Compendium of virtues.Part1

Brief: Design a dictionary in any medium defining 40 words.The words must relate to one subject.
Research dictionary types and forms, use of language – prescriptive/descriptive.
Consider:text, typographic systems, image, size, colour, medium.

‘It is often forgotten that dictionaries are artificial repositories, Put together well
after the language they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a
magical nature.’
Jorge Luis Borges

Response: Having such an open brief was a bit confusing at first because so far I have tried to approach the briefs from a commercial point of view. However, I felt it was time to drift away from the rigidity of that approach for a while and adopt a more personal way of dealing with the task. After doing a brief research into several areas of interest, I realised the main problem with that was finding 40 entries (not less) for the dictionarry.Regardless of my initial struggle (can’t believe I even made a diagram of that), I managed to find an area of interest which was wide and creative enough.So, I turned to illustration and decided to make a collection of drawings of virtues. Since virtues could be illustrated in a very vague way, which did not really fit with the concept of a dictionary, I decided to base it on the most fundamental way of teaching virtues, namely storytelling. An obvious, but not so easy to draw option was the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. An article by Vigen Guroian entitled Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues Through Fairy Tales was very useful source of contextual inspiration that backed up my initial way of thinking.

From that point onwards the reading of all Brother’s Grimm fairy tales commenced, which was accompanied by the process of assigning a virtue that each fairytale represents. Here, I also came up against another problem, which was to do with the fact that in most fairy tales there are set of 5 to 10 virtue that were repeating. This meant that not such a straightforward assignment should be employed but a more ambiguous one. After dealing with that, I set off with the actual drawing. It came natural for me to choose B&W and simple line drawing as a visual medium ( this also might have been a product of my slight fear of colour, but since I was also considering format at the same time I really think it was a right choice. In terms of the content of the drawings, I did not try to depict a certain moment from the narrative or a situation. The way I came up with the images was (at that time) more due to the complete mess in my mind created my the thousands of ferries, dragons, enchantresses, evil stepmothers, fictional kingdoms and mysterious monsters. So all this collided in my head and came out in the form of drawings that pinned down a number of events, locations and characters within the same composition. Imagination in this case played more significant role in the whole process, which was quite enjoyable.

For a period of 3 weeks I managed to make 36 drawings (some better than others).