Chris Roden Graphics Unit 2 Exam: March 2012

Chris Roden Case Study.
Rupert Fawcett Daddy

Context and Content:

The book I will be looking at is one of three books called daddy created by Rupert Fawcett.
The book had different stories within the one book. The main theme of the book is about a family man called Stephen who thinks he does more around the house than what his wife does and acts towards his children as if he had invented the wheel, generally in the short stories there are typical everyday occurrences which would happen to a dad. The creator adds his own personal experiences into the book so there could be a point of view perspective from the dad in a family. The other books that Rupert Fawcett has created all have the title ‘Daddy’ that all link to each other, they are practically one book separated into three. In the book, all the short stories have a short narrative which follows codes and conventions. The speech is in a question and response format, the layout is in chronological order and nothing is exactly perfect, it all has a unique touch so if he where to do it again there would be something different all the time.

Form:

Rupert Fawcett hasn’t used colour in any of his drawings and stories, instead he used achromatic tones, black, white and grey. The reason for this is because colours are a way to draw attention to a certain point of the image whilst achromatic tones make the whole image the focus, you can show everything as equal in the picture. The texture in this book varies on the type of surface, the background looks hard but smooth, the clothing generally looks quiet rough but soft and finally object look very hard, rigid but resistant to the touch. Throughout the book there is a very shallow depth, mainly the characters are in front to show there importance in the story, and everything else is in a shallow depth to show they are all as important as each other but not as much as the characters. Also the work holds together throughout, all the elements of the work, work well together , the illustrations are mainly the same setting but the characters change and this is really effective, it has an edge of reality to it in the drawings. Everything is controlled in the stories, Rupert decides where the characters will be place and everything is in its place where he wanted it to be. You can tell that the stories have been drawn by hand by the roughness of them and the way the characters aren’t always the same, and never will be exactly the same. The illustrations have been designed around the narrative and not just randomly designed.

Process:

The process of the book would be time consuming, putting loads of stories together into one book. The process of the illustrations are black ink pen, the illustrations began as doodles in a notebook then became more detailed and they where drew around the narrative. The narrative process depends, stories could hit the creator from a personal experience that just happened at the moment in time to an experience that happened and exaggerated days later into the story also a lot of his stories are observational drawings. The process of each story starts of with an inspiration, which in this case was he young children, to a narrative, then doodles, and then go into more detail with the doodles. He started of with direct distribution of each short story for free in the London underground, then got approached with a contract with rights of publishing. Now his work is distributed through different big companies, such as WHSmiths and Moonpig.

Personal Response:

When I first starting look at Rupert Fawcetts work it really caught my attention, with the humor used in it, and also how simple the drawings where how well they worked with the narrative. It also reminds me of my childhood, with me and my dad but not as exaggerated as the stories. The stories cheer me up when I read them and always make me laugh. He uses very visual words which puts you in the story. Its hard to say what I dislike about the stories, but its easy to say what I like, such as how they are very easy to relate to in either childhood or if you are, fatherhood. I like how simple they are to understand and how quick they get to the joke and also how they are drawn which shows how the artist feels with the use of achromatic tones.