Personal and Professional Practice: May 2014

Tuesday, 27 May 2014

Final Self Evaluation - PPP

1. What skills have you developed through this brief and how effectively do you think you have applied them?
I have learned from PPP to be constantly inspired by looking into as many practices of contemporary illustrators as possible. Everyone works in different ways, so it’s really helpful to evaluate people’s practices in order to get a good view of my own. I’m always being inspired by what I see, usually being envious of established illustrators/ artists because I want to make work as good as them, and I apply this to my own work by being motivated by the people i’d like to be like.
2. What approaches to/methods of image making have you developed and how have they informed your concept development process?
There are many methods of image making that I’ve explored because of PPP, as mentioned before, I see so many amazing approaches, that I just want to try. The biggest discovery of the year for me has been digital painting, I found myself painting in my usual way but without hassle like paint drying etc, making me produce work generally faster. This of course helped immensely, as at the start of the year, I found that time limits were a huge amount of pressure for me when I like to take my time making images. Working digitally also helped me to experiment with things like composition, colour, textures without having to make lots of images. This made it easier to have time to ask myself questions about my work and develop concepts. I feel like this might be a weakness too, because I don’t want to depend on digital ways of working, a large amount of experimentation and good outcomes can be produced if I play with traditional media. A way I may work in the future would be to try and combine the two, not unlike some of the artists I’ve discovered through PPP.
3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
The strengths I think I’ve shown in my practice this year is my ability to graft, putting a lot of effort and time into my work. With this, I think the amount I have done has improved the speed at which I can produce work. I’ve felt very stressed this year, however, I think eventually I turned this stress into determination to do well, I feel motivated to put more effort in my work, I enjoy doing certain things, like observational drawings, and portraits etc, which in turn allows me to do more through enjoyment. At the beginning of the year I felt like I was different and that this was a weakness, but recognising that I shouldn’t change, and learn to work with the skills I have in order to expand on them is a strength, the most important one of the year.
4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?
At the beginning of the year, I didn’t do my best as I felt too stressed and had no motivation to do the amount asked of me – I didn’t feel good enough and considered leaving the course. Although this did change, it was a big set back, especially in modules that ran throughout the whole/most of the year, like PPP and Visual Language. When I felt better about the work I was doing and got back on track, I was so behind on these modules that I put them off even more, which I know will affect my grade. I know now that this is why it’s only the first year and that marks don’t matter as much – It’s a huge adjustment to make and I underestimated it because I’ve never felt I’ve struggled with education before. Next year I think i’ll do a lot better because I’ll know what’s coming and what to expect – so I can organise my time, look for more inspirational Illustrators, research and try more methods and make my work more meaningful and skilled.
5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?
· · · · ·
6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas: (please indicate using an ‘x’) 5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
	1	2	3	4	5
Attendance
Punctuality
Motivation
Commitment
Quantity of work produced
Quality of work produced
Contribution to the group

Monday, 26 May 2014

Artists That Inspire Me - JungShan

For my People of note project, I found an artist called JungShan, who really inspired me.
The work is created with traditional and digital media (traditional Chinese inks and photoshop)

These images are stunning, and quite dramatic. The media seems uncontrolled and messy, but at the same time the image is precise and graceful. It was good too see how another artist deals with the same subject matter - because for People of note I was trying to familiarize myself with how Japanese samurais are depicted.

Tuesday, 20 May 2014

Development of Outcomes

Firstly, I thought i'd try oil painting on an A1 panel of wood. The outcome was alright, but i'm not sure if it was worth the time and effort! The down side of discovering digital painting is that preparation of paint, mixing colours, drying time etc, is forgotten, and I start relying on the 'undo' button. This is why I think that it's going to be important to keep going with traditional media, so that I don't feel this way so much.

These digital paintings of cat's noses I think were quite successful. They take a different approach to portrait making, a different composition/ angle whilst it's still possible recognize what they are. I believe that in this way I've found a way of doing what I aimed to do.

Digital painting in progress

Although there is not a lot that is unique about these pictures, I still think that they are effective, they have recieved a lot of pleasant attention, especially to people that like cats. Others appreciate the skill and detail. They communicate what I wanted to say, That wild cats are Big, powerful, elegant, and that domestic cats are cute, endearing, a bit stupid/ dependent. Both need looking after, though!

Ideas for Final Outcomes

Tigers are really beautiful and powerful
Cats are playful, innocent, cute - I really like Rag doll cats and want one really badly because their temperament best suits the aforementioned criteria.
I want to show different aspects of these cats, and compare them with each other, for example, the nose, eyes or feet. These are similar but always different
I want to do full studies of the cats, too, as I do really like the standard portrait and believe it to be one of my strengths.

Inspiration - Cats

After a progress tutorial, I realised that I didn't have much time left on this project and that I should change it's direction a bit, and not try and make a magazine, Although I still wanted to do work on animals, as they are a big interest of mine. My favourite is the cat, big and small cats are very different from one another, yet they are part of the same family and have a lot of similarities. Over all I just think that they are beautiful, and I'd love to paint them.

My new plan involves researching cats and figuring out what I want to say about them.

As well as my wildlife magazines,

Pinterest is a really good source for wild cat images. As well as this, they are sometimes linked to articles about the subject, which can be really useful too. I quickly gathered a lot of reference images.

From the Library I looked at 3 books-

Tigers - A Portrait of the Animal World - Lee Server

This book had many pictures of tigers, studying their behavior. Tigers are impressive to me in many ways, they are powerful and scary, yet they can look really peaceful and elegant at times.

Animals of Africa - introduction by Jane Goodall

There were many species of Africa photographed in this book, but of course I liked the cat part the best, there are lots of stunning pictures of different types of big cats.

Tiger - Susie Green

Here, tigers were analysed in deeper detail. As well as photography, there were illustrations of tigers alongside many different stories and legends described by a history of humans existing alongside tigers.

I used some of my own images when considering the appearance and behavior of domestic cats (I adore my cat so much I just have hundreds)

Many of these are very similar to the way big cats appear to act in the wild as described by the photographs I've seen in my research. Domestic cats are just as beautiful, and understanding this is understanding that our big cats need protecting in their environments as much as we protect our pets. I believe this still links to the message I wanted to convey at the start.

Planning a Magazine

When researching Fashion magazines and wildlife magazines, I realized that many different approaches can be taken to describe one subject. Because I want to mix wildlife and fashion, I thought I could do my own approaches to each angle of the subject. This would include images of wild life on their own, images of wildlife with people, beauty shots (close up of a face with wild theme) Wildlife inspired garments modeled by people, and my own print, which I thought I could print onto a garment and photograph on a model.

I think this would give me a chance to experiment with media too, because although I love to paint, I also want to continue finding more techniques I like to use - especially after this year, discovering digital painting.