The Detective, In The Kitchen, With A Coin (ALSO ELEPHANTS)

Yesterday we had our visual language class where we showed everyone the painting we'd done in response to our last class. We got given three random words, a place a person and an object, and we had to make 5 different compositional sketches and then pick and paint our best one. I did mine in gouche and was actually super happy with the result. 

I chose to place the kitchen in the background as I felt it was the visual element that was least important , then I placed the detective and the coin in the very foreground. This is something I really never would have thought to do before the class but now I can see from looking at my sketches that the most exciting compositions are usually the ones where the information isn't just arranged like a crappy still life so you can see absolutely every part of everything and everyone, on the same plane as each other. 

compositional sketches

Final image

Also in todays session we learnt about framing an image and how we can do this most effectively. In response to this we got given another 3 random things, this time it was ourselves, and elephant and a butterfly, and we had to create the best composition we could considering everything we learnt in the last class, as well as framing.

I chose to make everything the size it would typically be, maybe scaling the elephant down a bit. I also knew I wanted to fill most of the frame with as much information as possible because I thought with a big subject matter like an elephant, this made the most sense. This was my final outcome:

I'm honestly not sure how I managed to make the colour values of this work so well when we had so little time to do it in, but there we go. I chose to show the elephant strangling or cuddling me, while I was looking at the butterfly perched on the elephants trunk, so the elephant really ended up taking up most of the frame, with me being a smaller feature in the middle and the butterfly an after-thought. I was really pleased with the outcome and think this session has helped me to think more carefully about how I'm composing my images, because images are so much more interesting when they're structured in a dynamic way.

The Day I Went Insane

WOW

I thought I was stressed in the last blog but holy cow. That stress has multiplied by 10000 today. We had our big class crit session today, so we had to lay out our progress and plans and page spreads on our desks and walk round to look at everyones stuff. 

It was literally only then, in the exact moment I was pulling my sketchbooks out of my bag to lay them on the table, that I realised that it was really only the street-view art that I'd been doing that was making me truly happy. And then I got into thinking "god I wish I could just draw lots of little shop fronts for my book..... oh wait, I can".

WHY HAS IT TAKEN ME THIS LONG TO REALISE?!

I think with all the importance put onto having a strong idea with deep meanings we learnt in A levels and GCSE is literally ingrained into me, and now its all I really tend to think of when I start a project. I have so many ideas, how can I communicate them all? Which ones can I combine successfully? How can I show I've used as many materials and processes as possible? 

When really, I need to learn that sometimes if you don't really have the most complex idea to start with then you can make it special by executing it really really well and working hard on the craft of the thing. (Rant over)

So finally moving forward (hopefully):
- work with the idea of the ghosts of past memories as shown through streetviews of current/abandoned shops
- MAKE THOSE PAGE SPREADS
-make a front and back cover
-print and bind

Progress

Today I have not left my desk all day. I think I'm going insane.

BUT

I have finished most of the images to go into my book! 

I just have two more to do tomorrow and then I can scan them into photoshop and put the text with them. In the end, I decided to focus my book around the things that myself and others perceive to be ghosts e.g. infrasound, dead celebrities, missing people and things. The ideas range from the serious to the ridiculous but most of all they reflect what I think it means to be a ghost, and my experience with going to York and feeling lonely. 

I wrote out just the words before embarking on making the images, which has made it feel more organic to me and has helped the process along as to a certain extent I'm now just illustrating my written words. The art work in this project has been partly inspired by a wonderful book I've been reading by Nina Cosford called My Name is Girl. I liked her sketchy use of watercolour and the textures of coloured pencil she uses over the top.

Nina Cosford- My Name is Girl

To do:

- Sleep
- finish the other two images
- scan them into photoshop

Making A Start

Well today has been a long one (as you can tell, I'm writing this at half 12 at night). The goal of today was to just make a start on the action plan we made up in my tutorial yesterday, which was basically to ask people what they thought a ghost was and then go from there. I am so lucky to have such creative and funny people around me, some of the answers I got for this question were amazing, a few of my favourites being my friend Amber, the most logical person in the world. She tried to talk me through something called infrasound, which is a low frequency sound, that is below the limit for normal human hearing, so is sometimes used to try and explain ghosts and some experiences people have claimed to have with them. Then there was my flat mate Max who sent me a paragraph long explanation of what he thinks spirits are and what they do after they leave the body. 

I just love how this subject means something so different to so many people, and also how so many people took the question so literally, and how others described it as a feeling or a thought. I think it can mean what you want it to mean, as technically one of the synonyms for a ghost is something that's absent, whereas I also found a definition on Urban Dictionary (which is a very, very scary place) that used the word ghosting for taking a hit of a bong so hard that when you exhale, no smoke comes out. Clearly, we've moved on a lot from the time when a ghost was just a scary thing rattling chains and moaning, so I'm going to focus on twisting the classic ideas of what a ghost is in my book. 

Here's a draft of my first storyboard, I'm not sure which bits I'll keep, but I compiled a few things from other peoples definitions of a ghost, as well as what the concept means to me. So far I've managed to keep the little ghost guy and the high street images but we'll see how we go with it.

I'm feeling a lot more positive about it now, I definitely think this idea has a lot more of me in it, and I've so far really enjoyed working with the words to create something a bit more thoughtful.

Research

Turning Point

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.

Visual Language- Composition

In visual language on Wednesday we talked about composition and how it can make for great illustration, we read a handout from a school in Connecticut which was so interesting. Amongst other things it said that composition meant the selection and arrangement of appropriate elements within the picture space so that they express the artists idea clearly and effectively. This put it so simply to me and made me so painfully aware of how much I'd not been considering composition in my work enough at all. 

In the hand out it also said that a good way to consider composition is to make all the shapes that you know will feature in your picture simplified and then just re-jiggle them until you find the best arrangement. I think in future projects I might consider doing this using paper cutouts and a photocopier. BUT, for this task, we were given three elements we had to include in a drawing and were told to sketch it out from three different viewpoints.

My three elements:
- a detective
- a coin
- a kitchen

Then we have to whittle these down to the best composition and make a final image from it using wet media (which is exciting because I've not painted anything in ages). 

For this task I think I need to keep in mind that sketching can be rough and still look effective, I need to keep telling myself to look at these Josh Cochran sketches, that are so simple compared to the final image but still get across exactly what he intends to do in the finished piece. I also need to remember to use light and shade in my sketches to my advantage, to create a sense of mood in an image. 

Visual Narratives

On Wednesday (our first day back after Christmas) we had a day in the studio where we talked about all the things were going to need to have ready for our tutorials on Monday. 

TO DO: (for the picture book)
- storyboard
- pages of artwork 
- plans with what direction I'm taking it in
- some vague idea of whether I'm doing a concertina or saddle-stitch book

Phew, thats actually a lot less things than I thought.

To prepare ourselves for storyboarding our own picture books, we made a storyboard of a film of our choice in the studio and had to get other people the guess what it was.

Mine was Scream (obviously). Now I realise it would have been a lot less obvious at first if I hadn't used words or the iconic scream mask but it has given me an idea how simplistic things can be and still be considered a storyboard. These sketches literally took no time but I guess the point of it is just to establish the plot of each page and where certain elements will be within the frame, a bit like the handout we looked at that talked about composition. 

We also tried to make our own concertina books in groups and my group did this cute book with a string of sausage dogs going across all the pages. I actually had no idea how difficult it would be to make a successful concertina book, but it turns out its very hard. Considering this is the method I can definitely see myself doing because I like the continuation of it, and the possibility to view it as one long story or each page individually, I payed a lot of attention to the do's and don'ts:

Do:

- use good quality paper

- take time when putting it all together to get all the pages straight

- maybe use a clamp to help dry the pages flat

Don't:

- stick the paper to the wrong page of the book

Heres our finished book:

Moving forward:
- I need to plan my weekend coming up to make sure I'm ready for the tutorial
- get my storyboard done
- pages of artwork done
- BLOG IT