Computer Arts Projects - Issue 49 / 2003
Illustration Now!

Digital illustration did not just appear overnight, it took small groups of like-minded, creative, artistic individuals with foresight and ambition to step out into the unknown, to push, cajole and force the beast of illustration out into the light. Once there, the illustrated image could never be the same again. We investigate some of the people and places involved in thrashing a digital pathway through contemporary illustration. From looking at the beginnings and understanding the present, we ask, and attempt to answer, questions about the future for image making in the digital world.

'I can envisage a time when we'll all need our own individual Macs' stated John Warwicker in an interview with Graphics International Magazine back in 1992. Warwicker, a key member and driving force behind 90's design heroes Tomato, was sticking his neck out. Really, rewind back just eleven short years ago and the creative world was a very different place, the idea that designers would all be slaves to the screen was pretty radical. Although even more radical was the thought that illustrators would, at some point, come in from the cold and boot up alongside the designer. However boot up or tune in and turn on is exactly what the illustrator did, some through choice, some through necessity and the results have redefined illustration over the past ten years.

Even before 1992 the signs were there. Dan Fern, illustrator and Head of, the then, Illustration Masters course at the Royal College of Art, had laid out one or two challenges for the discipline in 1987 within his foreword for the catalogue that accompanied Breakthough, an exhibition celebrating 25 years of illustration at the RCA. Fern had seen the future, a full five years before Warwicker had dare dream of having his own kit, recognising that 'one of the most interesting and challenging tasks awaiting creative artists over the next few years is to invent a new aesthetic for the computer-generated image'. Interestingly Warwicker and his company Vivid ID had been part of the team that designed this exhibition, along with the Thunder Jockeys, but more of them later.

Breakthough looked back, as well as forward, at the glory years of illustration at the RCA, particularly the emergence of a raw new talent that had dragged itself into the limelight following in the slipstream created by punk. Outside of the RCA, Jamie Reid's cut-and-paste-ransom-note-graphics for the Sex Pistols owed more to the copier that the computer in 1977, but his approach allowed illustration the opportunity to take risks whilst ushering in an era of more radical and political work, evident in the Breakthrough exhibition.

Ten years before Breakthrough, at the fag end of the 1970s, Fern had recognised the importance of this new fired-up, angry yet fiercely committed approach, typified by his own graduates, Robert Mason (now Head of Illustration at Norwich School of Art), Russell Mills (long-term collaborator of Brain Eno and visiting lecturer to Leeds Metropolitan University) and Ian Pollock (best known for his stunted, twisted figures for Shakespearean classics). As rumour has it, a rumour documented in the Rick Poyner book on Dan Fern; Works with Paper, Fern had set alight all work he had produced prior to punk. The late 70s were clearly an important time for illustration. In fact, the foundation stones for what would become the first tentative steps towards the digital, ten years later in 1987, were being set with a new approach to image-making and illustration through collage and montage.

At same time as the doors opened on Breakthrough in '87, students within the RCA Illustration department had access to a unique set-up. As the only entirely post-graduate art and design institution in the world, the RCA had clout and Canon equipped a studio, as a lab, in the most creative sense of the word. Providing the first generation colour laser photocopiers, the CLC, and free copies to those intent on pushing the frontiers of the machine's creative capabilities, here was a chance to see just how innovative students and staff could be with a piece of kit more familiar to the office or copy shop, if you could even find one, than the studio.

Cutting and pasting, collage and montage could never be the same again. Early adopters of the Canon CLC could resize originals, distort their shape, alter colours, create negatives; utilise an unprecedented range of image manipulation tools. Being technically aware of the equipment became vital to getting the most from the kit. A precedent, the union of creativity and digital expertise, was being set for the future by a relatively small group of individuals led by Simon Larbalestier, www.simon-larbalestier.co.uk, most known for his album sleeve photographic and illustrative collage work for seminal 80's band, The Pixies. In his, hugely, influential book of the time, The Art and Craft of Montage, Larbalestier, as an RCA Research Fellow, investigated numerous techniques and approaches that pushed the limits of the CLC and other copying devices prior to the arrival of the computer. But his book came with a warning from Larbalestier, 'this book doesn't advocate the theory that the more equipment you have access to, the better and more resolved your image will become, since without a strong concept in the first place all that you will achieve is a beautiful surface, empty of content, emotion and provocative thought…' wise words indeed.

Around the same time as the early experiments into digital collage an agency sprang up that was to take a fresh approach to representing contemporary British illustration. Andrew Conningsby had set up Debut Art, www.debutart.co.uk, in 1985 with a range of artists hand-picked from a crop of new collage-based image-makers and within two years he had recognised what was starting to emerge, 'There was a move towards collage, with the Canon Colour Copiers copying at three quid a throw, a new direction was taking place. When you consider a basic set-up of computer, monitor, scanner and printer was around £10k, it was hardly surprising that most stuck with the CLC, for some time' Many of the Debut Art artists moved onto the CLC from, what Conningsby describes as, the 'lick and stick' of hand-crafted collage illustration. These very same artists would make the move to the computer as technology improved and prices fell.

Back over at the RCA many students were starting to expand their repertoire, rolling their sleeves up and getting their hands dirty investigating the Quantel Paintbox. Located in a special unit, this kit was intended for early TV post-production work but when illustration students got their heads round it and hands on it, the first digitally produced computer images emerged into and from the course. Dan Fern's clear vision for the department at the time supported this early experimental approach; 'our aim is not to produce graduates that slip neatly into the market - that would be comparatively easy… however to produce illustrators who at the time of their graduation often look precariously offbeat and esoteric, but are daring and committed artists capable of actually changing the market, that's altogether more interesting' explained Fern at a conference on illustration in Aspen, Colorado in 1986. These early fumblings into image-making with the Quantel assisted in the creation of the first digital/computer illustrators to graduate the institution with work and images that did not fit the expectations of the commercial design world. A problem others faced at the same time too. 'I didn't and my work didn't fit; people just weren't ready for it, for ages' explains Andy Martin, www.andymartin.uk.com, now a successful illustrator and filmmaker, then an aspiring designer and image-maker. Ten years previously, after a short design course in Derby that he didn't complete, Martin had made the move to London. 'It was 1977 and the 'Summer of Punk', there was a sense that change was in the air' he explains. Taking a design job that led on to becoming Art Editor at the New Musical Express, 'laying out front covers with pictures of cheesy mid 80's bands', and then quitting in 1985 to go solo 'because I could see something was going to happen'. Introduced to the Apple Macintosh by someone high within the company during an Apple event in London, Martin was given a Mac with 128k of Ram to 'play with, experiment with and just see what I could do' he explains. 'I was just taken down to a PR office and given the kit, it would have cost me an arm and a leg, and they just said 'take it', how cool was that?' He recalls his first Mac whispering the words; 'look after me and I'll look after you' and shudders at the next fact; 'sure enough, after eighteen years and around £35,000 spent on several machines I'm still using one!'

Despite Martin's absolute dedication to creating early digital art, he credits another illustrator with much of the early discoveries in digital imagemaking in London at the time; 'George was the man! George is where I came from, way before you could do it on a Mac, he was there developing stuff, leading the way'. The George in question; George Snow, www.3d3world.com. Snow had been working as an illustrator for a number of years but was quick to spot, what he believed would be, an exciting new development that would change the way images were to be made. Recalling his first introduction to the digital at the Association of Illustrators Conference, Drawing the Line, in 1999 he remembered 'In 1981 I discovered the Sinclair Spectrum and it was my first encounter with a computer. Pretty much from that day onwards I just totally abandoned illustration. I lost interest in it - I didn't see it as relevant.' What did interest Snow was the desire to create software applications that could aid artists to create images using this new digital technology, 'I immersed myself in programming computers, just programming, for the sheer hell of it, for the best part of three years. The thing about computer programming is that it can get kind of dull and nobody really understands the work that you've done. You have to show it to the world' explains Snow.

With RCA students and graduates becoming more engaged in the digital, with Debut Art moments away from taking on their first digital artist, with George Snow developing software, with Andy Martin experimenting with free Apple kit and with countless others across the UK, Europe and the USA also moving in on the territory, the dawn of the digital revolution was underway.

Andrew Conningsby of Debut Art recalls his take on the moment, 'the very first people I saw doing digital work were the Thunder Jockeys in '87 or '88. They got there first, very digital looking, very of the moment' Graham Elliot and John England went under the name of the Thunder Jockeys and for a short time their flame burnt bright in contemporary illustration. Having met whilst studying together at the RCA, their antics over a period of a few years became legendary; spending the entire RCA student union party budget on tonnes of sand to shovel in a foot deep for a 'beach party', turning up for an interview at Saatchi and Saatchi with a goat and a Dalmatian, the list goes on. The Thunder Jockeys later and almost inevitably, diversified into pop promo direction and advertising but started life as a product of the illustration department at the RCA, but it was their disregard for the 'correct way of doing things' that led to some early, yet very creative and innovative, image making using digital technology.

Around the same time, Andy Martin started picking up illustration rather than design work and for a short time, it seemed like a small group of people were ahead of the game, 'I was just learning about making illustration by doing it in publications, I did the second ever cover for MacUser way back when, I was doing stuff for Blueprint magazine, working all over the place, half the time was spent educating art directors, the other half was just figuring how to do it,' explains Martin. And then things took off, 'it was like a virus, one moment there were just a few off us around and then it went bang and suddenly everyone, it seemed, started to discover the same thing at the same time.' Almost overnight, there were more digital illustrators around, Debut Art nurtured their own artists making the transition from paper to screen, 'Gone Loco was the first', explains Conningsby, 'because he is that kind of guy, and then followed Andy White and Sarah Jones…'

George Snow recalls his first few years, 'I borrowed some cash from the bank and bought and early IBM PC just to play with it, I think I told the bank it would improve productivity. I installed or attached a Pluto Graphics Card that had an Intel 1888 chip so the two could talk to one another and then I mixed and messed about with video. All on 64k software! Snow, having made the move from programming to video direction, and then back to image-making, remembers what happened next, 'along came Photoshop and I had a whole new set of tools. All of a sudden I could blur the edges of an image, I could make areas of my collage transparent. There were in those early days, as I think everybody knows, a real problem being an artist and working on a computer. The software itself dictated very much what the final result looked like. You could look at computer-based art and say 'he used this tool, she used that tool'. They knew the techniques, they knew the plug-ins'. Andy Martin is more dismissive of much of the work from that period; 'It all went safe, it all went anodyne, cut-out template Photoshop bollocks' he rants. Snow admits that things have since changed, 'now it has got to the stage where they're a great deal more sophisticated. I think the software industry has really grown up around artists and their demands,' he states.

So where next, for digital illustration, a good question and one not easily answered, at least without some crystal ball gazing. Hardware and software will continue to develop, processors will clock faster and faster speeds, software will offer more and more options; that we can be sure of. The big leaps in technology will still happen too, the hand-in-glove interface that Tom Cruise utilises in The Minority Report, however far fetched it may seem now, will look as dated as Daleks in less than thirty years time. Think about it, less than thirty years ago a pocket calculator was considered ground-breaking technology. Fifteen years ago, so was the mobile phone.

Hardware will get smaller or at least the inner workings will. Nanotechnology, the ability scientists have to move atoms around and to create tiny electronic switches will soon advance to the creation of ultra-tiny-super-mini chips. There is a limit to the size that we can reduce our interface with technology down to though, our hands and fingers are not getting any smaller, as long as we work with keyboards, the keyboards have to remain at an optimum size. The on-screen PDA keyboard is an example of the shrinking digital world really not working, the new mobile by NEC, the e808, reduces a QWERTY keyboard to the size of… well, to fit on a rather large mobile phone actually. Try to imagine a keyboard-less computer and you have the MS Tablet PC, but that feels like a step back rather than forward, for some reason. Artists and illustrators have used drawing tablets for some time, they get more and more touch-sensitive with each release, but they can get no smaller in their current incarnation. There will have to be a radical re-think if stuff is going to work differently in the future.

If the inner-workings get smaller, they will get lighter and that may mean truly portable kit, if someone can figure out getting round the monitor issue. The 17” Powerbook looks fantastic but imagine lugging that beast around. Take the power of the Powerbook, set it inside a PDA size device that could, like your average data-projector, project a screen onto any flat surface. Rumour has it that Ericson/Sony developed a mobile phone that could do just this but could not get a battery to last more than 20 minutes. But they are thinking about it.

Software will continue to develop, but breakthroughs into genuinely new applications still occur very infrequently, think browsers, think email applications; both have helped us change the way we use our computers in the last five-ten years. Voice recognition software has been around for a while now too but has not made the break-through into image creation, try getting your head around a convergence of IBM's ViaVoice and Photoshop, it could happen.

Forget hardware and software, true artists and innovators will continue to push boundaries whatever kit is available. Interestingly, the focus has shifted away from how illustrators are using the technology to what they are doing with it, back to solving problems with visual solutions, back to creating work with a purpose, with a point of view. George Snow agrees, ' after everything that has happened in digital imaging, we still need good ideas, bloody good ideas, we still need to get a message across'. The glut of fashionable vector drawings that anyone and everyone was 'creating' and every client, it seems, were happy to use was a passing fad, as were the over-complicated, multi-layered digital collages of a few years previously. Now, the very best clients want something unique, they want to use the illustrator as a craftsperson, the software is taking a back seat and it is more about creativity than technology.

For a new generation of image-makers, having grown up with a computer in the classroom and another in their bedroom, the allure of the digital is far less compelling than it was for their older brothers and sisters. More fascinating for this group, is an increasingly hands-on craft where the evidence of the hand is more visible, although the digital is playing a role in transmitting the work via email, storing the work via the web or DVD, that role is now really just part of a bigger process. In vogue, right now, is to create work with a nod back to the '60s, work with a retro feel that encompasses older techniques and older stylistic leanings. The roughly drawn mark, the felt-tip, the 'pop-a-point' pencil aesthetic has returned but software will soon catch up. Software developers will show us how we need not hunt down materials via the old art shop but just tune in and click on the next generation of tools within our chosen applications. George Snow is not so sure, 'I can't imagine that software can that much better than it is right now although I still spend as much time working as a technician as I do an artist; upgrades fall over, new kit comes out that doesn't talk to old kit, same old problems', he sighs. 'However', he adds, 'it doesn't cost what it used to, back in 1990 I spent £250,000 on hardware and software, last year I managed on about £6,000'.

Whatever the associated costs, it is vital to remember that styles will change, fashions in illustration will come and go, 'creativity is about diversity' explains Conningsby, offering the Debut Art explanation to the wealth of visual approaches currently being practiced. Andy Martin goes one further, seeing it differently and recognising a shift away from categorisation, 'this is a very exciting time to be working and has coincided with the breakdown of old categories within the art and design world. I look forward to a future where this openness will bring new hybrid forms of imagemaking' he offers. It may be that the days of the freelance illustrator, as specialist, are numbered. It may be that a broader range of skills will need to be developed to tap into increasingly less defined markets. Martin, in the sleeve notes accompanying the release of his first DVD of digital film/motion graphics, Earth Bonding Point, explains; 'photography, graphics, colour, narrative, composition and audio have all combined' in his own work, 'thanks to digital technology but also because I've tried keep an open mind'. George Snow now running his own lab/training outfit in Italy, 3G3 World, agrees, 'now it is a very, very sophisticated mix, I envisage a return to drawing and painting, using materials by hand,' Snow explains 'but in combination with, what I see, as a one hundred percent digital future'.

Just to put it all in to some kind of perspective, in the grand scheme of things, it is worth remembering that the digital advances made in the last twenty or so years have been just a tiny flicker in the overall history of man and his desire to create images. From the first mark on the wall of a cave 10,000BC to the cutting edge digital images produced at the dawn of the 21st Century, the power of the picture continues to excite.

Extra
Apple Icon

From a start-up in a Californian garage in 1976 to an annual turn-over of millions and the launch of 'the world's fastest personal computer and the first with a 64-bit processor' - the G5, Apple has come a long way. It all began, back in that garage belonging to the parents of Steve Jobs, when he sold his Volkswagen camper van and his partner Stephen Wozniak, or Woz, sold his programmable calculator to fund the building of the first Apple product, the Apple 1 circuit board. It featured a wooden frame and had to be constructed by the purchaser, fifty were offered for sale.

Right from the start Apple would think different(ly), early advertising campaigns described the product as 'the computer for the rest of us' and the original development team are often regarded as radicals. The idea that the invention of the personal computer owed as much to a desire to oppose centralised authority and technology, as it did to the invention of the microprocessor is a theory that has left Apple with a particularly strong image. For the computer that brought 'power to the people', Apple's core users are still regarded as creative types, freethinkers and free spirits.

© Lawrence Zeegen