Monday, 30 January 2012

Dave McKean


David McKean is an English illustrator, Comic book artist, Graphic designer as well as a musician. David McKean is a very creative graphic artist who has made a lot of artworks for Front Line Assembly. He has also done artworks for artists such as Download, Project Pitchfork, Slayer, Tori Amos, Fear Factory and a whole lot of others. He attended Berkshire College of Art and Design from 1982-1986 and, before leaving; he started working as an illustrator.

I am analyzing one of David McKean’s successful adverts ‘Social Work Adverts’.  The image gives the impression of a map as it includes various symbols as well as signposts which appear to be indications.  I am really intrigued of this particular art piece, as the image of what seems to be a map is not typical. The map doesn’t provide signals to a certain place but however it portrays indications to get in touch with Sonya; ‘Sonya is hard to reach’. This however gives an idea of the journey or even lost love theme. The use of colours applied to this particular art piece appear to be quite old and reasonably dull, this however gives the image a sense of isolation and very much puts emphasis to the theme.
The art work is put together as a planned journey of the main character who appears to be Sonya, one day Sonya will help show someone else the way’. Interestingly to see how the colours gradually get brighter as you go down the map, this is a good use of technique revealing a sense of hope in Sonya’s journey. I also noticed that the writing changes each time from the font including the size, this is to perhaps portray the changes in Sonya’s pace.  I think he did this well and it was a successful use of technique. The message ‘People are isolated’ this is possibly the main message that Dave wants to leave his audience. On the other hand I detected that David used various comical images as well as real photographs of people. I felt that the use of real images gave the advert a more serious appeal.  However incorporating cartoon images offered the advert a humorous look to it, which was quite appealing. McKean also uses post notes expressing hidden memories and feelings; it’s very informal yet creative.

In this particular art piece there are various technical media processes used.
There is photography of people which were possibly scanned onto illustrator.
The use of path tool in illustrator on the text saying “you know she’s really getting somewhere”, which is also a representation of a road.

When David McKean creatively produced this particular art piece social care had a bad reputation as the press constantly published negative factors of the social care industry.  So therefore I believe that this campaign is incredibly useful as it will very much help raise awareness in the defects of faults within social care.

No comments:

Post a Comment