Today I had my tutorial which was much needed as I've had a majorly foggy head for the whole of this project (if you couldn't already tell from my erratic blog posts). I feel partly like we had a bit of a breakthrough, but also like it makes me really sad that I think a lot of the problems I've encountered in this brief have stemmed from me not having enough belief in myself or what I'm doing.
I started out really excited by the idea of getting to do a whole project based around ghosts and haunted creepy places, and even more excited when I got to do a trip to York. Then I came up with the two ideas of the ghost character and the high-street paintings and literally after that completely hit a brick wall. I really really tried to find a way around it as well, I literally was trying anything to get my little ghost guy to link in well with the street drawings, and whatever I tried it just didn't work. I think in my tutorial today we agreed that the ghost idea was a nice one, but that it didn't really have legs, and that maybe I just got too over-excited about being able to do all my own research for a project and going out and being a journalist, that I was trying to find more content in the subject than maybe there really was.
I also made the point that I am a really linear, literal person in most respects, and that's really been made apparent in this brief. The project is a really open and diverse one where we don't have to make a book which had any clear narrative running through it, I've somehow taken that in my head and made it something that needs to fit a certain application, most likely a children's book. ALL of my storyboards have ended up looking a bit like a kids fiction book, and actually I think at first the idea of making the book as if it needed to fit a certain application was a way of me trying to make the project into something less open-ended and scary. I've realised that one of my 'strengths' would be that I work quite well under certain restraints, which maybe worked to my advantage for the first set of briefs we were given, which were shorter and more specific. But when given the chance to make something more led just by me, and I've absolutely panicked under the pressure, its almost like I have so many ideas and so many ways I want to take it in that I don't settle on one and then it just looks messy.
Its also worth noting that right from the start of this project, I'd pretty much made up my mind that I wanted to make my response to the brief something funny and light-hearted, which seems to be a common theme in a lot of my work. This has meant that I've received a lot of nice feedback from people who find this kind of cute art really visually pleasing, and while I think humour is a valuable element to my work, I need to recognise that not every situation suits being light-hearted and 'cutesy'. There is an area in between the funny stuff and really heavy, serious art that I have yet to explore. I'm only just starting to wrap my head around is that you can make pictures that are jovial and clever, but that also say something of value. And I'm a young person with a lot of opinions that I like to talk about in my life outside of my illustrative practise, so surely these should naturally cross over sometimes?
I'm not really sure where this phobia of putting myself across in my work comes from, but I think it might be to with the fact that I've always feared being one of those people that takes themselves too seriously. But now I'm old enough to know that although I can act like a mug outside of illustration with my friends, as an aspiring illustrator, I've been given a platform, which means that potentially my art will actually be seen by people. This means that if I've got some kind of feeling towards something, or an agenda or an opinion, its OK to try and communicate that in my work, because that's communicating a little piece of myself to someone else. Not only is that really cool, but that's probably likely to make my work more relatable to other people who share the same opinion, or if they don't share the same opinion they might just respect me for being so honest about mine.
Bottom line to this very rambley rant, I need to start trusting myself with the content I make. And I need to learn to please myself before I go looking for the approval of others, I am the one making the pictures, so therefore I should find them enjoyable to make, and take the same amount of value (if not more) from them as others.
No comments:
Post a Comment