Daniel Stacey - BA2b Reflective Journal.
At the beginning of this project I found the first workshop for starting idea generation to be very helpful. Allowing myself to just be able to draw without reference imagery enabled a fluid like quality my ideas at first eliminating the more obvious and developing the more unexpected. I found that I personally responded very well to this way of generating ideas throughout the unit, realising that I’m more of a visual thinker than a written one.
I found that my subject matter was too similar at the start of the project. Most of my illustrations relied on a bottle within the composition somewhere to relate to that idea. After discussing in groups and reflecting upon each other's work, I found that my peers picked up on this recommending that I look back into the text or try another form of research/ idea generation.
My initial ideas could have been helped along a bit I feel if I had just worked with the scale of the illustrations as opposed to what they were. I could have fit compositions around the canvas size and experimented with cropping sooner, which, may have created more diverse imagery.
Experimenting with different forms of animation was very interesting and unexpected. I feel that my outcome for the GIF animation is something that I didn’t think would work with the limitations of my blog itself and if the GIF would even upload. I found that my problem solving skills really came into play in this instance, trying to reduce the content in the GIF and the scale to enable it to work on my blog and exploring other formats of video rendering to retain the overall quality.
Looking into the work of illustrators and other editorial work pushed my ideas and enabled me to think of ways of presenting my ideas in a more effective way as opposed to maybe the easiest way. Combining an aspect of reality in the video I captured with the drawings that I only slightly animated creates an interesting relationship between something relatable like film and something interpretable like drawing.
I tried working completely digitally for one of my initial ideas for my full page illustration, I wanted to see if working just digitally I could create something similar to what I had been originally hand rendering. I found this very difficult and my work came out almost cartoon-like and very different looking in comparison to my other works.
Visual researching and collating visuals is something that I really need to do more of in my starting stages. I found that creating mood boards from fitness magazines to be very informative and helpful in generating new ideas. This enabled me to see different perspectives and compositions of people and objects, it also helped me use techniques like cropping and editing to fully realise my ideas.
Working on the collaborative event part of this project was a very stressful and spontaneous experience for me. At first I wasn’t really sure how to interpret the brief, I asked one of my tutors to talk with me further about it and I gained a better grasping of what the brief wanted. We worked very well together as a group, keeping in very good communication throughout the process. I feel our idea of collaborative topic based drawing, takes inspiration from our first workshop rather well but also adding to it. We wanted people to interact with each other’s work, without feeling like they would be ruining it or altering it in a negative way. I feel we achieved these by using rolls of paper as opposed to individual sheets.