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.