editorial — Process — Jason Ramasami

Just a quickie: here are some of the process moments from producing the cover for Michael Chiles’ new book.

The big idea here was that educational feedback is an organic, moving thing that makes meaningful connection between teacher, parent and student perspectives. Each one has a part to play and affects the other.

I don’t have time for a deep dive into the process (some would say this is a good thing) but it’s worth saying that my approach was to combine Clip Studio Paint and Affinity Designer. In the end producing flat vector colours is too hacky in CSP - it involves making balloons and then going through each one in a tedious fashion - waaaaay quicker to import a hi-res bitmap into Designer and work while you are thinking using a pencil tool with a fill in it.

Using a Reverse line

One other thing worth sharing is that in feeling mildly frustrated with clean flat lines I incorporated a little more of the reverse line style I have been dabbling a bit more with lately.

An example of the reverse line style from an editorial image I did a few weeks back.

This involves creating a rougher, less precise line (approaching linocutting in it’s approach) through drawing the inverse areas. It feels rougher somehow and brings a counterpoint to the cleaner stuff I make like this recent cover for Mark Enser’s new book.

In the end I am not sure it really notices - should I have gone a bit more all-out with it? I ran out time but the experimentation was fun.

(HT: thankyou Michael, Mark, Crown House and John Catt for involving me in your projects!)

Cliff Manning runs More Than Robots. Focussing on the shifting intersection between ‘tech/youth/support’ the group consists of a stimulating newsletter and quarterly meet-ups. As I am mainly working from home as a high-school teacher in lock-down I was able to attend the most recent event via zoom. Cliff’s encouragement to contribute something initially left me a bit cold… but as we discussed mutual areas of interest I realised that creating a set of sketch notes would probably be the best thing I could offer to promote the excellent work represented by the attendees.

Here are the eight snapshots I created for most of the presentations:

Some process footnotes:

as this was my first remote scribing experience I gathered as much source material as possible for later review. This included a variety of things - initial talk slides, audio, weblinks and screen captures for later reference/review, notes in my sketchbook.

I agreed with Cliff beforehand that it was counter-productive to create facsimile drawn notes for everything being said - there were already slides that could easily achieve this - better to grab a few resonant moments and illustrate those in a useful, shareable way. Below - is a scan of my initial notes: the boxes in red denote areas that looked worth developing into something more.

From here I used Clip Studio Paint on the iPad to compose something that I felt worked better.

And then I dropped this into Procreate which feels like a better final inking solution for this kind of thing. It’s funny that the way CSP works seems facilitate thinking in a way that Procreate enables toddler bitmap art. If the project had required something more involved I would have gone further using Affinity Designer for polished hand-drawn vectors.

Thankyou to Cliff for letting me in to this group - it gave me a strong impression of how many serious-minded groups are trying to serve those who so often get left behind in society. If you are interested in using me as an illustrator/facilitator then please get in touch and we can discuss your needs.

The Feedback Pendulum

Using a Reverse line

Sketchnoting for More Than Robots