This work is called "Summer in the City" which was created by Ciara. It is a pull out poster as Miss Phelan has said on her website. It is for Nylon, a magazine company who asked her to do a pull out poster of various cities in the USA. Each City have their own places or areas to go to. I have chosen to analyse this piece as I have a similar idea of creating my final outcome that seems to come from this artist and her work.
Although her techniques of ding her collage are a bit different but it is similar as she cuts her work where as i will be cropping images form pictures I have taken.
Well this illustration as I have already said is a pull out poster showcasing five different cities where summer is the topic here. Ciara Phelan has said so her self on her website. Also it looks like the images that are within the college relate to the cities that are present, for example the traffic lights and sign post saying New York. Again that sign is also relative to the entire collage as it signifies journey. Quote from Ciara Phelan about this work "My illustration was designed to feel vibrant and summery whilst placing each city on a map of America and showing off its street style." I agree that she has done so to achieve this goal. This work is vibrant, the colours brings it to life. I feel like this piece falls into college with illustration. It is clear it is a college. The theme in this piece is summer, the title clearly suggests this where also the images used to form the collage is all summer related. For example a lady wearing a bikini. The reason why summer was the theme is because she was asked to "illustrate their Summer in the City guide" for Nylon magazine. There maybe other themes to this aswell like holiday, each image conveys fun and holiday. We usually associate Summer to be the fun part of the year where holidays are taken place. Lots of people travel and explore and this leads to another type of theme traveling. As this college is about illustrating five major cities, they are all spread out across the USA and to go to each state traveling occurs. The title is clear in this collage, it conveys the idea of holiday, touring. The word Summer really sums it up though. Summer can mean a lot to anyone like holidays, travel, exploring new places and many more so the title is very informative . From this title you can also tell straight away the illustration is going to be about places to go to. This work is about a guide where people can look at it and decide where to go. It is more about tourist attraction, places to visit and site see. The work is reflective to what Ciara Phelan has said she wanted to achieve a vibrant and summery style which I agree she has achieved. The deeper meaning in this I think the artist is trying to convey is; enjoy the summer as much as possible. The imagery used surely does show us about how fun the summer can be. I believe that she found inspiration from the title and also the task was handed down to her which she collaborated with Volcom.
In terms of aesthetics, the artist here has used a variety of materials and techniques. One major technique would be cropping out selected images and I believe she also does cutting outs too, so maybe there's a mixture of magazine, book images along with digital images. This adds the emphasis of mixed media into the collage, hence making it different making it come to life. Also there seems to be images that have been edited like the purple minivan, she may have added a filter or effect like noise or cutout to make it seem retro. This gives off a retro atmosphere to the collage, as it some sort of history is to be learnt to understand this. It is odd to have an old van in the middle of the collage but what the van signifies tells us a different story as those vans were very popular and people used them to travel around in. So having that image of the van is significant to the theme of travel and holiday. The process of making this is unknown but from what I have gathered, I believe that there's a bit of both handmade and computer aided design. The way the artist uses colour is very clever, the brighter colours are used with the hotter and common states on the map. For example, the green limes and oranges and strawberries are used for L.A where it is a common state for tourist to enjoy the sun where are got New York the colours used are not as bright as New York isn't that type of state compared to a beach state. Also the use of colours everywhere else make the work vibrant as Ciara Phelan has suggested. It really makes it look like it's a summer poster. Summer is about colourful images and she has used them well here for this collage. In this there are some textures added to some images like the background images, the base. There is some sort of texture added to that to make it seem vintage. This also make it work well with the other images like the van and many others. Also there are some patters scattered across the work. A blue red and green strip runs across come images but they are not very visible. Also there are come light colour shapes behind the work pieces. I think this balances out the amount of pictures with other objects.
In my opinion, I like this work in terms of techniques and materials Ciara Phelan has used to portray the image of summer. I chose to analyse this as I found it interesting to have a guide with just three states and using collage to illustrate a guide. what I dislike about this were the amount of vintage imagery used, I think that it is a bit too much it over balances out against the other images of flowers or fruits. What I like about this is the colours she has used to illustrate summer. I think she has done well to show what summer is like, colourful and "vibrant". I have not seen other works like this by different artists. It has inspired me to create my own version using my own images and editing them out to form a similar style to Ciara Phelan.
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