Personal Professional Practice - End of Module Self Evaluation

Going into Level 4 I was initially a bit skeptical about PPP and the role it would play within the year, however I have found it to be the backbone of my practice and an integral part of my learning. This module, although feeling like somewhat of a burden, encouraged me to broaden my horizons in terms of artist and process research. It has also allowed me to draw a good understanding of the path I have travelled so far and where I plan to go through Level 5 and into my professional career. 

Despite the praise I give myself in these areas, I am not entirely happy with all of my work from within this module. I feel that the practical brief (Studio Brief 2) was my weakest aspect which is ironic as it was supposed to be the culmination of a years development. Whilst I feel the piece isn’t terrible, as it shows a marked improvement from my early work from within the year, I feel there is a lot that could be done to improve it. I never quite grasped the purpose of the brief, which hampered me. I failed to pick, in my eyes, a worthy topic. To improve the work I made a conscious effort to enforce skills and processes I have learnt this year, but without a strong narrative or point to be made I ultimately feel that this brief is one of my weakest of the year. I would like to go back into this pice and rework it, in the hopes of giving it a stronger purpose.

On a more positive note, I feel that my presentation (Studio Brief 3) went very well. My previous presentation in my Context of Practice module was not delivered as I intended - I rushed through my presentation for fear of overrunning the time constraints and failed to make suitable connections with my audience. With this presentation I ordered my slides more effectively and streamlined my notes. This allowed me to make much more eye contact with my peers and deliver a more engaging presentation.

As I head into Level 5 I want to continue the professional attitude I have displayed in recent months by spending more time within the studio, and discussing my work as articulately with my peers as I have been of late. I want to find more purpose within my work other than the imagery looking nice. I feel that I have touched upon this lately by considering what format my work will be displayed in ie zine etc. However my final practical brief, despite finding a format, failed largely due to a weak research base. I can’t let this be the case in future briefs. It is only through continual investigation and research into practitioners and processes that I will be able to create work that will make an impact both visually and with purpose.

Presentation: Creative Strategy

My presentation depicting the evolution of my illustrative work throughout Level 4:

Ping Zhu: Big Heads

Wow, so Ping Zhu was pretty cool (most likely due to her American accent). I found her to be quite interesting. Personally, her illustrations aren't that amazing in my eyes. I can, however, understand why she gets work. She has a great understanding of process, composition and colour. What interested me the most though was her sketchbook work. It looks terrible! And thats great! I've always disliked how awful my sketchbook work is compared to others, but seeing hers has really made me feel better about how I use my sketchbooks.

The Illustrated Self: Power Rangers Vs Hollywood

Here's my final outcome for PPP, a comment on how unoriginal Hollywood has become:

There are several things I would change however, for starters I feel the zine is far to short. The jokes don't have time to pay off. I also feel that more time could have been spent developing the piece. It in some areas feels cluttered and perhaps to rich in black etc.

The Illustrated Self: Zine Development

Today I spent 10 hours in the studio (exhaustive but rewarding) working on a zine for PPP. I feel that the poster just wouldn't work well on a large scale format but downsized looked okay. It got me thinking that I should push forward with my original zine idea.

By taking screen grabs of several Power Rangers episodes last night (and realising how truly dated that program is) I had enough stock images to create a zine using collage. I wanted to incorporate the defining aspects of my year into this piece, so I used collage, halftone, shape and thought greatly about the colour of the piece. I also added a bit of satirical humour into it as well as created a front and back cover (made from my unused poster). I used the Cintiq's to write the speech within the zine as I have terrible handwriting and was able to write over digital text to create a personal typeface of sorts.

I then printed it out.

The Illustrated Self: Poster Development

I decided to push forward with my poster development yesterday and sketched out a few ideas.

I spent the day developing my strongest ideas on Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. I began by cutting a figure of the red Power Ranger together which I then traced over using the light box. This was then transferred on Photoshop. I felt my line quality wasn't very strong though so transferred it to Illustrator to make stronger lines, however I ended up focusing more on shape. After playing around for a while I then move the image over to Photoshop again to add some texture to it.

I'm really not feeling this piece. It displays some of the qualities I've learnt over this year but I don't think it works well as a final piece of work. However it's been a long day and I need to rest.

The Illustrated Self: Sketchbook Development

Over the past few days I've been working in my sketchbook formulating ideas and visually investigating the subject of Power Rangers through repetitive drawing and media.

Whilst doing additional research I also came across these images from recent movie posters. There is a trend with poster designs at the moment (especially superhero films) where a character has his back the audience, a hero's mask is broken or there is a monster towering above a city.  thought about how I could present my work as a movie poster and looked at the Mondo movie posters created by Jock.

Here are the posters I found:

Could I make a series of Posters instead? I decided to draw out a few concept ideas  for these posters. (Insert photo of posters)

The Illustrated Self: Planning and Research

Unfortunately due to financial circumstances I can't afford to get to college this week so have worked from home. I dislike working from home as my neighbours are noisy and there are many more distractions than in the studio. I made a plan for the week but unfortunately it hasn't worked out as such, largely due to sorting out my accommodation next year outside of student accommodation which means an excessive amount of paperwork!

However I have managed to get a bit of research done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTXUD6YH-5A

Photo from new Godzilla film

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/man-of-steel/27096/zack-snyder-defends-the-mass-destruction-of-man-of-steel

http://comicsalliance.com/man-of-steel-destruction-estimate-750-billion-dollars-humor/

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-30/entertainment/ct-ent-0630-transformers-destruction-20110701_1_robot-hotel-monaco-appraiser

http://www.film.com/movies/cities-that-have-been-destroyed-the-most-onscreen

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/avengers-damage-manhattan-would-cost-160-billion-322486

I'm forming the idea to maybe make a small zine which would consist of the Power Rangers fighting off a Hollywood sized threat of some sort. I want it to display some humour which I like my pieces to have as I have shown in earlier pieces such as my Dracula piece from Visual Language. I'm thinking that there should be a joke of some sort about them saving a demolished city - much like in many current action films.

Emily Hughes: Big Heads

Today we were spoke to Emily Hughes who is a children's book illustrator. I'll be honest her work doesn't grab me too much (despite my interest in possible doing children's book work at some point). However, her repetitive sketches really stood out to me. This is an area in which I really need to improve upon…

The Illustrated Self: Tutorial

Today I had a tutorial with Matt. My ideas so far have only been around three possibilities; resting, tea drinking and television.

I don't feel too passionately about any of them in all honesty, however on the weekend I found out that Hollywood is going to ruin another of my cherished childhood TV programmes by releasing an rebooted Power Rangers movie!

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/07/new-power-rangers-movie-announced

I'm now waiting for a typical 'giant robot vs alien explosive popcorn movie' that is the trend in Hollywood to appear.

I explained my idea to Matt and he warned me of the limitations of my subject. I have to ask myself, 'is there enough substance here'? If this was an editorial piece for which I was making an illustration for then maybe, but beyond that? I'm going to have to give this some thought,and soon. I have just two weeks to prepare my work for hand in which is not much time at all.

The Illustrated Self

Our latest brief I feel I'm going to struggle with. We must create a piece of work based on something that we are passionate or excited about, and well I don't generally get excited or passionate about many things. I am quite bland. I like to relax, read, watch TV and films, and drink tea. Not very exciting!

Here is an A1 sheet of paper with idea generation and questions to ask myself.

Maybe I could make my subject interesting via the process in which I create it rather than having an exciting subject itself?

Context of Practice - End of Module Self Evaluation

Context of Practise was initially a difficult module for me; I found it hard to get my head around denotation and connotation among other semiotic theories. However once I did I began to really enjoy the module.

For the most part my daily commute from Leeds to York has been somewhat of a pain, however it greatly benefited me when it came time to prepare for my essay. My journey roughly takes about half an hour so each day I withdrew several books and spent the travel time formulating ideas and reading extracts that may have been important to my essay writing. This early research was integral as my laptop unfortunately died. I had failed to back up my work and my completed essay was lost. I had to hurriedly rewrite the entire thing and without my early planning and note taking I would not have completed my essay before the hand in date.

After my essay I did not look forward to continuing to study the area of female degradation as it made me feel horrible as a man. However as my research evolved I came to understand that men were being victimised just as much as women. I am glad that I pushed further with my visual research in my development sketchbook as this realisation would not have occurred if I hadn’t.

I feel that while my development work is strong it fails in the final steps somewhat. The characters within my book were not as refined as I’d have liked. This was down to a lack of investigation into body shape, which is quite an integral part of my final piece.  Given more time I would have gone back and reworked these characters, refining them and perhaps making there later body shapes more exaggerated. I was against doing this but feel that ultimately doing so would have added an extra element of humour towards what is actually a very sad subject. In the final stages however I feel that my experimentation with colour really benefitted my work. By developing a greater understanding of colour I was able to take my work to a high professional level. Unfortunately technology again failed me when I came to printing the work out; from InDesign I some how printed the pages in the wrong order. In the future I’ll have to take extra care to make sure I understand the printing process so my work is presented in the best possible way.

Going forward I’m going to have be more prepared for unforeseen events such as these. Technology hampered me in several instances throughout this module. By thoroughly researching and making backups of my work I’ll hopefully be able to prevent instances like this happening to me again in later modules. I also hope to take my research and development further going into Level 5 by thinking about the context my study has within society. 

Roman Muradov: Big Heads

Roman Muradov is brilliantly awkward person. As is the norm with these Skype conversations Roman showed us his work whilst detailing his process - but what interested me the most was the fact that he doesn't seem to be too well off financially. He lives in a small (messy) apartment where he also works. Despite of this he has won several awards. This raises an interesting point, do I want to illustrate for money or acclaim? Or do I just want to make work for myself and see if it sells?

Deth. P. Sun

Today I nipped in to visit the Deth. P. Sun exhibit in the college and quite enjoyed what I saw! By (what looks like) painting on wood, the artist has created a series of pieces concern a collection of characters. He uses colour and shape extremely well within his easy to view pieces. However, I was left wondering whether this is illustration or fine art. Perhaps if the images with the room were part an obviously sequential narrative then they could definitely be considered illustration. Without meaning or purpose and lack a cohesive narrative, I believe that these pieces should be considered fine art.

InDesign Refresher

Today I went about putting Perception together. Although I took part in the inDesign tutorials, I couldn't quite remember the process of layout in inDesign so went on youtube to find a how to.



I also used youtube to remind me how to import images into inDesign.