CarlUni

[carluni]

SWOT and Future Plans

Strength

I am a critical thinker, and always have my own opinion on things that I will always try to argue yet I am not stubborn to the point of not accepting new ideas or viewpoints. I am not afraid of taking the road less travelled and trying something different from the norm.

Weakness

I do struggle to stand up and share these ideas, I do have an anxiety of being seen as wrong that stops me from sharing my opinion, even if it could be a good view or opinion. Time management still causes a problem for me and my work, and this year I have found motivation for certain work difficult

Opportunities

This course has offered me a safe space away from criticism to speak my ideas, within our post lecture discussions. To be able to work on my anxieties and involve myself more with critical thinking and discussion of lectures.

Threats

My lack of confidence does stop me from speaking up in certain situations, even when I feel I have something worth contributing. My time keeping problem stops me from giving sufficient time and effort into certain aspects of my work. Motivation ties into the time keeping problem, since I have not enjoyed some work I have put it off and that has resulted in poor results.

Future plans

I have a lot of things to work on. Again time management is a skill I need to work on as it stops me from researching mainly but sometime it stops me from getting the best possible result in my work and therefore not showing off the best of my capabilities. Motivation has been a constant struggle but I feel the biggest reason was this worry of the second year having to be a professional already and I removed myself from my work too much, to the point I did not enjoy what I created. some briefs this year have been unappealing to me but it is my job as a creative artist to make it fun for myself and impose my personality onto the work. To work on these skills over my summer break I have ideas of small creative projects to set myself and hopefully develop my skills during such as my time management but will also keep me wanting to create, and make this new found inspiration last ready for my third year. Thinking about this want to create I will try to spend more time just creating in some illustrative way to keep me always thinking creatively and develop my technical skills.

To overcome my confidence issues I feel the best thing I can do is use social media to my advantage and share my ideas and opinions more often, alongside my artwork. I recently created an Instagram that I will use to try and document my creative processes in a more casual way, as this means I will get my work out there and gain an audience, by not worry too much about everyone liking it or it being perfect. It is a way for me to express myself and get myself out there without feeling like I will be completely exposed. On the other hand I need to create a professional portfolio, ready for the career side of my future, for clients to view my best work and get me ready for working for more real world clients. Specking of clients I do need to get out there and make more contacts for myself no matter if it is research or clients to work for, it is something to look into for the summer.

[carluni]

Strangequarters album cover

My contextual studies tutor approached me and another student with a proposal of a live brief that we both accepted, and it is to create the album cover for his band. We were given the imagery and album title our job was more about thee structure of the design, and our main guidance point was a want of the cover to pay homage to the pelican books.

We started with a small brainstorm of ideas of what it requires and what aesthetics to include in order to fulfil client needs. The main aspects of the pelican books we found were the large type, bold geometric lines and block colour. With this in mind we created a few slightly different ideas similar to our initial first final (first image) we wanted to use the given imagery as a background then tried using it to dictate the placement of the text that was then separated with white lining, to imitate the separation of white space and colour found on pelican book covers. We took this idea to our client for review to get feedback and see where to take it cos although we were happy with it’s idea we wanted to see what the client truly wanted.

The main feedback we received was this desire for the image to be a focused image rather than a background. I instantly had an idea of how to do this, by using the lines from our first design to emphasise and outline the image. We changed to black lines to make a more noticeable juxtaposition between image and background and it only helped make it seem more like a pelican book in style.

Again we took this idea to the client to see if there were more significant improvements to be made other than reworking the spacing and making it look more professional. The only request was to add a colour to it beside the image with a suggestion of a pastel like blue found on the cover of a certain pelican book. We have yet to get to experimenting with this but should be able to get to it soon enough and hopefully be creating the final image to be used for the album. 

[carluni]

Daniel Graves

Again I looked into this artist because of the Joanne Newman lecture, but I obviously new him prior but as just a music pass time. It did help that not long before the lecture he had released a video alongside social media statuses explaining his work ethic and personal philosophy that I could look back on to help my research.

Although he is a musician and therefore a different artist from myself, I like seeing how he can use his medium to portray a message to his audience through sound and occasional music videos. What makes him more interesting to me is how he creates his work with an idea in mind, an initial narrative in order to create it successfully, however he will never share this with his audience and instead lets them create their own meaning from his work. He stated how it does not remove him from his work yet does not deny the creativity of the audience, it in a way becomes their art of how the react to it.

He has become more open recently in his creative reasoning and explaining why he does certain things, and I have found him to be very situtionist as of late in how he decided against creating albums anymore as he says it takes an effort to create an entire storyline to stretch through an album that makes it seem chore like as opposed to what it should be; fun. He has also hated in a way the over commercialisation of music, not to the point of hating money as he has to fund what he does, but to make him change why he does certain things. The most notable of late being a short tour where he did not announce tour stops until the day of the show, to make more of a feel of going for the music and experiencing art rather than just for the personality.

I find him to be a very inspirational role model, that will influence how I work in a way of making it initially for me not to fulfil the needs purely for someone else.

[carluni]

Melanie Martinez

Relating to Joanne Newman and the idea of juxtaposition within art being used effectively I looked more analytically at my personal interest in music and how they use their medium to tell a story.

Starting with Melanie Martinez, a music artist whose first album told a story of a girl and her real world struggles, but what makes it interesting to me is the way she tells it not only through song but a series of music videos to accompany, but all done with pastel colours and seemingly happy imagery, that juxtaposes the dark meaning of her music. An example would be her song dollhouse, which is all about family troubles and keeping secrets from one another yet always putting on a fake smile to appear to be normal to others. She manages this in the video by having all the characters appear in a little girls dollhouse, with nicely done make up and clothes and cutesy imagery with pastel colours that get progressively more disturbed as the video goes on. This does not exactly tie to my practice as a designer apart from the juxtaposition, but the more important thing to me is the work of artists outside of traditional art and how effective it works in the real world.

[carluni]

Joanne Newman

The final lecture that helped me was presented by Joanne Newman. There were quite a few reasons why I enjoyed this.

The overall and most important reason being that I agreed with her philosophy, of always putting herself into her art and always having a personal connection to what she creates. She enjoys interaction with art as it helps strengthen the connection between artist and audience, and again makes the art seem more personal as everyone will react different, as opposed to simply admiring art in the same way as someone else. She stated how we should always have fun with our work and if we did have fun when creating then the work itself has already been successful, which is a humbling thought to me that my work does not have to become this huge world changing thing, as long as I enjoy what I do, she also added that we should not be afraid to experiment as that can be fun too and help the creative process. I liked how she described how everything can be used in order to emphasise a piece, such as the space it takes up even going as far as to interrupt others work (although not in an arrogant disrespectful way) This gave me a great idea for a future project to do during the summer, based on interruptions, a simple explanation would be to set myself a series of art pieces to do with an unknown action chosen that will dictate when it is finished such as the next text I get means I will stop this drawing and that's it finished. She also made a good point of always using a title for work as a title informs the audience with vital information on the piece and should alone, alongside the piece, be able to tell it’s story.

I personally enjoyed her use of juxtaposition within her work, often having her work on a sensitive subject such as feminism, but portrayed it with cute imagery, with use of pink colour or use of humour. This did make me think of a music artist who is similar but I will save that for another post.

The final inspiration she gave me was the fact she was so relatable, she too is a young designer that has recently finished her education and gone into the real world of design and art. It made it all seem much more real and achievable, and less like a prior doubt I had of this all leading nowhere. She has inspired me to look forward and strive for success.

[carluni]

During my main module we had a week project of creating a sculpture of a craft, I did mine on key cutting and although what I made was simple I had a lot of fun physically making something and trying something new, it was a good exercise to help me try and get out of my comfort zone, and something I need to continue doing with future projects to get more work done and to be more invested in what I do.

[carluni]

Type plays a huge part in a menus success, and with this example I find it really proves this. I found it difficult to read for a number of reasons, the first being no distinguishable separation of the groups of food, made worse by the inconsistent spacing between each line. This mixed with the random enlarging of certain sentences and it’s fancy font just made it seem like it was wanting to be something visually pleasing whilst forgetting it is supposed to serve a purpose.

[carluni]

Writing/Judging the visual aesthetic and criticism

We started off by being told the difference between an opinion and a judgement. Everyone has an opinion, and is usually only done at face value of the subject whereas a judgement is done with more thought behind it, based on prior knowledge of the subject. Branching rom this is what aesthetic actually means. It is the pure sensory judgement and sensory feeling when first experiencing something.

I found more use out of the post lecture discussion and I realised this being quite common for me, I believe it helps being in the more relaxed environment and having everyone contribute ideas and opinions to then develop new insights and understandings of a subject. The first discussion point was can we make an effective reflective judgement based purely on initial feeling. Personally I feel there can be an initial thought that could be an accurate assumption, however an initial thought will never be as effective as taking all the known information and reviewing it.

From this we had a short discussion on the difference between criticism and critiquing, again a criticism can be made by anyone and usually has a negative context, whereas critiquing is done in the idea of informing the recipient on how to improve and should be done without bias.

Going more into a more artistic context we were shown the ideas of Emmanuel Kant, who has worked on the idea of separating beauty from it’s historical baggage. An easy way to visualise this, is can a prison be beautiful architecturally or will it always be ugly due to it being a prison and all the negative subtext it carries. To me it is an intriguing thought on should work gain or lose attractiveness based on it’s meaning and history. I could not help but think of this in it’s opposite of is certain work by artists automatically viewed as good, just because of the artist who did it?

I believe we should at some extent be able to separate the artist and their work, in that if the artist was a bad person for whatever reason, does not make their work bad technically as in they may be a talented artist. I do however, think there should not be a complete separation between the two as the artist’s life will always have an influence on what they create, even if not intentionally, this also is true for their opinions affecting the work they create.

We finished with the thought of beauty is not a quality that art has, it is the audiences response to it. No one has to agree as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and art can be successful purely from the audiences reaction to it.

[carluni]

Part 2 Mexican restaurant menu

The second menu found in this restaurant was the food menu, which was on single a4 sheets. Again there were these doodles found on every page however these were the same on each one, as presumably it is just printed and set each day. What I found interesting was it’s interaction with the customer, as the waiter took the order they highlighted the menu itself rather than noting it in a small pad. It may only be a small thing, but it makes it completely unique in how it is used by the user. The menu itself had a nice structure to it overall, but I do feel like a lot of the information was cramped in which made it slightly difficult to read.

[carluni]

Part 1 Mexican restaurant menu

I have had to split this into two posts as the place essentially had two menus. The first being mainly a drinks menu found within a small bound book. What made it interesting to me was the unusual illustrations that were different in every single one of them. It makes the menus fun and unique, and helps fill in the blank space without over crowding the page to distract the reader.

[carluni]

David Preston - looking forward

During a main module session we had a guest speaker, who set up a workshop designed to get us thinking forward. It was a series of questions, to make me consider what I wanted and the reality of doing it, thinking about obstacles in the way and how to overcome them.

In a dream world what would i want to be doing and designing? The first question proposed to us. Ideally I would be a comic book illustrator or concept artist. I have always had an interest in character design, and would love to have something out there be it a film, game, comic etc. with my name on it.

We were all told to be ambitious and not hold ourselves back because of skill level, as there is only room for improvement. Having said this I had to consider; what skills do I have?, what skills am I developing?, what do I need to develop? There’s a whole variety of skills that I am developing during my time on the course, but the main skills I need to develop to achieve my goal are to do with my drawing skills. I need to draw more often and be continuously working on my skills to improve.

The last major thing to consider is how to get our foot in the door, how can we get recognised. To me the best option for me is to create an online portfolio of my work, to professionally present my best work, but also to use social media to my advantage more, as a way of sharing my work more casually than a portfolio.

[carluni]

Artist Portfolio - Jock

The same book has a more in depth look at certain artists, in this case, Jock. It tells his personal story and how he progressed to where he is today, telling how an “unconventional portfolio led to Batman, Super man and Hollywood”. He explains how he started out just drawing on his own,  showed it to another known artist and was essentially told, “why you showing me?, Go make some money”. He has now gone on to work for 2000AD, Marvel and DC.

It’s interesting to know in depth what he did in order to succeed and to hear how it was through persistence of getting his work out there and always improving has made it feel more achievable for me. It may seem simple but the best advice he gives to any readers is persistence.

[carluni]

Mark Brooks

Another artist in that previously mentioned book, although not as wordy as the other artist, it is still interesting to see his stylised work, and I can honestly just use it as a means of getting inspired to draw. He does have interesting little facts about each sketch as well, saying certain ideas he tries to put across or just things to consider when drawing yourself.

[carluni]

Joverine I purchased a book from WHSmith that contains various artist and their views, helpful techniques and how to improve, and other interesting areas. This is a good research tool for me as I feel I can relate to it and I'm not doing research for the sake of research. Even if it does not directly integrate into my main module it will help me personally develop my illustrative skills.

Some of the ideas this artist has are something inspiring personally, he does not use a sketchbook to capture a series of scribbles, but instead says he "loves to lose himself in an idea, harnessing the raw energy of inspiration and riding it all the way through the page". It show his dedication and passion for what he does which I aspire to be like, I need to work more on drawing but do it to enjoy it and get better with the practice. He was also quoted saying “I’m just drawing fun stuff and then shoving a story behind it”. which furthers my point and makes me feel I shouldn't always be worried with finishing work and just enjoy the activity.

He also suggests using spider man as a template character, as he can fit in almost any pose and can help practice anatomy drawing. Overall this book is useful just for seeing other artists work scheme and how they do what they do.

[carluni]

During our main module we had a brief based around designing an invite, I managed time poorly and did not put sufficient research into it. So I thought afterward to look through any packaging I own and I came across this, which was similar to what I created. Although simple it works so well as a storage device for an invite, that looks professional. I need to work on using more primary research and actually finding inspiration from the real world rather than developing my own ideas from nothing.

[carluni]

Whilst walking through town I noticed this outside game, fitted into their new interactive play section within the shop. It is unavoidably eye-catching, with the neon working well due to the tunnel it is located within. It carries a good message as well that welcomes all passing gamers, who are usually outcasts socially, and promotes a safe environment.

[carluni]

Whilst looking at cards for someone's birthday I saw these. I like the old aesthetic of the scratchy texture that comics used to have and the pop art style bold colours that have been watered down. Just a visual inspiration.