writing a Brief 

For this exercise I had to identify a piece of artwork to which I share a connection with, and write the brief for the one you chose. The brief you write must guide the illustrator so they can create the image.

The first thing I did was to read through the text included within the project and highlight bits to focus on whilst understanding it all. Just the same way you need to read through and understand a brief so this step fits in perfectly.

I highlighted bits of the text in which I thought was most important, I think its important to always ask for clarification on briefs, I can imagine it can feel stressful to receive a brief and not completely understand it, but you avoid saying anything because you want to seem like you know what to do.  

When creating any piece of artwork for someone else I think its vital to capture what they want to achieve with that piece and always keep that in the back of your mind when illustrating. However its also important and can most of the time be in the commissioners best interest to give the illustrator some creative control. 

On the next page I liked this breakdown of receiving a brief and I can use this within my own work on this course, In my opinion though, I usually begin researching before generating ideas as this usually can help me to generate those ideas in the first place.

The next thing I did was choose my illustration. The illustrator I chose was Micheal Kustsche I studied him in the first exercise I completed ( The History of Illustration). I really love his work and how he can capture characters so well. I was just going to choose one of is many illustrations however I thought that the task would be the same If I chose a whole collection and would actually make sense realistically as this would what he would be producing after receiving a brief. I went with his concept art for Christopher robin that he produced.

Christopher Robin concept art

I then wrote down in my sketchbook a rough outline of everything I wanted to include in the brief broke down into sections. They were: An outline of what he needed to produce, The Role of the Illustrations, Target audience of the film and Physicality's of the characters.

I then went onto writing out a full brief using this info. Here is what I came up with.

I summarised everything I had written down into a concise brief, I wanted to include only the things that mattered and can aid Micheal in his work. For the purpose of this log post and to make the direction of my brief clear Ive highlighted elements to section them into groups. To begin with Grey is what the studio wants broadly. They want " 6 digitally produced concepts illustrations of the 6 main characters".  Yellow is the feel of both the background and characters themselves. Blue is the role of the illustrations and what they will achieve. Green is the target audiences of both the illustrations themselves and of the film in general. Finally Red is the physical characteristics of the characters including colour and materials. 

Conclusion: Overall I think my brief achieves the purpose and if it was given to another artist would garner the similar results to Micheal. I think I included all relative information inside the brief and covered all bases. This exercise really made me think about what goes into creating an illustration when I was breaking down his work. It also highlighted to me how an artist can interpret information and reasons for their decision making. For example Micheal would presumably be told about the role of his illustrations, so this would influence the expressions of the characters and also style. The role of the illustrations was to bring the characters to life inside the world. So Tigger needed to look full of energy and eager to explore, Winnie the Pooh needs to seem chilled out and content and Owl needs to look wise smug. He has gone to capture these elements perfectly.