Shade

Shade: Silhouettes led by Darren Raven

'A silhouette is the image of a person, an object or scene consisting of the outline

and a featureless interior, with the silhouetted object usually being black or some

other solid colour or texture. The silhouette is a powerful tool in graphic

communication – it’ s both specific in what it conveys and yet vague in leaving out

most of the details for the viewer to fill in for themselves.

In this workshop we will work with silhouettes to produce large images that,

similarly to silhouettes themselves, cause the viewer to fill in the gaps.'

In this workshop with Darren, we used silhouettes to create images to represent London using illustrator to work with vector images that we found on the Internet, and that were already downloaded. The key to a successful piece of work was to keep it extremely simple but also witty. However, I found working with these vector images a little bit boring and decided to take a more traditional approach to the word 'silhouette' using the traditional method of cutting to produce images.

After researching silhouettes on the Internet, I came across a few designers that really inspired me to make my own work. 'Famille Summerbelle' creates some amazing paper cut designs that feature such delicacy, and are extremely attractive to look at.