Exercises

Exercise 1: Reflection on Part Four

You will now have received your tutor report for your themed project in Part Four. With the benefit of hindsight, read through your report and think with hindsight about your themed body of work. Consider some of the following:

● Your visual approach to the theme. Would you change it now?
● The research you undertook. What did you learn?
● The creative and material processes. For example, if you made a group of paintings, what were their strengths and weaknesses?
● What would you have done differently?
● Was the scale of the work appropriate to the ideas?

The project for part four was one of my more ambitious ones, having made a more than twenty pages in just a few days. The tutor report on part four was very positive overall. Given the time limitation, the project was extensive and fairly well-realized. I received some excellent insight on levels of detail and was recommended artists’ work to analyze and draw inspiration from for the future.

For a future project, I think I will try to be bolder stylistically, or at least experiment with more approaches to see what would best suit the subject matter. I did have some inspiration for the drawing style and researched other people’s approaches, but I didn’t really adhere to the mood board or test out the concepts properly. Next time I might try different drawing styles.

I enjoyed making the comic a lot, and I’m very happy I was able to record the process. Playing the videos back has helped me streamline my workflow more. I think the thing I would change most about it is adding an extra step after the first sketching layer to make a more visually developed result. I feel like going to “clean” ink so soon and cutting the drafting stage short really shows in the final images.

Exercise 2: Creative Audit

You can now begin to think about your final assignment by going through all of the artwork you’ve created so far for this course. You can do this by:

● Reviewing your sketchbooks, notebooks, working drawings and sketches as well as the more ‘resolved’ or finished pieces.
● Use post-it notes to identify the images you have made which have elements that you consider successful.
● Read back over your reflective statements and notes in your learning log and take note of any points or thoughts that may have changed or developed since you originally made them.
● Identify and focus on the most positive aspects of your artwork, experimentation and critical reflections.

Select the 10 pieces of work you have made in this unit that you think are particularly successful. These could be from any exercise or assignment from this unit – they could be sketches from your sketchbook or finished assignment pieces. Collate them as this exercise outcome on your learning log as a portfolio of creative experimentation.

By doing this, you can identify what has worked and build on your successful work so far in this part of the course. Alternatively, you could begin completely afresh, by pursuing an idea that you have had for some time and now feel you have the skills and abilities to develop more fully.

Assignment 1: Flowing and Playing

Part 2 Exercises, Flowing and Thinking

An eagle-eyed view of my work with such a small selection is difficult, especially since I used a few techniques I was not used to, but I think some trends are the use of line and texture as opposed to volume, a preference for figurative work, and some use of fantasy elements. I tried to select a variety of images, not just finished pieces in order to show intermediate steps as well as a more polished result. I will be commenting on this blog in lieu of post-it notes because many of the pieces are digital.

Part 2 Exercises, Big

The two sketches, Assignment 1, and Part 2 Exercises: Big are good examples of how I work on paper: usually with black ink, though Big is with charcoal. Big, Word Processing and Movement are part of my focus on sequential storytelling in this course (Visual Skills 2). One of my goals has been to better my approach to clarity and communication with the reader when it comes to sequential storytelling. The Movement and Word Processing exercises were an attempt at figuring out how to work with sequential storytelling in different styles. The Word Processing exercise uses a vertical style often employed in digital comics whilst in Movement, I focused on a more traditional comic book approach. The fourth assignment took the experimentation from the exercises a step farther and was my first attempt at a more elaborate comic. The most difficult part of drawing comics for me was communicating the story clearly. I can easily follow the stories I draw on my own, but too often the images fail to be self-explanatory when others look at them. For the next assignment, I will continue to build on these skills and hopefully make the story more clear, with or without words to aid the images.

Exercise 3: Creating Connections

Up to now you have been reflecting on and collating what you have produced in this unit. Now take the 10 images you uploaded in the last exercise and print them off – you could print off several versions at different sizes to give you lots of visual options. For this exercise you are going to mix up and combine selected elements to create new images. If you are comfortable with software you may decide to complete this exercise digitally.

Lay out your printed images somewhere so that you can look at them together. This is similar to the ‘Cut Ups’ exercise in Part Two but this time all of the imagery is of your own making. Arrange your composite drawings to create connections between them. You could choose to group elements from different drawings together to see what happens, or elements from a few of your photographs. Or you could mix up part of a drawing with part of a photograph and part of a painting. You might like a figure in one image and a landscape in another – put them together to see what new story or narrative they create. Be as experimental as you can. When you have made 10 new composite images upload them to your blog and reflect on the process in writing on your learning log.

I chose to elaborate on the previous collage exercise and developed the collages digitally. Since both the animation and the comic book have multiple images in them, I chose one panel or page of each to use as an element. At first, I tried to use everything at once, even if a lot of the images got buried and obscured and tired to make something halfway harmonious with the very different sorts of images I had available. Then, I started chipping away at the number of images, eliminating some entirely and making focal points out of others.

Because my focus has been on sequential storytelling, I think the collages below best represent the sum of my work. The one on the right is especially representative, though perhaps on the nose, in the way each distinct image both occupies a panel whilst also showing the motion of the original comic underneath. The transparency is subtle in some panels, but it gives the unrelated images a sense of cohesion.

Though my work is not stylistically consistent and therefore doesn’t look excellent when cut and pasted together, the amalgam of styles can be useful individually. Having multiple approaches within reach to match to a project can be invaluable. What has stayed consistent is my direction in terms of subject matter. I will focus on developing those ideas and skills for assignemnt five. The exercises and assignments I have completed will be a great starting point for this final project.