Trends in Illustration: A digital approach to large format illustrations on Igbo folklore.

Abstract

From past times oral literature had been the norm for the transmission of folktales. Time came when scholars from Nigeria and Igbo Society in particular came to academic recognition of the latent potentials in folktales. With that, a lot of oral literature were researched on and written down. Thus this led to various publications on the Igbo folktales. During the heydays of contemporary Nigerian artists, art scholars like Uche Okeke, Chike Aniakor, and Obiora Udechukwu, to mention a few, used visual metaphors to portray some of the Igbo folklore, particularly in the form of Uli lines. Today, digital media in Nigeria is not farfetched. However, much experiments and visual expressions of Igbo folklore have not been explored using these modern digital media. In view of this, this study uses Adobe Photoshop CS4, a digital draw and paint tool, to illustrate some of the notable folktales in Igbo oral tradition. Vector and Raster techniques of computer graphics will be employed and discussed. Basic information on digital illustration will also be enumerated in the project. This piece of information will be useful to art Scholars, art teachers and art practitioners at large who intend to develop their potentials in illustration technique.