Project Proposal - Peer review

Here my peer feedback:

Clarity of the project rational. To what extent have the aims and objectives of the project been clearly stated?

At the moment it is not clearly stated, however there is huge potential - the intent to produce a 'help guide'/fictional characters. Really positive aims - if carefully considered + handled could be a really effective/moving project!

Identified themes and subjects outlined in the proposal. To what extent do they offer sufficient scope for research and development of significant/appropriate content?

Mental health, very vague/complex/sensitive/personal issue. However if your book follows the theme of your work so far the content advice will be delicately approached/helpful/sensitive/positive. Like your water colours, watercolours etc.
Loads of research
Material, websites youtube etc advice. Health services will have free pamphlets/posters up. Your book could stretch to these products too.

Proposal practical and conceptual application outlined in the proposal. Is it clear and does it offer the potential to develop a significant body of work?

Book - small format, lots of pages. Digitally printed. This could easily create a range from these illustration e.g. posters, leaflets. There is a a significant body of work to make.

The breadth and appropriateness of the contextual references. To what extent are they informing the decisions regarding product, range methods of distribution?

Look at other self help guides, for other people to understand. Do you want to spread the word? mass production, help as many people as possible. Or do you want a really beautifully made individual book?

To what extent is the plan realistic with regards to workload and timescales?

More work needs to be put into researching to decide where you want to go with the content of the project however the boot etc seems really good plan with lots of potential and will be doable.


Check out, Jacob Van Loom.

Peer Review and Project Proposals

Here is the feedback which I recieved on my project proposal today. My proposal was still a bit to vauge as I am still a bit unsure, and thus made it much more difficult for the one giving me feedback. They have me some helpful pointers though. Such as the context in which I would want my work for this to exist, and therefore who might my intended audience be?

Concept Peer Crit - 26 February

Contextual research

Mental Health

Gary Waters/Ikon Images

This is a nice piece of imagry abotu mental health, the overall feel of it is quite simple, yet quielty emotive.

Imagery Research For Characters and Narrative

I want to look at a series of creatures to study and draw them lots in my sketchbook to create a character of them.

European Starling

I love this description from National Geographic:

"Identification Stocky and short tailed, often seen strutting about lawns and parking lots. Flight profile distinctive: buzzy in sustained flight, wings look triangular in more leisurely flight. In flight..."

They are quite magnificent and breathtaking little birds. I love the idea of using this powerful imagery of all the starlings flying together as a part of a narrative, I think it could have potential to be quite striking.

Blue Footed Boobies

These are wonderful humorous and playful birds.

The Balckbird

Visual Journal research and proposal extension questions:

What do you already know:

• I know that mental health is a serious and legitimate thing that can heavily effect peoples lives, and the lives of those around them.
• It has a negative stigma about it, some don't recognise it as an illness, but as a weakness or something that can be snapped out of. Lack of understanding.
• Its a very sensitive and personal subject, everyone is different and will have different experiences.
• It's very difficult for those close to one affected with mental health illness, especially if the condition is undiagnosed/recognised.
• Current campaigns for mental health are under supported, and do not have very good imagery/artistry attached.
• It's something quite close to my heart, and something I have always wanted to try and understand better myself, and to be helpful.

What do you want to know more about?

• I want to know more about the conditions themselves.
• I want to know what advice and aid is recommended by charities and health organisations out there.
• I want to know more about the existing campaigns.
• I want to find out the best way to portray and negotiate this subject, both in terms of content, context, and aesthetically. What media is best used, what approach to imagery and image making?

What will you do to find out about it?

• I will consult information provided by the NHS, to get as accurate and medically correct understand/research as possible.
• Look at existing charities and their campaigns, such as Mind and Time to change.
• Talk to others and see what their perceptions and experiences of this subject is.

What themes are you interested in exploring?

• Using characters to describe and make thins information more accessible and interesting to people, in the hope to make campaigns more successful and memorable.
• Interested in exploring themes of sensitivity, and portraying emotion and feeling through my drawings.

What subjects are you interested in exploring?

• I'm interested in depression and OCD especially.

What texts have you been exploring?

• I've been reading works by ... and illustrated by David Hughes, particularly 'The Hole in the Sum of my Parts' It is a book and collection of poems which explore abstract themes quite strongly based around human emotion and experiences, that are perhaps more vauge or a different and interesting perspectives. People can appreciate and relate to different moment of different poems, but probably not all of them. 
• 'Your illustrated guide to becoming at one with the universe' by Yumi Sakugawa. This is a book that is quite lovely and simple to read, and is actually something I gave to my friend who had some spells of sadness. It is a book that clears your mind and helps you to feel more at peace with life, and perhaps take things more simply if life is becoming a bit much or sore.

Visual Journal Research and proposal extension questions

What do you already know:

• I know that mental health is a serious and legitimate thing that can heavily effect peoples lives, and the lives of those around them.
• It has a negative stigma about it, some don't recognise it as an illness, but as a weakness or something that can be snapped out of. Lack of understanding.
• Its a very sensitive and personal subject, everyone is different and will have different experiences.
• It's very difficult for those close to one affected with mental health illness, especially if the condition is undiagnosed/recognised.
• Current campaigns for mental health are under supported, and do not have very good imagery/artistry attached.
• It's something quite close to my heart, and something I have always wanted to try and understand better myself, and to be helpful.

What do you want to know more about?

• I want to know more about the conditions themselves.
• I want to know what advice and aid is recommended by charities and health organisations out there.
• I want to know more about the existing campaigns.
• I want to find out the best way to portray and negotiate this subject, both in terms of content, context, and aesthetically. What media is best used, what approach to imagery and image making?

What will you do to find out about it?

• I will consult information provided by the NHS, to get as accurate and medically correct understand/research as possible.
• Look at existing charities and their campaigns, such as Mind and Time to change.
• Talk to others and see what their perceptions and experiences of this subject is.

What themes are you interested in exploring?

• Using characters to describe and make thins information more accessible and interesting to people, in the hope to make campaigns more successful and memorable.
• Interested in exploring themes of sensitivity, and portraying emotion and feeling through my drawings.

What subjects are you interested in exploring?

• I'm interested in depression and OCD especially.

What texts have you been exploring?

• I've been reading works by ... and illustrated by David Hughes, particularly 'The Hole in the Sum of my Parts' It is a book and collection of poems which explore abstract themes quite strongly based around human emotion and experiences, that are perhaps more vauge or a different and interesting perspectives. People can appreciate and relate to different moment of different poems, but probably not all of them. 
• 'Your illustrated guide to becoming at one with the universe' by Yumi Sakugawa. This is a book that is quite lovely and simple to read, and is actually something I gave to my friend who had some spells of sadness. It is a book that clears your mind and helps you to feel more at peace with life, and perhaps take things more simply if life is becoming a bit much or sore.

Photoshopping a Fish

I had some fun going back to some proper analyitical drawings, and drew some fish from refrence. Although it rarely feels relevent to use this level of detailed and like for like drawing, it is still a very nice thing to do, and it's important to spend time fully studying and understanding what you are drawing. Developing my work on from an origional good analyitical understanding is a good way to go about trying to make characters out of drawing lots of birds and animals.

Just some silly photoshopping of different elemetns of my sketchbook together. 

This one looks like an ice lolly.

Letterpress Induction

I really enjoyed letterpress as a process, I'm not particularly confident at type and layout on the computer, I'm quite overwhelmed by the choice and how easily I can keep changing it. There was something very satisfying about writing out sentences from the rack of letters, learning where each one comes from, not unlike recognising where the keys are on a keyboard!

It is a time consuming and fiddily process, I would like to come back and use it for something. The analog nature of the process and the results has the handcrafted element and feel that I like/can't help but be drawn to.

Idea for 505

Take eight conditions:

-small post cards -  consider contextt.
- Animals as a consistent theme.
-e.g. Post Natal.


On each post card, I can use my animals to represent and communicate about a different form of mental health.

This will be aimed at a wide range of audiences, dependant on the conditions that I choose.

I will aim to make my characters really lovely images, and have them try and feel sensitive and quite emotive and touching to humans. This is in the hope that they might have a more comforting feel to any of those suffereing from a condition that see's the card, and remind them that they are not alone.

Early Sketchbook Extracts

Extracting little drawings from my sketchbook and putting them through photoshop to see if there are any moments of success.

I experimented putting this hands sketch alongside some textures that I keep on my computer, the orange one wasn't big enough and just looks quite bad because its so blurry, but there is something to be said for that nice cartridge texture, I must make a point of scanning in a better quality version.

I played about with putting paint on the page and then drawing faces into them. 

Vice - Some Research into Rule Britannia

Rule Britannia is describes as a 'nefarious den of online activity', it has documentaries about things very relevant to Britain's youth culture.

Most of the subjects they tackled were serious and often about criminal activity - which made the 'Rule Britannia' title seem satirical and a lot of the articles had a tongue and cheek tone of voice. The tagline 'The best of Old Blighty' is ironic as the articles are exclusively negative.

I watched a number of these documentaries and this more satirical, ironic and tongue and cheek nature of the programs did come through quite strongly to me, so this is something that I would like to try and communicate, if only subtly though the characters that I will be drawing for the animation.

Collaborative Practice

I met up with my partner for responsive again,

Ideas:

• Research/select imagery and ideas from the Rule Britannia documentaries themselves.
• Explore and experiment with some hand drawn fonts. 

Vice - Rule Britannia

Collaborative Practice

This is the current vice ident for Rule Britannia I believe.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/feed/may-2010/27/rule-britannia-ident

It isn't very good, neither of us live the font, and find the animation to be not communicating much of all that Rule Britannia represents and is.

Study Task - Characters and Narratives

Catherine Rayner

She has always been one of my favourite illustrators, and is one of the people that really inspired me to pursue Illustration myself, so I can't resist coming back to her now.

I read once that she allocates a whole sketchbook to one of her characters and then spends a long time working on and developing them, often using real life for movement reference. Here is an extract from her website: 

"She finds huge inspiration in her pets and often uses them as models, frequently asking Ena to pose so that she can study her posture and movement. Then she translates sketches of Ena into characters such as dragons and hares, not to mention moose and bears! But it was creatures of a wilder kind that inspired her first picture book, Augustus and His Smile - Catherine spent hours and hours watching and sketching tigers (in freezing temperatures) at Edinburgh Zoo."

Oliver Jeffers

I like the inventive mix of some of his images, and the strong element of craft. However I find some of the character aesthetics a bit too simplified/children's book illustration, I think I'm interested in not only communicating to children, as that instantly makes what you do a bit more selective with regards to the audience who will receive it. 

The texture and the composition of this image is very descriptive and emotive. The texture gets across the dense, powerful sea in a storm, (the sky especially adds a lot, it looks impressively broken and cloudy). The tiny figure in their little row boat contrasted against the big length of the composition adds to the magnitude of the storm and the littleness of the character.

Sarah Maycock

This image does perfectly seem to capture and summarise David Attenborough, and his role in the worlds of natural science. 

Beautiful vibrant and vibrant brushstrokes that make her work very descriptive. 

 Ralph Steadman

I'm very interested in his wonderful, very expressive way of drawing, and how this is balanced with and includes very detailed and intricate components too. There is always a strong feeling of a lot of emotion being communicated in these images and that is something that I would love to achieve with this characters and narratives project. 

 

The colours, and expressive movement of the ink line work is just wonderful. 

Animal Behaviorist

I love his mad characters, they're enormously strange ad yet he has managed to get the right amount of features and expression into them to make them work.

I would love to be able to communicate emotion and expression like Ralph Steadman can, there are no others who are on his intense level and talent.

I can't really begin to unpick how he achieves this, but I think that asides from the obvious freedom, control and expression all wonderfully existing in his pieces I think that the texture and his selective yet very detailed/tonal use of colour lends a lot.

Quentin Blake

No one does charm and character quite like Quentin Blake does. 

"Lolly sticks dreaming of being horses from 'Rosie's Magic Horse' by Russell Hoban "

There is a very pure creative nature to his work, a sort of freedom of imagery. Which I believe is part of the way that he has managed to bring Roald Dahl's work to life so wonderfully.

I would love to be able to create work that was something in between Quentin Blake and Ralp Steadman, perhaps with vibrant expressive brushstrokes like Catherine Rayner or maybe even a more vibrant version of Sarah Maycock. But in order to achieve this I will have to loosen up my work and become even more uninhibited and free about it. 

Here is a link to a post I just wrote on my PPP blog, I think that it is really relevant to this study task and this module too. (With regards to character development and narrative) http://j-broad1316ppp.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/where-wild-horses-are-hide-your-eyes-by.html