The illustration project started as a mission to provide more variety to the illustrations about African characters in microstock image banks. Along the way my mission evolved into a personal sensemaking attempt about my role in a complex social setting.
I began my journey by setting a loose frame to my illustration project. I had a vague idea I wanted to draw illustrations about Africans to microstock image banks such as Dreamstime, Adobe Stock, Fotolia and Istock among others. The idea came from frustration I felt going through these sites. The overall impression I had was that many of the illustrations provided kind of narrow representation of what it is to be an African. I saw images of rural women carrying pots on their heads and babies on their backs and nothing much. The images seemed to lack time and space. They were just floating somewhere in Africa unchanged by time. They seemed to have no message or agenda. Just pretty exotic images, that’s all. They were balanced by variety of images of modern city life depictions of black characters, usually labelled as African-American, lacking any references to the continent of Africa. I wanted to provide illustrations that were characteristically African with depth and which did not appear stereotypical. This was the setting where I began to plan the project.
My first sketches were explorative in nature. I really had no idea what topic I would choose. I only knew I wanted to create characters with depth. They should have a background, future, motives, feelings and personality.
As I sketched I tried to steer away anything stereotypical and offending. I felt like my own big brother, watching over every move to reveal the least of mistakes. I had a feeling that whatever I drew was biased somehow. I felt suffocated. Sketching was slow and unfruitful until I decided to analyse my works at a later stage instead of during or immediately after drawing.
From the beginning I struggled with the idea of white person drawing black people. How could I as a European designer define how an Africans would be seen. Should not I leave that task for the Africans themselves? I would forever only be able to give an outsiders view on things. I would continue the colonial setting of the white defining the black, the first world dictating how the third world should be seen. To decolonise the setting I should have left the job altogether. I never came to any catharsis with this dilemma. I just chose to plug my ears from the nagging voices to enable me continue drawing.
In attempt to release my creativity I collected some magazine cut outs and tried a collage method. Combining an image of an African mask and an image of a mother playing with her children produced an interesting outcome. I made a sketch based on the two photos. In the sketch a mask headed woman plays with white children. It reminded me of a mammy character and the role of blacks as house helps in Western popular culture.
I became fascinated by the house help theme. I reflected it with my own experiences with a young relative who had lived with us for a period of four years as our ward helping in house chores. Her position resembled that of a house help in some ways. She also represented a larger group known as house girls and their male equivalent house boys. They are a part of Ghanaian culture difficult for outsiders like me to fully understand at first sight. I thought this could be a fruitful topic to illustrate. I did however hesitate due to the private nature of the topic.
The outcome was a vector silhouette collection that will be put on sale on microstock image banks and an art series that can be showcased online or in an exhibition and sold as art prints.
ILLUSTRATING THE OTHER 