Visual Skills Studio Brief THREE - 'Play, Play, Play'

Long slogger of a week dedicated to nailing these three a3 pieces. I found myself in the studio until closing time every night, which i actually quite like - i enjoy the silence, plus the table lamps in my room at home are toilet! Aswell as developing my successful designs i also had the headache of which medium to use. Wanting the set of images to be as clean and bold as possible i entertained the idea of popping my acrylic cherry so i could achieve some bright block colour, but after a short practice session i wasn't getting the desired results with the darker colours - they were coming out streaky, which might just've been down to my lack of experience using the stuff.I definitely want to try acrylic paint out in more depth at some point, as they work well with the media I'm already confident in using i.e.: fine liner, posca and fat markers. Mr Penfold & Mr Gauky are two guys i look up to inparticular when it comes to the use of these mediums. Enough waffle.

IMAGE AS TYPE

I generated some simple shapes in Illustrator to work into the 

background, to represent water current. Had planned to use them as stencils.

Had worked out a rough backdrop for the type, but knew without 

digital aid it might be a bit ambitious.

Photoshop mockup so i could work out a suitable layout and colour 

scheme before actually applying it to the real artwork. 

I probably tried planning things out a bit too much.

I felt having the eels with no fill might make the image look a bit 

unfinished so i inked them in to suggest some light and texture. 

Which put a big old dent in my time scale!

Inked in eels - when i started working on this design i intended the type to 

not be too obvious to make out,  but i think i might have gone too far the other way!? 

Having settled on a combination of fineliner,posca pen and card for the backdrop cutting it all out become a major headache.Also having painted the paper it became thick and curly & troublesome to glue down, and indeed part of it keep unsticking.This actually partially worked in my favour as it allowed me to thread some of the card elements under and over each other.A happy little mistake.

IMAGE & TYPE

Cutting out the white text wasn't a realistic option (though was seriously considered at one point) given my deadline, so i cut the whole hammer text out and stuck it to the black card backdrop.

(PShopped left: as it should've been) Traditionally the bolts of lightning from Thor's Hammer are blue, but i went with classic yellow bolts because ,at the time, i thought that all my pieces would be featuring yellow more than blue, so would work more effectively as a set.I also added the plug and socket at the last minute, to fill a bit of space. Made it a bit cheesy for my liking, and kind of regretted it.

SINGLE IMAGE

Thought i'd carry on using the same medium for the final piece to complete the set, and in similar colours.What had set out to be a simple shape based image (due to my dwindling time frame) soon turned into a similarly detailed a meticulously drawn out image of a lapped face vulture.Whats wrong with me?! I guess i just thought as the background is just a blue swirl, that won't take me too long, so i'll  take hours and hours filling in the bird. agh! Glad i did though, quite pleased with the ugly sod.

As predicted, a fair bit of the criticism was due to my text being too hard to read. Fair do's. I can understand that. Maybe I'm still producing work with form over function in mind? The Hammer text i didn't expect anyone to have a problem with though?! Also, my incessant need to be as precise and polished as possible had eventually led me to being an A3 short (the vulture image was incomplete).Certainly not down to a lack of effort or laziness. Just striving for hours & hours to generate images with card and pens that i would have knocked out in half the time on my Mac - and trying to simulate the results i would be getting with a computer is becoming frustrating, and most of the time a sub-conscious decision. But its good too see the craft side of my practice is improving.

A couple of interesting comment on my feedback sheet, one nearly brought a proud tear to my eye; "the craft and detail is so neat, you clearly care so much about your work which is amazing" 

Also somebody asked; "have you seen Tom J Newells work?" which is funny/worrying, as i am big fan of Tom J Newell, and was increasingly aware that my work was starting to resemble his style a bit ,and to a point some of Mr Gauky's work ( which kinda resembles some of Newells work, or vise versa). With this in mind, it stalled my progress a little as i was thinking, people are going to think I'm ripping him off (even though i wasn't referencing any of his work, and never have.I'm just an admirer/fan) and i need to find some other way of rendering my work,in my own voice..?Which is hard to do when pretty much everything's been done before, right? 

Main lesson here: STOP TRYING TO BE A COMPUTER,IAN!