Exercise: Visual metaphors

For this exercise, we were asked to collect as many examples of visual metaphor as we can find. I used a thesaurus to look up the meaning of a visual metaphor. I then started to collect images I found on the Internet. My research was a little limited due to co-feared and as I have no magazines in the house other than travel magazines and no newspapers, and I feel that these would have been good sources of visual metaphors. However, I did find a variety online from different magazines and advertisements. As well as some examples of some illustrations from an unknown source.

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We was asked to choose from one of the following phrases; reaching retirement, dreams of romance, broken relationship, censorship of the press, high achievement, economic catastrophe.

After trying to think of ideas for each of the six I decided to go with high achievement as this is the only one I could think of any ideas for. It was asked to create a drawn visual list of objects and subjects which could be used to symbolise them. The brief does say not to be overly concerned with the aesthetic quality or technical accuracy in the drawing, and to see this is the an extension of your visual shorthand.

I found this exercise extremely difficult, as I just could not come up with many ideas, even though I had looked at examples. I feel like this is something I am not particularly skilled at, and my mind would just go blank. I wonder if this is possibly due to my dyslexia. Even now as I write this in my learning log no new ideas or understanding of this exercise comes to me. I asked my family if they could tell what my drawings were meant to be. They were aware that they were meant to be visual metaphors. I received mixed feedback on these. They tried to help give me ideas of what I could do, so I tried these out too. In the end, I ended up going for the word high achievement and created the image below.

Reflection

I was very frustrated with how much I struggled with this exercise, especially as I understand its importance in illustration. However, I hope that as my skills develop during my course that perhaps this is something that I can try to improve or that will improve naturally as I progress. I’m not completely dissatisfied with my image as I feel like he could be developed into an interesting image or at least a fun image. But I feel like so much more could have been achieved and explored with this exercise had I been able to grasp the concept better.