Bill Wright

How do you make strong ideas a visual reality? By hand is always a great starting point - drawing, painting, etc - but today illustrators often take hand-created work a step further, using digital tools to mix, layer and manipulate their art work, without losing its freshness, boldness and 'human touch'. This course will help you develop your visual ideas and own personal visual language through a series of projects giving a flavour of the BA Illustration at Central Saint Martins. You'll be thinking creatively and exploring traditional illustration methods, but you'll also see how hand-made work is manipulated via computer and do this with your own projects. Projects will emphasise ideas, visualisation, hand-crafting with pencil, ink, paint and other media and then digital development of your handmade work into expressive, vibrant illustrations. Digital development refers here to steps like superimposing or resizing hand-drawn elements, adding hand-created colours or texture to an illustration, editing line-work, adjusting colours and manipulating hand-made lettering - all the while maintaining a personal, hand-crafted look to your resulting illustration. Beginning with simple steps, you'll see that working with your handmade work in virtual 'layers,' separate from each other, allows each element to be independently modified or replaced. You'll move back and forth from the art studio to the computer lab learning techniques and experimenting in both. Professional practice will also be discussed and the work of successful illustrators examined. Resulting illustrations should add an exciting, knowledgeable dimension to your portfolio. Who should take this course? Typically we have a great mix of students from two directions - those who know something about computer graphics and want to add a handmade aspect to their work, and others with an interest in drawing, painting or illustration eager to find ways to take advantage of digital methods. Both are welcome. If you've had no experience with either of these areas and find picking up new methods difficult, you might take a more basic illustration workshop or computer class first. On the other hand, both the 'I can't draw' computer person and the 'What's Photoshop?' artist have thrived in Enhanced Illustration.

Bill Wright is a practicing artist and has taught drawing, illustration and design in the US and UK. He currently teaches on the illustration pathway of BA (Hons) Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins.