Exercise 2.5

Word processing

Work with your computer and a thesaurus to start a word association game.

Choose a word to examine then look this word up in a thesaurus, look for the third definition, then continue the process with that word, and so on and so forth.

Once you have done this for a while you will have come up with a word poem, after a while you will come up with no more words available, so you can continue with picking the fourth definition from the thesaurus instead.

Once you have reached a 20-30 word poem, draw pictures that associate with the words in quick sketched or thumbnails in your sketchbook.

Record them in the same sequence as your poem, now combine all the sketches into one picture.

So I started this exercise by thinking up a word, the word I chose was BALLOON, the next words that came up on the third meaning were:-

Bladder

Pocket

Hole

Crater

Pit

Mine

Quarry

Game

Sport

and then it went back to GAME again, so I then chose the fourth word meaning of GAME:-

Pastime

Hobby

Craft

Adeptness

Command

Mandate

Directive

And then it went back to MANDATE again, so I chose the fifth meaning of the word DIRECTIVE:-

Memo

Journal

Daily

Periodic

Recurrent

So I think I’ll stop there so I can start on the sketches for each of the words, I can already see that some will be harder than others to draw!

The word poem so far is Balloon, Bladder, Pocket, Hole, Crater, Pit, Mine, Quarry, Game, Sport, Pastime, Hobby, Craft, Adeptness, Command, Mandate, Directive, Memo, Journal, Daily, Periodic, Recurrent.

Here are my small sketches of each word, I found a few hard to draw especially PIT, Mandate, Periodic and Recurrent. I think they are ok though and could sit ok for those words.

Next I moved onto making a bigger picture with all the sketches, again this is going to be quite tricky with some of the words, but I’ll give it a go!

I started with the idea of an office as most of the items were office type work based sketches, then I added a window (similar to the example) but was the only way I could think of incorporating the more outdoor based sketches to the picture.

I added a second desk for the craft elements, then added some bits to the walls to make the other sketches fit.

I think it works ok, all the sketches are included, it’s just a rough sketch but could be developed further, and you could use your imagination to create a story from it.

Reflection

What went well?

I found using the thesaurus easy as I’ve used one before many times on different aspects of illustration, I enjoyed trying to think of images for the words to draw, although some were tricky!

I think the overall last picture was good, although rough it could be developed further and gives the culmination to the exercise, and helps you to understand what was expected and achieved.

What would you do different?

I don’t think I would do anything different next time, although maybe try with a different word for experimentation.

I did find some of the words hard to draw for and some I don’t know whether that was what was expected but I did what I thought was best.

I enjoyed this exercise more than I thought, again I liked the creativeness of it and thinking how to draw certain words was definitely out of my comfort zone.