Mapping project

Our Mapping project revolved around the concept of cartography and the many forms that it can take. I started my research with an artist named Fernando Vicente, who focuses on creating figures, shapes and animals out of simple geographical maps. He enhances and draws from existing shapes within the image, and shades them in a way which creates form. I decided to try several similar exercises, working not only with geographical maps but train lines, such as Harry Beck’s famous London Underground tube map.

The exercise involving the koi imagery is my favourite, as I felt that the fish’s simple lines and bold, contrasting sense of colour were a memorable visual theme. I decided to go with this for my final piece, using “koi” as its central idea.

I started by finding some photographic references online from which to practice drawing the shapes of  the fish, and proceeded to use a graphics tablet and a mix of Photoshop and Paint Tool Sai in order to create the line work. I am not yet confident with using a graphics tablet, so I decided to rely on simple lines and colour created using a simple circular brush. The following image is the line art for the final picture.

I believe that its simplicity was effective once paired with the background image. The underlying map shows several parts of South-East Asia, the place in which koi fish are the most popular, and contributes to the piece’s fairly pastel colour scheme.