OUIL405 - End of Module Evaluation

1. What skills have you developed through this brief and how effectively do you think you have applied them?
This brief helped me develop my research and evaluation skills, having to do Studio Brief 1 and collect as much physical evidence as possible in order to come up with a subject matter for the next brief and to help the project develop showed me the importance of extensive research prior to beginning a brief in order to just stimulate ideas. I learnt that constantly gathering physical research like photos and simply sitting somewhere and observing can help generate loads of different ideas and help you to develop a project if you get stuck. I think I applied this very well during my project, because after my first time of just sitting and observing I got a bit stuck for ideas, but after my second time sitting in Trinity and just watching people and taking notes of things I found interesting, helped me to come up with a project that I became really interested in and really liked the outcomes.

2. What approaches to/methods of image making have you developed and how have they informed your concept development process?
When I was just putting down my initial ideas of a concept rather than thinking about the actual visual aesthetic of the ideas I just used a pencil to quickly keep track of my ideas or things I thought could develop into a full illustration, but as I started to think about what I wanted to my illustrations to communicate, I wanted them to be funny and kind of hectic looking, I changed the media I used to better suite what I wanted my images to say. At first I tried using a brush pen and doing quick and not very neat sketches with block colours and no texture. After lots of experimenting with this one of the images I did, where I overlapped two block colours, made me decide I wanted to screen print my final book. After this I started to make my images look a bit cleaner and made more of a uniform line quality in order to make it easier to screen print, however I think this took away from how I originally wanted my work to come across.

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
I think the biggest strength in my work is that I can make people laugh. A lot of the feedback I received in the crit was that my work made people laugh and they could either relate to the characters I portrayed in my work or that they knew someone exactly like that. I want to continue making humorous work but also make work that has more a specific message. In this brief I made work that satirised our youth culture but didn't particularly have a clear purpose or message, other than to make people laugh. I want to combine humor and also work that communicates something important.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?
I think that in general I sometimes lack the quantity of development work that is needed, sometimes I tend to only develop my ideas a little bit and when I find something I really like, stick to it rather than try to really improve it. I get too excited about creating the finished product rather than spending time developing lots and lots of ideas to create the best possible outcome. Although I was very happy with the outcome of my final book for this project I wish I had spent more time experimenting with media or possible materials for my book, although I think that what I came out with in the end did in fact communicate what I wanted it to, I think I could have found a different media that allowed me to spend more time on making my actual book into something interesting and different. In the future I will spend more time exploring different ideas rather than focussing on one and just using one media that I think works best.

5. Identify 5 things you will do differently next time and what you expect to gain from doing these?
Next time I plan to spread my time more equally between research, developing and creating a finished piece of work. I want to explore lots of different alternatives to creating work and create something that looks completely different to what I have made before. I think that if I do this I will begin to find more and more ways of working that bring out my ability to entertain people and make people think with my work. Balancing my time equally will help to make all aspects of my briefs the best they can be, doing more research will better inform my ideas and help me come up with more, combining this with more experimentation and documentation will help make me decide what method of working best suites me.

6. How would you grade yourself on the following areas?
Attendance - 5
Punctuality - 4
Motivation - 4
Commitment - 4
Quantity of work produced - 4
Quality of work produced - 5
Contribution to the group - 4

OUIL405 - Peer Feedback and Time Management

I really enjoyed the crit and I think the feedback I received was really useful and showed me that my work had achieved what I originally set out to do, be funny and relatable and un offensive at the same time.

Instead of planning my days hour by hour I find it more practical and realistic to just make to do lists and write what I need to do on each day. I think this works well with the way my brain processes stuff.

OUIL405 - Studio Brief 2 - A book of.. Making the book.

Before making my final book I made a mock up concertina book with sketches in to plan where I would place each image and make sure they looked right within the frame of the A4 page. Originally because I wanted to screen print my book, I was going to do the concertina double sided and stick the long, large sheets together. However after planning my week a little better I decided that I wouldn't have time to screen print, so I decided to use digital printing instead.

Because I was digitally printing I decided I could no longer make a concertina book, so would just make a normal, stitched book, which would save a lot of time.

As I had already made all the negatives for screen printing, I decided I would scan these into Photoshop, and colourise them, in order to get a similar overlapping effect still using the bold shaped of colour.

This is my final finished book after I had stitched it together. I am quite pleased with the overall finished thing, I think the colour turned out how I wanted, although the layout could have been better, I kind of like how there is only one image on two of the pages.

OUIL405 - Progress Surgery

I found my progress surgery to be really useful, obviously realising I didn't have any time             

to screen print meant I had to change my timetable and reschedule things that I had planned. I also had to book a digital printing slot in order to print after I had colourised all of my negatives. The crit also helped me think about what I want to do in my future briefs and what I want to communicate, I realised I need to start thinking about who I want to be as a professional illustrator.

OUIL404 - Studio Brief 2 - What is composition?

For studio brief 2 I decided to change my area of research to look at dog shows, as I got bored of my last topic and thought it would help me make better work if I changed to something new.

I wanted to focus mainly on the dog's from the dog show, as in this brief we were asked to include a figure, an object and a landscape in our composition.

I thought the most dynamic looking image was the one with the two dogs, as this provided a unique point of view and could easily include all of the aspects that were required.

For the final image I wanted to use a different media from what I would usually use. I used a mix of acrylic and gouache paint to create a thick and bold block colour, then dabbed the paint with tissue to make a texture for the dogs fur.

OUIL404 - Studio Brief 2 - 3D and Lens

My super power was to have hair and eyebrows that grew really fast and never stopped growing, because I have always dreamt of having long eyebrow hairs so I didn't have to draw them on. Obviously I would shape them a bit better if I really had eyebrows that long and I don't think they'd be white. 

It was really hard to get the paper to stick properly to my face and hair hence why it isn't positioned properly on the left hand side.

I couldn't think of any other super power that I'd want that I could illustrate legally and safely.

OUIL405 - Studio Brief 2 - A Book of...

Research and critical awareness

• I first began my research for this brief in the Trinity centre, standing outside Topshop and Urban Outfitters counting how many people went inside, I then went inside to photograph clothing that caught my attention, there were a lot of weird clothes that got me asking the question "What the fuck is that and who the hell would wear it"
• Looking at these fashion trends lead me on to wanting to satirise youth culture and the trends that have become popular recently 

Problem analysis and problem solving

• I knew that taking the mick out of people and popular culture could be offensive if I didn't do it in the right way, so I wanted to create something that was funny and that people could relate to, kind of taking the piss out of ourselves and even if people reading this do the things I am making fun of, they can still find humour in it.
• To solve this problem I decided to go with a simple low fi style, which would better communicate the humour rather than a realistic drawing style

Practical developments

• I started out by making quite detailed illustrations, not thinking about how I would actually create my final book, when I thought about how I wanted the finished thing to look, I decided I wanted to try and screen print it, so I started to draw in a more simple and graphic way using only two colours.
• The type of pen I used also affected the way my work turned out. When I was doing the more detailed drawings I just used a normal pencil, however when I switched to a brush pen when doing the simpler drawings I found that the lines became much more fluid.

Visual quality

• Because I wanted my work to communicate humour and satire I didn't want the line quality and overall texture of my work to be perfect, seeing as I wanted to screen print my work I knew that when making the negatives, using an uneven fill of colour would make the ink also uneven. I also wanted some of the colour to overlap, to create the look of a screenprinted image.

Organisation and evaluation

• After I wrote down everything that I had to do to finish and create this book I decided that I would not have time to fully screen print it, so I decided that it would be better to scan my negatives into photoshop and digitally print them instead. Although I wanted to screen print my book this mistake has helped me realise that I need to better plan my time and make my outcomes realistic to what I can actually achieve in the time I have in my future briefs.

After I decided I wanted to screen print my final book, I wanted to make something that was a bit more simplistic and graphic which would lend itself more to the printing method. I decided to start using a brush pen rather than just a pencil, because I liked the more fluid and messy lines it created, rather than the clean ones made with a pencil, I think this helped communicate the humor a bit more as well.

This was the sketch that made me decide I wanted to screen print, I really liked layering the colours, especially how the black is partially see through so you can still see some of the red, I wanted to try and recreate this by screen printing.

The sketches below are what I went on to develop after my initial ones, Although I tried to improve some of the first sketches I think I kind of lost some of the flow and quickness the first ones had, because I was taking more time on them and trying to make them look neat. 

When I was making the images for the actual book I wanted to make sure I spent less time on trying to make them look perfect and neat and focussed more on just communicating the humor.