EGRD1009: Independent Practice
Collages created after attending a workshop and working with Martin O’Neill. Thinking about how the pieces fit and work together and how the layout and placement of the ephemera can hint at the meaning and emotion of the piece. Learning about using hints to show what its about rather than spelling it out for the viewer.
Using a live brief from the Penguin design awards as the basis for part of my independant work, creating a bookcover for James and the Giant Peach. Working to an actual brief pushed me to quickly create work and in the end helped me explore a wide variety of techniques including illustrator, hand drawing and using physical letterforms.
After seeing and getting involved in shadowplay at Pick Me Up, I became really interested in using shadows. Setting up a basic string line and clipping the images and type to it. Despite the wind the images came out out really well on the fence and because they are shadows they have a fuzzy soft edge around them which worked better than the hard edged sillouettes.
Photos taken using a Kodak Retinette camera bought from a charity shop. The beauty of film cameras is that you have no idea how the photos will come out unitl you get them developed and it was suprising how good some of the photos came out because I was still trying to figure out how it all works.
Education cuts protest in London, taken on a Kodak Retinette Film camera.
After the workshop about creating a typeface, I found the idea of using an object to create the alphabet quite interesting. So using a map I began to find letters in the roads and then scanned it to illustrator and created vectors of the letters. Using the O as a starting point and then creating the rest of the alphabet from that. Learning how to use illustrator and about the relationship between different letters.
Letterpres workshop, working with type to create an idea for a poster for the book fair. Having physical type to work with helped me to understand the relationship between letters and the spaces between them to make it visually pleasing.
Using the limitaion of only black ink and a dipping pen to illustrate ‘old objects.’ Drawing from old Objects is more engagin for me because they have a history to them and are often more interesting to look at and draw from.
Experimenting using watercolours and other media including ink tense pencils to create illustrations of a variety of objects. Developing my drawing skills and starting to create a bank of illustrations in my sketchbooks.
Serendipity. The happy accident of cutting a hole into the page of a sketchbook and then drawing onto it ignoring the hole completely. On the page underneath you get a completely random viewfinder of the image which takes it out of context and creates a whole different image where the markmaking is more visible and becomes the image because your not disracted by what the drawing is of.
Experimenting by drawing onto tracing paper with holes in, over a page in my sketchbook so you get an image on the reverse of the tracing paper and when you flip the tracing paper over you can see the two images together.
Serendipitus drawings from a typewriter. After blowing the circles up the mark making of the drawing becomes really clear and so using this I created lino cuts and printed from them. Lino enabled me to replicate the mark making of the original drawing.
Overlaying prints on top of each other on photoshop to create a set of images. The way the two Images marks interact together and the layers of tone make the image a lot more interesting.
Evalutaion Throughout this semester I feel I have produced a wider range of different work through independent practice. Starting out with a discussion about what we were going to work on throughout our independent practice work meant that I was able to have a main idea, which I worked on throughout the semester and to focus on as well as working on other things. This was helpful because it gave me something to work and focus on and so I feel like I have produced better work than I would have if I hadn’t given myself a bit of a brief. As drawing is my main passion I made this the basis of what I was going to do to improve my skill and experiment with a variety of drawing techniques so in future I can refer back to it to see which style will suit what I am doing best. I have also tried to work in the print room more because I am interesting in printmaking and analogue techniques. So from my drawing I created some lino cuts which I printed and submitted for the Rag Factory LAB exhibition. I also did a letterpress induction and produced a poster idea for the book fair using it. I think having the knowledge of letterpress and how the type works together can really inform you when working on other work using type and I like the hand one feeling of prints and hope to use it a lot more next year. I have been to a lot of the workshops this semester and have produced work has led on from what we did. The variety has been really interesting and I have learnt a lot of new skills. The collage workshop with Martin O’Neill was really helpful because I enjoy using collage and working with ephemera but I had never really thought about how the layout conveyed the emotion of the work as well as the images and text used.
Talks: Ditto Press Hyperkit Mark Pavey/ Dan Mumford Olly Smith Kate Gibbs Rian Hughes GF Smith Graham McCallum Noah Harris Airside Rick Poyner Workshops: Letterpress Martin O’Neill Bob Wilson CV Workshop Exhibitions: Pick Me Up Iggusund - Black Box project Saul Bass Isotype London Street Photography V&A
Throughout the semester I have attended a lot of the talks that have been going on. Its really interesting to hear from people working in the industry like Airside and learning about how they work. The talks during the LAB from Ditto Press and Hyperkit were helpful because they explained how they got to where they are today as well as about their work and it was a good insight into the industry. Having regular crits about our independent work didn’t really work for me at the beginning of the semester but as it went on I found them really helpful. To begin with I didn’t plan my time as well as I could have and ended up doing work just for the crit a couple of days before but as I began to get into what I was doing I started to organise my time better so I was able to continuously work on my independent work alongside the studio work. Regularly talking about where the work was going meant that it was pushed further and continued more so than if I had been left to do it without any input from tutors and other students.