Another Sunday, another illustration credited to Mary Hilleren / Special to the Pioneer Press on the front of the Life section (here's my post about the earlier ones).
The good news first: It's not completely lacking in charm. The human figure near the top is kind of cute and has some style, unlike her earlier efforts. The color use is also better: you can tell where one thing ends and another starts, at least.
And maybe the concept is okay: a ice-fishing child is petting a fish, while under the ice there's a world of gifts waiting to be caught. It's kind of complicated, but I suppose it could work.
Except that it doesn't. First, there's no indication that the bottom two-thirds of the spatially complex image is supposed to be under water, other than the fact that there are fish flying or floating around. It doesn't look like water. And this begins to get at the biggest general problem with the illustration: what is figure and what is ground? After peering at it for a while, I realized the top third is supposed to be ice (note the arcs of an ice-skater's blade), while the green squiggly line is somehow the edge of the ice. The child is sitting with their feet... in the icy water? Is the fish's nose supposed to be out of the water? And down below the ice, what is that medium-blue blob behind the Christmas tree? Is it supposed to be a cave or something in the ice wall that comes up to the edge of the ice where the child sits?
Then there are the details that are amiss. I think the illustrator got some photos of aquarium plants or ocean plants for reference. There's nothing growing on a Minnesota lake bottom that looks like the tropical plant at middle right or the coral-like growths near bottom left.
Oh, and probably most glaringly wrong among the details: the "hole" in the ice is drawn with its shading inverted, so it looks like a disk sitting on top of the ice, rather than a hole into the ice. It's a really basic thing that anyone could see. Does it look like a hole? No, it goes up instead of down.
(And now I grumble to myself all the same thoughts I had about the Pioneer Press at the end of the previous post about this illustrator.)
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Another Bad Illustration in the Pioneer Press
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2 comments:
Yikes. Who even dreams up something like this illustration?
I think that the big blob is the rounded pyramid-like form that jewelry stores use to display necklaces. But here it looks like it’s used for a display of Christmas lights.
That would be even weirder (what is a giant display doing down in the lake?), but the fact that you see it as a convex shape, another person I showed it to saw it as a concave shape (a cave), and I see it as both... is another indication of the illustrator's problems.
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