Reportage Illustration: Visual Journalism

Product Information

In the month we mark World Refugee Day, I would like to talk about reportage drawing – a type of visual journalism. Reportage drawing is drawing on location, intending to capture an observed subject. It resonates hugely with me as a former journalist and broadcast news pr for nearly 20 years, before I retrained as a portrait artist in 2010.

Regardless of medium, there are some aspects of his work that just scream James Jean. The loose, gestural quality of his figures is one such feature that appears in both his illustrative and fine artworks. Gary Embury: Susan Sontag said, 'photography is an act of non-intervention'. Is drawing any better? UAL Enterprising Alumni Network Event: Purpose-driven and social enterprise from UAL Alumni - Meet the SpeakersGet a part time job: In a gallery, a print makers, an agency – anything to make your illustration life easier. That's a good example of a single image narrative, that has very direct impact and perhaps what many of us are engaged in. Lucinda's exhibition is a good example of this, the accumulation or the investigation of a project through a number of works. It's that body of work that potentially can change, raise awareness, do the things we are talking about. rather than the impact of a single image, but it's true, it's very hard to think of an individual drawing that can have that impact. Whilst the Olympic games were actually taking place I had the freedom to move around and respond to emerging stories as they were happening, so a project like that took a lot of research and planning in advance. Following on from that I took on a project to draw at a number of Eastern Orthodox Monasteries in North Eastern Greece through a bursary from the Royal college. In Kharkiv, an eastern town under sustained Russian shelling, Butler met a surgeon and was able to visit a hospital treating severely injured civilians. L.R – It is done on location as much as possible and I usually turn down jobs that have nothing to do with this way of working.

Having reported from many trials at the Old Bailey – the central criminal court in London for England and Wales – I have always been an admirer of the work of courtroom artists who capture the unfolding events during court proceedings. In the UK, artists are not allowed to draw inside the courtroom and must sketch from memory after they leave. Literary reportage is a genre that presents factual real-life stories but with the storytelling techniques and stylistic conventions of fictional works. In essence, they both involve sketching from life and on location. After all, the ‘urban sketching’ movement was started by Gabriel Campanario, a Seattle-based journalist who works for The Seattle Times as both a writer and an artist. He started the Urban Sketchers blog and invited other artists to become ‘correspondents’ and contribute regular journalistic sketches depicting life as it unfolds in front of them. The Executioner's Song is a Pulitzer Prize-winning true crime reportage that details the events surrounding the conviction of Gary Gilmore in 1997, the first person to be executed in the US following the ban on capital punishment being lifted in 1976. http://www.houseofillustration.org.uk/whats-on/current-future-events/in-conversation-with-lucinda-rogers

Following the publication of Reportage Illustration: Visual Journalism, Gary Embury and Mario Minichiello will be discussing reportage drawing at the V&A

Illustrating for books will help you develop your drawing skills for illustrating a range of different types of books, from non-fiction books, to travel and childrens books. For non-fiction books and travel books, you will improve your reportage illustration, drawing from observation, and learning how to develop sketches into interesting illustrations. For childrens books, you will learn character design, storyboarding, and how to build up a scene and add depth to an illustration. Each class will involve a drawing exercise to explore some of the ideas in the lesson. I think so. Photography is brilliant, but we’ve just become obsessed and addicted to it and forgotten some nice bits of creativity on the way. We hear a lot about compassion fatigue. Can art provide a different way to remind people of what’s happening?

With a wide selection of visual approaches to reportage, there’s a great range of images to enjoy. From Anna Cattermole’s two-year record of shipbuilding to Anne Howeson’s dreamlike images of the vanishing buildings of London’s Kings Cross. Examining the images is revealing. Scale is an element of the compositions which often places the human aspect of the image into the context of its surroundings. As in Alex Nicholson’s drawing of a demonstration outside the monumental buildings around Bank in London, or the intimate space occupied by Steve Wilkin’s commuters, drawn regularly on his daily travels to work. When I approached the people I wanted to draw I told them that I was an artist and I would like to do drawings of them but to do so I was going to have to take photos of them as reference. Many of them were a bit suspicious of me taking photos..

Matt Booker Drawings from four months in India at the International Institute of Fine Arts in Modinagar, Delhi, the Himalayas and Rajasthan. We look forward to seeing your artwork. Together we can share real stories and work for positive change here in Nepal! I don't draw on location anymore, I used to do it a lot. but I came to a stage when I started to work journalistically, I just didn't have the time to draw, photograph and conduct interviews at the same time. I also noticed that when I draw on location my likenesses are not very good. Her drawings are stunning and really capture the atmosphere of a place, especially her projects about New York and London. She gave a lecture at the Dulwich Picture Gallery a few years ago entitled Drawn From Life; afterwards I was fortunate to be able to ask her a few questions about her location drawing, and about her views on making a career in reportage illustration. Lucinda has been kind enough to review her original answers and update me on what she is up to now.

Absolutely, the best bit about illustration is having a commission, it’s incredibly reassuring. However, 75% of the places I go are initiated by me.

What are you looking for?

When you are in a reportage situation it's often crowded .. there might be something technology can do to help make your experience more exciting. However, traditional journalism is usually objective, constrictive, straightforward distant and detached, which can make it dry and uninteresting. Hence, writers of reportage blend aspects of fiction to make reporting factual events more lively and engaging. Writers of reportage use the first-person narratives to immerse themselves in the story and do not shy away from drama, dialogue, human emotions, personal opinions, character development, vivid imagery and experimentation with plot structure and chronology. Unlike traditional journalism, they focus more on the lives of their individual subjects and how they have been affected by events rather than institutions. I think there's something actually really radical about drawing, that it provides an alternative way of understanding a location and being on location to the dominant one which is photographic. It's much more visceral, it's much more contemplative, it's much more grounded.. John Berger wrote a lot about drawing and the politics of drawing. He wrote about drawing in Palestine. Drawing people created a shared vocabulary and he talked about those people whose houses had been bulldozed in the occupied Palestinian territories and who used drawing to assert their memories of the houses that had gone. I'd suggest you can't do that with a camera, you can't do that with a photograph. The drawing formula is a brilliant one for news and we used it extensively before we became obsessed with cameras,” he says.