Part 3 Exercise 5: Giving Instructions

This mood board is a selection of instructional illustrations I found online as well as in music books and cookbooks science books, although some of them have a lot of writing I focused on the pictures and drawings for inspiration.

When establishing the steps, I did a small little spider diagram of the things included and some thumbnail sketches of to get the feeling of how I was going to draw things and the shapes. On these sketchbook pages I experimented with watercolour, pen, paint and what quirky features I wanted to add and the character I wanted.

On this page I decided to use the typical checkered floor/ walls of the kitchen for the background. Brown, I feel is a bit less harsh then if I would have done black and it also matches the theme of tea and those neutral beige and brown colours. In addition to the background, I experimented with painting with coffee and tea, I liked the idea of using water colour, but I don’t think I could have created the shades of tea I wanted like the coffee and tea did. They were generally easy to use, only problems I had were a bit of excess dripping and smudging but other than that it was pleasant and effective.

 Some reference pictures of me carrying out the motions.

 

I made my first mock-up on an a4 piece of paper and thought about using a background in the squares rather than the background itself, but I decided I preferred a more intense background and wanted to keep the focus on the illustrations in the squares. I coloured some parts in simply to see what colours I liked best.

Finally, I carefully I sketched out the parts where the illustrations were going and painted the background using a brown watercolour and tea for the lighter squares. I then started with the coffee which I played with the amount to get a darker or lighter shade; I like the effect water-based mediums give. I wanted my instructions to have a bit of character about them hence the milk splash for adding the milk step and the square being blue for filling the kettle with water, as well as the steam coming out of the square into the background. I also wanted to incorporate my style of cartoon, so I chose an old lady about to enjoy her made cup of tea. to make the steps and illustrations stand out I used both black fine liners and white pen, I think they add just enough that there’s no focus taken away for the illustrations themselves. After all the details were added I thought of just adding the duration of time needed for a certain step, I didn’t use words anywhere else, but I felt like these were necessary. 

The feel of the diagram suggests comfort and warmth to me, I think the use of neutral colours and the Nan type figure gives a bit of comfort and the odd details like illustrations not sticking to a box, dripping, splashing or the random overlapping of boxes and steps keep it playful and fun to read. There is a empty area in the bottom right which I suppose could be used for writing if needed but even though its empty the background is distracting enough that it’s not a main focus. I asked friends and family to try and decipher what the instructions for and most said it was quite obvious, there was also that interactive element smelling the coffee that they could experience unlike the other students on the forum who just could see the image.