THE LANGUAGE OF READING IMAGERY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R9zjn9BBvA

Christoph Niemann is an ingenious illustrator who uses simple imagery to create his designs. He bases his designs on how the human mind works. It is a complex organ and it can decipher imagery in different ways, it can connect the missing dots or shows something represented as something else. For example in the video he shows an illustration of man catching a baseball with a mit, however the mit and ball is an avocado with the seed still in the middle. This showed me that the mind can create illusions of what things could look like rather than what they actually are.

Drawings don't only show imagery but they can also evoke emotion. Having a story behind the image or showing something that is relatable to the audience can really change the way the emotion portrayed. The deeper something is etched into your consciousness the fewer details that are needed to understand it or to cause an emotional reaction.

Our minds are good at filling in the blanks and there is a concept of negative space where the space around the subject is drawn but the actual object isn't. Christoph Niemann's objective is to use the minimal amount of information to get a point across, where if you take away one piece of information, the whole illustration falls flat.

With the illustration of a heart with an arrow in the middle, it symbolises love, however if it looks to realistic it can gross the audience out, and if it is too abstract then nobody knows what it is, the key is to find the balance between abstract and realistic.

As a designer it is good to have an understanding of the visual and cultural vocabulary of your audience. A lot of his design ideas are a slow process of minimal design choices which lead to a good idea. His intentions are not to make a realistic scene, but to create something that will trigger your mind to show you that you have that imagery in your mind already. One of the most important skills of an artist is empathy. Sometimes you have to step back from your work and try to understand it from the point of the viewer.

He started to do a series where he would take a random object in his home and use it to create something completely different that has nothing to do with the original purpose of the item. He can be at it for hours, but the thing that works for him is to open up his mind and put out every idea that he has in his head until something clicks. The real magic happens in the mind, not the by the drawing itself.

Reference:

Niemann, C. (2018) You are fluent in this language (and don't even know it). [Online Video]. 22 August 2018. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R9zjn9BBvA. [Accessed: 15 March 2020].