I extended the deadline for this assignment as I wanted to do it justice. Following my work from section four, I had really enjoyed sequential aspects of the module. I also had felt that I was carving out more of an individual approach to my practice and preferences.
So I was caught off-guard by the exercises at the start of the section. They seemed (to me at least) overly proscriptive and this created a lot of cognitive dissonance with the progress I had made in forging out my own way of doing things. In the end, I am really pleased with how I then interpreted the briefs and tacked the exercises. It shows me a rebellious and inventive streak that I want to cultivate more.
I am becoming more confident in leaning into my strengths and establishing a visual language. However, at the moment I think I may be focusing too much on the more clinical aspects of my visual language - building on core skills of drawing, colour and light. I don't think that this is wrong, per se, but I think I may be avoiding other aspects in terms of content, composition and aesthetics. Working out what I want to say with my skills will require me to do some deeper personal work, and I have been afraid to plumb those depths so far. This is a fear I need to embrace like I have done with others throughout this module.
Thankfully, this is exactly what sketchbooks can help me with, and my work through this module and this section have equipped me to face the fear head-on. I am pleased that I have developed strong preferences in terms of my personal process and associated materials. I loved creating my own sketchbook for this assignment and rather than being scared of using high-quality materials (as shop-bought books can often elicit) I loved the sensation of my pen on the paper that I chose - it was a delight to use.
The assignment itself has allowed me to tackle a brief given specific constraints. Given the storyboarding element to the option I chose, and the brief that mentions it is for a trailer, having the assignment only selecting six keyframes was tight and a little confusing. I am glad that I could tackle that brief and achieve my personal objectives of it telling a story in a very limited number of frames.
It also allowed me to experiment with taking more stylistic approaches to my work, playing with colour and emulating the print effects of the comics I grew up with as a boy. Some of these colour experiments have been really successful. I don't think these images speak with my voice yet, but there are a number of elements that I want to take on - composition, environments and narrative. My figure drawing is still improving, but I still have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to dynamic characters and expressions. I think a lot of this comes from my obsession to get anatomy correct, and this leaves my characters somewhat wooden.
I think I need to let go and embrace the comics influences of my youth. Taking things away from realism and embracing distortion and exaggeration could be a useful avenue to explore. My ongoing influence from Edward Hopper still pervades my subconscious approach to my work. I have thought a great deal about this over the summer, and I need to take away what appeals in his work (architecture, light & shadow, isolation) and give myself permission to let go of the specific realism he uses to achieve his work.
This way I can take from other influences as well to create a much richer personal visual language that has more self-expression and less emulation.
More and more I realise the secret to improvement is thinking before doing - the muscle memory will come with practice, but I need to think more as I do - what am I trying to say? Where should that go? How will that fit with other elements? How does this join that?
I have appreciates all of the support my tutor has given me, and her advice to "set yourself personal small projects to help spark ideas and develop specific skills." Is something I am already actively pursuing through personal work, and will continue. Setting myself specific objectives and constraints has been extremely useful in helping me focus and inventing past the anxiety blocking my way. It becomes a challenge rather than an obstacle.
Preparing for assessment
Preparing for the OCA assessment process has been different and more challenging than my last module. In my last module, I had produced a number of finished (or near-finished) pieces. The challenge laid in whittling these down to ten items and then learning all about how to get them printed and mounted for best effect.
This time the challenge was twofold: First, the nature of this module meant that they sketchbooks themselves were the main artefacts. So I had only produced a limited amount of specific pieces to submit. Secondly, I now had to submit everything digitally. Tackling these constraints was challenging, but the benefit of the updated submission process meant that I had the opportunity to take a more multi-media approach, which I think is very in-keeping with my approach to the module itself.
So there were a few areas where I could identify that some extra work could help me. I started by identifying existing work that I wanted to present. This gave me about 14 potential candidates. A few pages of my sketchbook were successful in their own right, whereas others were deselected because I felt that they were me pandering, rather than expressing my journey through the module, and my developing creative voice.
There were some elements where I felt that drawing on comments from my tutor reports would be useful. How could I take the feedback and then take elements from my sketchbook and refine them into more finished pieces, just like in a brief? The first thing I knew I wanted to do immediately was to take the storyboards that I had created for assignment five, and turn them into the animatic that the assignment brief mentioned.
This was a lot more challenging than I expected: not only had I learned much about the compositions from the assignment pieces, but for the animatic to work well it needed many extra keyframes to roughly animate the story. Added on top of this, I committed to making it as authentic as possible. So not only did I have to think about the sequence, but I had to think about music and audio. Selecting the right music and then timing the images to fit the music was a wonderfully challenging and rewarding constraint. I think that the final animatic (which you can see in the updated assignment post) is really successful and taught me a lot about balancing fidelity and storytelling.
I wanted to continue with the animation aspect, taking feedback from my tutor to animate my corona virus / planet earth sequence from my sketchbook. I enthusiastically started this but found that accurately animating the earth spinning was far harder than I felt capable to tackle. After many attempts, I decided to stop my progress down that path. Instead, I looked back to other feedback I had received. In section three my tutor had noted
"Your attention to detail with light and gentle indication of texture works very well, extend your knowledge and put time into exploring paint. This image has great potential, you might want to develop it further in your own time in order to communicate this strong sense of community that has spurred on local research."
Given all the personal work I had done in exploring gouache painting, colour and light I thought that this would be a good opportunity to explore 1) how to take this little study and take it to a final image, and 2) how could I take what I have learned in the traditional media and translate it to a digital painterly format, which was a skill I was apprehensive about. You can read how it went here.
The other element that I wanted to improve on was the final piece I created for assignment three. The figures here were not great, and my tutor had given me specific feedback. Combined with her feedback from assignment five, I saw an opportunity to improve this image with what I had learned in the intervening time. I also managed to do this digitally, which was a wonderful experiment. I found that I could replicate the watercolour approach really effectively, which gives me more options for future work where time is of the essence. You can see the update here.
I wanted to include work that I had done in my sketchbooks but not directly related to an exercise or assignment. I had really enjoyed the Life Drawing Live television events and was really pleased with some of the pieces that I had completed. Initially, I chose one of the images, but I ended up feeling that it was a bit random - what was I trying to tell an assessor. So I decided to make a triptych of life drawing sketches to show my overall ability and progression in this area. To present these effectively, I created one single image, using a scan of black mounting board as a background on which to 'mount' the images and give a presentation I would have chosen if it were still physical.
I now had ten pieces to present, which encompass a multimedia approach covering traditional, digital, animation and sequential approaches. I think it's a holistic and accurate representation of my journey through this module.
The last consideration I made for the presentation was to try and create a sense of progression as if I were submitting a physical portfolio for assessment, or even submitting a digital portfolio to an art director. When you have a portfolio on a website, you can control the layout and presentation. It's a lot harder to do this in a GDrive folder. My solution was to clearly number the selected pieces, so that they ordered themselves in the folder and, along with my cover sheet, will hopefully prompt the assessor to work through it in order. In previous assessments, you would have been able to send physical sketchbooks. This would have worked really well for this module in particular, given its subject matter. My sketchbooks videos are all long and the assessors would not be able to watch them all. So I decided to create a time-lapsed video of all of my tours together. They might not be able to see all the details or have the benefit of the voiceover for context, but I hope they will get a sense of my progression and how I use sketchbooks. I feel for this module that is very important in terms of the learning objectives, in a way that learning log entries alone cannot convey.
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