At the beginning of this project I was excited by the
prospect of writing my own brief, so excited in fact that I got carried away
thinking of the different products and designs that I’d wanted to make. I lost
sight of the fact that we only had a small time in which to do this. By the
time our briefing after Easter came around I realised how far off track I’d
gone, and narrowed down the now massive project to designing and making 4
images themed around the My Favourite Murder podcast. I wanted to include the
elements of dark humour and a feminist survival outlook that are a huge part of
the podcast, but still make something beautiful and decorative that people
would want to wear and own.
I began this process by choosing the most popular quotes from
the show and then sketching things that I thought visually represented that, I
already had some ideas of elements that I wanted to incorporate into these
drawings, such as skulls, poison, weapons and retro looking phones as these all
feature heavily on the podcast. Once I’d made a few that I liked I started
painting in black ink. At this time, I still thought that my final images would
end up being black on white stock. As I often tend to overcomplicate my work,
repeating this mistake was already a concern for me, so I wanted to keep them
looking graphic but clean and simple.
However, once I scanned them into the computer and started
working on them in Adobe Photoshop I realised they didn’t translate as well as
I’d hoped. They looked flat, and the colour scheme was a bit too dull. Whilst
doing research on the merch already available I saw that most items stuck to a
red, black and white colour scheme which I thought was a bit boring. So, next I
tried to rework my original drawings, avoiding this colour scheme. I chose to
work in pastel hues, and once I began doing this I instantly knew what shape my
project would end up taking. I tried to play up the juxtaposition between the
dark comedy quotes and the imagery, creating little wreaths made out of skulls
and weapons to go with my quotes. I added the illustrations onto square,
brightly coloured backgrounds and I felt like they suddenly looked like a
cohesive set.
I really enjoyed the application element of this project,
choosing relevant products that my target audience would enjoy and applying my
illustrations to them. I feel this is something I’m quite good at, and
something I hope to take into my practice in the future. This also made me
realise my interest in making and designing homewares and apparel, I feel that
my strength in working with text and image together fits this kind of brief
perfectly, as these items often have slogans or writing on. However, next
project I need to remember not to get so carried away, and aim to do fewer
things, but to a higher standard. I also need to work at managing my time
better. In spite of this, I definitely feel that I have more of a sense of
myself as illustrator and where my illustrations fit in the wider world now,
and I’m ready to push this further next year.
