laurenkellyillustration

In 2015, half of my class were given the opportunity to work with a charity called Parkinsons Equip. And that opportunity turned out to be one of the best of my life. It’s a long story.

The brief asked for us to produce something, and to raise money. In the space of a few weeks, we’d illustrated poems written by two people with Parkinson’s – one being the founder of Parkinsons Equip, a lovely man named Ray Wegrzyn – and organised an event hosted at Joshua Brooks in Manchester, along with an auction of original work created for the publication. All in all, we raised over £800 for the charity. It was INCREDIBLE.

The Art

For the element half of my brief, I was designated the element of ‘gender’. This led to lots of research about if and how Parkinson’s effects gender differently. Getting through the specialist jargon was a bit of a brain-breaker, but after searching through different sites and reading up on symptoms that effect more of one gender than the other, and exploring potentially how these differences are caused, I found myself a bit stumped as to how to portray all of this very technical information.

As I really toed the line with sensitivity with the poem, I decided that I wanted to keep this image very simple. It was a sensitive subject and I didn’t want to push it or make a joke of it, especially seeing as how my first image could maybe be a bit touchy for some people, so I decided that maybe an infographic would be the best way to go about it. Keep it simple, keep it professional, but figuring out how to do that without just straight up making my image an essay was hard.

First, I explored ways to portray gender. Using the gender symbols ♂ and ♀ would be hard to work with. Drawing hands with typically masculine/feminine builds to mimic the logo could be visually appealing however it didn’t really show that I was working with the topic of gender–it just looked like someone holding hands.

So I started doodling, and I drew male and female signs, like you’d see on the ladies’/mens’ bathrooms. And then I drew it again, in a different medium. And then I drew it again, on textured paper. I liked it. It was simple, so I didn’t have to worry about pushing the limit, and allowed for text, and the texture of it kept it looking interesting.

I ended up with multiple sheets of paper with doodles and designs and writing, and looked much different to the majority of parkinsons infographics which are very technical and graphics based, and often a lot to swallow.

This led me to the idea of keeping the image simple, relying on texture for detail, and also allowed my main piece which is the poem’s illustration to take precedence. I ended up with a simple image that sums up the fact that men develop parkinsons at a rate of 2:1 to women, and the most obvious symptoms differ between as well.

I feel that I’ve ended with a sweet,collaged image that coherently sums up the link between gender and Parkinsons without being too in your face, easy-to-digest and presents information clearly without detracting from the message.

For the poem half of my brief, I chose the poem ‘Shaking can be useful, if you let it be’. This poem explores a positive side of the shaking side effect of the disease, using beautiful imagery like creating the perfect cocktail and shaking the creases from a shirt just by holding it to put a positive spin on an otherwise negative trait. It really wasn’t what I expected it to be and was a pleasant, positive surprise to work with.

My initial ideas included drawing with my left, non-dominant hand to put myself in a position of vulnerability and give my lines a shaky quality so that I could experience to a tiny degree what people with a Parkinsons tremor went through, however I felt that this was a bit too touchy and sensitive to go through with, and so I tried a more visual approach for my next initial idea.

This idea was to illustrate straight from the poem–hence the lady with the shirt. This idea QUICKLY got stale though, and I felt that it didn’t capture the funny, uplifting tone of the poem at all. It was hard coming up with a concept, though, but after a long while trying to figure something out, the idea came to me initially as a doodle that developed more and became the thing I was going to run with.

I took the idea of shaking things from the poem–cocktails, maracas, spray paint, video game remotes, things like that–and within a few hours I had four figures, full of motion and energy and more accurately representative of the poems tone. I drew inspiration from graphic novels such as This One Summer and Blankets and artists such as Tomer Hanuka, simplifying my style, changing my line quality and exaggerating shape to create motion in a way that I don’t usually work in order to really bring the characters to life.

From there, I re-drew the lines in the first colour, red which I felt would stand out more effectively on the teal than the opposite way around. Then I used teal to isolate the characters and add little features to break them up.

Together, I really enjoyed how they worked together and added a border and text with the title of the poem. For the font, I used a generic font so that I could easily swap it out with whatever font was being used in the publication, however after talking to two of my tutors they agreed that it looked quite static compared to the characters.

Because of this, I attempted to hand-write it and add it in digitally, however this made the piece look very messy and juvenile, so instead I looked for lively fonts. And that led me to the number 1 font used in primary schools, used for its friendly, lively look; comic sans.