Unit 2 evaluation

Unit 2 evaluation

Covert and obscured, the theme for my graphics unit 2 exam. To me the words covert and obscured cover a huge range of ideas and objectives, my first real task was simply narrowing down this huge range down to a much more modest three that I could then focus in on and evaluate further in order to give me the best chance of creating a piece of work that is true to the theme. Spying, shadow/silhouettes and derelict building were the three ideas that I decided to look slightly deeper into, to do this I first noted down as many thesaurus alternatives to the ideas I chose, the gave me a broader surface to work on and make it easier to come with ideas to fit my smaller sub-themes. Next I wanted to see how these sub-themes would work in a graphics medium so making lists of ideas of what I could do with these mediums against my sub-themes really helped. For example under the theme shadow/silhouette I looked into how i could develop shadows into children's book and came up with a small idea of making shadows fun by trying to incorporate animals. Having going through the many ideas i then had I decided to run with my children's book idea, now I had one focused I could delve deeper into the roots of what actually made up, or what I believed made up a children's book, to express my idea in a clear and organised way I made a mind map/ spider diagram of ideas.

 

Our next task was to look at the work from another artist or designer, I chose to look further into the work of Jim Field and his piece Bear, Brolly and Salmon. I was first drawn to the image by the interesting way of creating the fur that really seemed to add texture, using ink was reasonably new to me so trying to emulate was a bit of a challenge for me. Firstly I looked into the obvious patterns created in the work more closely about the paths of the rows of the lines, they are clear in the images below, next the scale/ size of the lines in proportion to the whole image.




As you can see I made my own emulation of a picture from my pinterest board containing subject matter. Otters are obviously a key part of my ideas, so creating my own take on the image I chose made sure that the finished piece would be relevant and useful for future work. This made me fully understand the ways of capturing the key aspects of animals like in this case I learnt a lot about the fur of the bear and how Jim field expressed his ideas of how the fur flows, making his final piece really interesting and inspirational.

Experimentation is of course important in working toward a piece of this nature, for my work I tried out something new to me, painting in acrylic paint. At first in was difficult to get used to as when I have painted previously my aims were to be very precise and careful with my paint so it was a big change building up thick layers of paint and crafting my images out of these layers. To meet the brief chose an image that I felt really captured the idea of covert and obscured, as you can see from the image below it mixes very dark colours and almost pure white so it was a very challenging piece to complete.



When completing this task the first thing that I found that working in layers does aid the artist is completing work that has quite similar shades, blacks and greys for example because you can paint over the colour agin if you feel it is to light or dark. If I was going to try this task again there is something I would change, the detailed and small nature of the key parts of the image, the bottles and birds. It was difficult because of the nature of the paint I was using as fine detailed painting was very difficult. Doing this it did help me develop some of the key aspects of my work, my final piece was designed with much darker colours like the colours I used when completing this task. By looking at this work it was quite clear that although the colours did represent covert and obscured, for my choice of a children's book though the darkness was simply too sinister.

Having a lot of preparation time to work toward my final piece gave me an amazing opportunity to develop and correct some aspects of my piece over time. My favorite example of this was my drafting for this final exam piece itself. Working from very basic sketches I made notes on the piece in order to direct me in the direction I imagined my finished piece would take, making small notes on each piece in regard to scale, colour and positioning I helped me to slowly and precisely edit my work up to a standard I felt was good enough to base my exam piece.




Along with making notes on my work  started to think a lot more about the finished piece and you can see that by my final draft I had worked on the size of the cover and side and created, for all intense and purposes, a mock book to be sure that the scale worked and would be realistic to real books. As I'm sure you have noticed my drafts are not that accurate to my final piece, in the exam itself when I arrange my work on the screen I felt it needed some further development as some of the aspects of the image didn't work well on screen. Changing to a slightly more simple layout allowed my work to progress a lot more as I felt more freedom to work with more styles.

The final exam, as I have already mentioned, making slight changes to the design made me a lot more free to use creative examples of work as they would no longer be over powering and make the work look crowded. an example of this would be the grass which I created separately using my skills that I picked up from Jim field to add lines in ink to add texture to the final piece. Using photoshop I was able to use my inked lines to make a pattern overlay which when added to my grass, made using any shades of green, it created a much more rustic and hand crafted affect which I feel is of the upmost importance in creating something as inviting as a children's book.

My original otter design really didn't vary to much through out the process through every design, development and change the otter images have stayed as the key figures that really symbolise the book as a whole. As terms of experimenting and improving goes though I did try to draw a lot of otter characters that had very different emotions and almost stories of there own, to give me the best chance of picking the right otter with the correct expression for my piece.

To keep to the theme I used the idea of shadow, using photoshop tools and my drafting ideas I finally created, using the blending modes multiply and darken, a shadow that spread across the covers and spine of the book, using blending modes it creates a much more realistic effect. I believe that even though I was creating a children's book and being fiction not everything as to be 'true to life' it is important to uphold a certain level of detail to make sure the design does not end up overly outlandish and messy. To some up I leant a lot in this task about knowing when to leave something out is as, if not more, important than knowing what to put in, making the design complex enough to create a relevant and original effect but knowing when to hold back and analyse rather than just adding.