Evaluation - Holly Brooks
The theme for my practice in action module was portraits, and this involved a collaboration with the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. We were asked to produce a portrait, 3d illustration and promotional materials such as zines and postcards inspired by a picture from the museum. For my project I chose ‘The travelling companions’ by Augustus Leopold Egg – the reason I chose this is because I really like the symmetry of the figures as well as the chemistry between them, which is something that I wanted to elaborate more for my final portrait. As well as Egg, I also looked at the work of Japanese artist Mika Kato – who creates sculptures of people who look almost perfect albeit slight disfigurements such as freckles, blotches in the eyes and discoloured skin as well as creating portraits based on said sculptures. Another artist I had taken major inspiration from is Karen Woods, who came for an embroidery workshop in my last module. Woods’ work combines the use of fabric paints, embroidery sewing and mixed media to create intricate and bold designs based on stories of adventure. I spent several days inside the museum sketching various portraits and painting whilst improving my figure drawing skills and working out what techniques I would use. I finally settled on taking a mixed media approach and using paper, fabric collage, embroidery stitching and watercolour paints to create my portrait, as these were materials that I was used to using for previous illustrations. What I liked about my completed portrait was that the embroidery for the hair, body and book looked lovely and the posture of the tired girl resting on the other girl’s shoulders showed more of a connection between the two people than the original picture. The only things I would change about the piece if I could remake it was the make sure I use a embroidery hoop if I am using a fabric background so that it reduces the amount of creasing or puckering in my piece (which I ended up with a lot) as well as making sure to hand sew the facial areas instead of machine stitching it as I found due to the lack of control I had, the face became very distorted. However, looking back at that I did not mind the distortion as it reflects the ‘almost perfect’ theme of Mika Kato’s work as well as it adding charm and originality overall. When I went on to create the 3d illustration, and for this I wanted to keep the same techniques and materials that I had been using for my portrait. As well this, each side had to involve a word that, when each side is put together, creates a 6-word story (though there is a bit of leeway here as I used a few 1 and 2 letter words in mine). I went for “Identical Doll-like Siblings, So alike and yet so similar” as this helps illustrate the relationship between the two characters in my portrait and reflect their personalities. Each side was made using card, fabric, fine liner pen, inks and embroidery for which my tutors found to be rather interesting and unique to everyone else. If I had a little bit more time on this, however, I would want to have finish off around the edges so that it looked less rushed and neater.
The last part of my module was to create 6 individual postcards and 1 zine, both of which could be to do with anything from this module or previous modules, so that they could be sold at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery as part of a complimentary pop-up shop associated with our work. I went back through my sketchbook for this module and I really liked the flower collage work I did on one of the example and decided to make my illustrations based off that. Because I was going to be using flower motifs on each of the illustrations, I called my zine ‘Floral notes’ and for each piece I would a flower-based quote next to them to compliment them. When I came to embroider my illustrations I took my advice from my mistakes on the portrait and used an embroidery hoop so reduce the amount of puckering, as well sewing the majority of the illustrations by hand so the faces looked neater and less distorted. Because of the earlier worry of sewing the faces, I first used a paper templated that I pinned onto the fabric, and once it was done I pondered as to whether or not to rip off the paper but eventually decided to keep it as the creases in the paper and the soggy look from using watercolour to paint the skin made it look fragile and therefore more delicate and something to treasure more. Alongside this, I also used other materials such as feathers to use as wings to add more texture to the illustration. The postcards themselves were easy to create, but the problem came when doing the zine – because the printer I was using did not print on double sides, the eventual zine I made had rather awkward blank spaces between each illustration and quote. Hopefully for next I can either find a printed who can print double sided or if not find a way to illustrate the blank pages or bind them together so they are not visible.