This journey started with the Typology poster project which immediately struck fear into my heart as I didn’t even know what a typology poster was, but once I’d found out they were similar to the Birds of Britain posters I was all for it. This brief in particular that as a challenge as I’ve never really drawn people, I felt like I was rubbish at it and that it wasn’t worth bothering but something changed during this brief, maybe it was all the talent sitting around me or maybe it was that I REALLY worry about trying to look like I know what I’m doing. But either way I found an ok way of characterising all the people, and then found a nice way of drawing them with pro-marker and I was happy.
So definitely got off to a good start, but then we were given the Illumination briefing which sounded so up my street until I was given a very depressing article my George Monbiot about how technology is making us lonely and will be the death of us all (sigh). At first I really struggled to pick out any imagery in it as I felt so blinded by the sensationalist nature of it all, but after I got over that it was actually quite an enjoyable process. I liked the systematic approach of going through the text, finding imagery or a sentence that appealed to imagination and then sketching based on just that. Doing this project based mainly on a piece of someone elses writing also made me realise, its ok not to agree 100% with the thing that you’re asked to illustrate, you can still make some nice imagery out of something you wouldn't personally say. This brief also bought me back to using collage which is one of my favourite media to use, but did also encourage me into using it in a newly simplistic way. I realised through this how much I can tend to overcomplicate things and how effectively a story can be told with just the bare minimum in shapes and line.
The final brief was the was the Judge a Book by its cover one which I’d originally thought would be the one where I could excel at… turns out I’m not as good at book covers as I’d thought as this one really challenged me. What really threw me off was not being able to pick the book we would be illustrating the jacket of, which is not something I’ve ever done before. It meant going into it completely blind and as there was no time to read the whole thing I ended up getting really into the authors Ted Talks, just reading the bits of the book that sounded most relevant and crossing fingers for a miracle. Fortunately I got quite inspired by the images inside the book taken by the author of the masses of thrown away product outside supermarkets and the volume at which things were being thrown away. For this project I really tried to push myself not to only rely on analogue media as I know I can be such a technophobe. I ventured onto photoshop to change some of the elements of the cover and add text to make it look more professional which is something give not done in ages but was really happy with the outcome.
Something else I’ve really surprised myself with is how much I’ve appreciated blogging and what it can do to help with my practice. For someone that would usually take pride in doing a meticulously detailed and ‘pretty’ artists research page or evaluations in my sketchbook, its pushed me to not make everything look forced and perfect and just to get it down before I forget it. Its been good to keep as almost some sort of diary of my work as well and has helped me to stay out of my own head. I think what I’m trying to say is that although the short and sweet nature of these briefs frustrated me at first, I can now see that they were designed to encourage us to work and think fast, and to push us out of our comfort zones. And to be honest it really worked for making me more adventurous and playful. No longer do I care about my sketchbooks looking messy (much), AND I even used a computer. So even if I’ve not done the best technically, I’ve pushed myself to do things that were’t even on my radar in foundation, and for that I’m really happy.
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