Final Crit for Visual Communications and People of Note

Peer Feedback

 

 My Self Evaluation and Plan of action

Post cards:

These really are too simple, and discussions had during these crits particularly reminded me, what am I trying to achieve by having the boats all of the same size? This made me realise that I was not effectively illustrating my person with these at all. However, what if my solution could be in this more limited time frame, to vary the views and particularly scale of these boats, what does the scale mean with regards to the image? Making her boat very tiny could talk of the isolation and vast sense of how she really was all on her own when she sailed all the way around the world to break that world record. 

Poster:

My struggle for this is still the composition, I want it to portray Space. It is a very complex image, and my tutor even said that really it was too complex, but that once again scale could be the answer. 

Postcards

[SCAN AND SHOW ALL THUMBNAILS AND ROUGH SKETCHBOOK PLANNING]

I did a lot of thumb nailing to try and work out what I exactly I wanted to show in each postcard, but I did find this quite a struggle, as all of my ideas didn't quite fit together as a set, aesthetically and compositionally at least. 

As one solution to the inconsistent images I thought about varying the orientation of some of them, so their compositions could be more matching so that they might work better as a set together.

• I wanted to have one postcard showing her chart of ambition, and how she saved up all of her lunch money for years to buy her own and first boat. 
• The second would perhaps display the imagery that she used to describe why she couldn't really finish with competitive sailing and that was that 'Racing was always in my heart'. 
• I liked the idea of showing her extra micro victory on Top gear
• I would have liked to have had a general image showing her and her deep love and happiness with sailing.
• I was also experimenting with the idea of showing her dreaming of sailing constantly as a youth and indeed as an adult, she has always remained as fiercely dedicated to her dreams as possible.

My initial idea for the postcards was to show elements of her, or her life that really defined and perhaps even made her the person that she is today. 

Top Gear

This I find to be another great example of how much of a competitive, and successfully competitive person she is. This actually is a memory of my own of her, I remember her at the time she broke the solo global circumnavigation sailing record, and I remember my father basically explaining how amazing she was. He used this as a further sort of proof, that she just came onto Top Gear, with hardly any driving experience, and yet she still managed to be the fastest in their little celebrity racing chart. I though that this might have been another moment of her life that almost summed up her very competitive and determined character.

Visual Devices

These are some boats that I drew for the A2 poster, but to keep the series of outcomes that we had to produce consistent as a set or series I liked to incorporate them between the different images that had to be created. I think that it links them together in a subtle way, also it is important that its the same boat, as this was the one that made her as enormously famous and respected as she is.

In my Heart, the dream had been racing

Using photoshop I created this little fleet of racing boats. They aren't perfect, but I like the feel and effect of the slightly misaligned ink splatters texture behind them. It gives them a more three-dimensional feel.

Here is one of my sketches that I used to combine on photoshop to create a more interesting heart texture and image.

Here I am starting to try and piece together this composition, but its hard to get it just quite right.

There is far too much white space, so I started to add some more colours and textures to the background. 

This is just getting too complicated and messy, and still isn't enchaining the image at all.

Chart of Ambition:

With this postcard I wanted to try and tell the story of her childhood a little bit, and the way that she spent years and years saving up her lunch money as she didn't get pocket money in the hope to one day buy her first ever boat. she used to keep her pennies stacked on her beside table until she reached a pound, then she would put it into a special tin and cross off a box in a big chart she had made.

This was the best that I could come up with, although it could have actually been improved with much greater initial drawings, but time was beginning to run out, and I was still quite concerned that even by keeping the colour theme the same red, the images just were not going to tie together at all. Some were too conceptual and others didn't look good at all. So to answer the brief a little better, and to create images that would work more successfully as a set I decided to take a different approach.

Final Postcards

Thankfully the dimensions for these prints can be a little bit economic/printer friendly, as 210mm is exactly the width of an A4 piece of paper.

These are the boats that I took to the final crits.

The boat needed a background, so I added this painted texture that is supposed to reflect waves and the sea. Below are some of my efforts at tweaking and fiddling with the layout of it, it feels a tricky one to get exactly right.

Aesthetically these are reasonably nice, but I am still disappointed that they are not so conceptually strong. I need to make them more personal to my person.

Finals:

 

For my final postcards I decided to really vary the scale, and this is to be more reflective of my person. Particularly the first image with the small blue boat I find to be a little bit powerful, although I think that now with hindsight I probably should have made the boat even smaller. I like to think it is a little bit symbolic of how small her boat might have felt amongst the vastness of the ocean waves, when sailing around the world there would have been incredibly isolating days when she would have been very on her own in her little boat. I wanted to show the boat at a much larger scale too though, as reversely she was all alone with her boat, it was all that she had. For the time that she was sailing around the world her boat was her everything, so showing it at a larger scale hopefully reflects that a bit too. Overall I am a little disappointed with these postcards, I really would have loved to have shown and illustrated more informative aspects of her life. But I do like these a bit, as they compositionally and aesthetically look nice enough together, I think that they are a big improvement from work that I have been creating in the past. The varied scale is very much still an attempt to reflect Ellen and to keep them very personal to her character.

Ellen MacArthur

Postcards

Stamps

Early Thumbs and Ideas for Stamps:

Above are some very rough early ideas for my stamps, I was contemplating about using them to portray little symbols and icons of her life, and this way I think that I would even be able to include the Circular Economy aspects of her life, which I was struggling to before. However with these I cannot see them perfectly working as a set together, so I think they would be less successful and more complicated to create and to pull off.

This was me deciding which aspects of her character I really feel are most accurately her, and sum her up. I chose:

• Dame Ellen
• Business Woman Ellen
• Classic Sunglasses and Tshirt Ellen.
• And of course Sailing Ellen

Sketchbook practice and developmental drawings for stamps portraits:

I actually used this scan of paper quite a lot as a texture when I was making the stamps on Photoshop. 

Visual Devices

Below are two painted ink layers that I have edited and processed through photoshop so that they look like a deconstructed planet earth basically! I have already used them in my A2 poster, and here I am using them again to add to the stamps, partly a reflection of her and a reminder of her fame bringing sailing, global circumnavigation feat, and partly to tie the aesthetics of all the different components of this brief together a bit more, so that all of my final outcomes will work as a set.

Border Control

I felt that these stamps needed a bit of a border, or something to fill the negative space and tie them together. I prefer the first one but it is quite unclear, so perhaps needs to be bolder to actually be effective.

Perhaps she needs to be made bigger still to become more clear, and to make better use of the somewhat awkward negative space at the top and bottom of the image.

A2 Poster

Concept

In an extract of speech from Ellen MacArthur she says 'My boat was my world'. So in my sketchbook when I was being playful and testing with ideas, I liked the notion of literally depicting her boat as a world, by making it look like a planet and putting it into the solar system. this of course is also a little symbolic of her sailing around the world, for which she is most famous for.

 Compositional Decisions

I did a lot of drawings on tracing and detail paper, and in my sketchbook, then I began piecing it together on photoshop. I was having some quite major difficulties originally as I originally though the piece had to be A1, so I was scanning in my artwork perhaps at far to high a resolution, and had apparently accidentally created a photoshop file that was essentially 6 meters big, no wonder it was being far to big to save or even load! 

To make the planets and the images look clearer I experimented with making the background much darker, so that the planets and the sun would look more vibrant and be much clearer. I think this was tiny bit successful at least. It was a compromise trying to find the balance though, as I was keen not too lose too much of the inky and colourful textures of the background sky, or space.

Printed Proof

I this poster out to a smaller scale several times to try to grasp a sense of what composition works best. I've had a bit of a struggle with this composition, I just cant seem to get it to feel right at all. I like this one, but the sun and the boat come much too close to the edge of the boarder, it doesn't look like its in outer space at all. 

I made the planets and everything much smaller, and so now I feel that at least the image is a little clearer, and it does give a much better sense of space. I still think it's far from perfect, but a deadline is a deadline, and it still conveys my basic concept, even if the details are not quite perfect to me. In many ways I think that I prefer the look of the image above, but it isn't quite communicating right, and perhaps wouldn't make sense to people that do not know my idea like I do (that sounds silly). I'm happy with a lot of the colours and textures of this piece.