For those of you that don’t know, when I’m not blogging I teach art namely illustration and animation. One of my favorite assignments to give students is the ‘one word illustration’. It’s a great project because it forces the student to build an entire world out of a seemingly limited word.
To tackle this concept lets break down what the word escape means.
Definition of ESCAPE
intransitive verb
1a : to get away (as by flight) <escaped from prison>
Now that we’ve defined ‘escape’ lets dig further and get to know its synonyms.
escape, avoid, evade, elude, shun, eschew mean to get away or keep away from something. escape stresses the fact of getting away or being passed by not necessarily through effort or by conscious intent
So to escape is to elude or evade. This conjures images in my mind of a prisoner evading capture. But, I don’t want to be too literal. Instead I’ll put some humor into it. I want the escapee to be a cry baby, a big oaf. Let’s add a little more drama to the illustration by making the oaf narrowly miss being captured as he cowers against a wall.
Definition of OAF1:
a stupid person : boob
2: a big clumsy slow-witted person
Now we have the mental imagery needed to create our illustration.
Escaped Oaf - Pen and Ink
The last step is to color the illustration in the medium of your choice. In this case I will be using Adobe Illustrator to combining the hand inked drawing with vector based paint.
Escapee Cowering
Here we have our final image of the escapee cowering in fear of the search lights.
I hope you found this small introduction to illustration helpful. If you have any questions let me know in the comment section below.
This post was inspired by Cynthia Yildirim @CynthiaY29 after she requested to see some of my art on my blog.
You can follow me here: @KevinMinott
