visual application

 I decided to talk about all 3 different life drawing sessions as they generally followed the same theme of incorporating colour and playing around with compositions. These were likely my favourite life drawing lessons because not only was I challenged but I feel like I responded well, In a way in which I produced results that I was happy with. My favourite outcome was my "oranges" composition which I think looks really visually attractive and is so different from anything that I would usually produce.

 This task felt to me awfully similar to lino printing which is a technique I absolutely adore so I felt rather comfortable carving away at these rubbers to create stamps to make my own exquisite corpses.  Whilst doing this task I really wanted to create interesting designs which varied in size and structure to have some really unique outcomes and designs. Overall I think I had some really interesting shapes and segments and would love to revisit this in the future.

  The video above shows a couple of prototypes for my folded format and also vaguely outlining the general story of my folded format, at first I was toying between the story of Mansa tanking the value of gold in Egypt and the story of Mansa using the drinking water meant for his pilgrimage, to build his wife a single use swimming pool in the desert. I storyboarded the first idea but I decided that It would better fit the animation.  The folded format was interesting to me because one of the prototypes was a complete accident and laid the ground work for my final piece. After this prototype I wanted to plan out how my folded format would come together so I drew up the design that would be bound rather than folded. In the end I did change this slightly and opt to make the cover out of a thicker textured paper rather than use it for context, as I wanted my story to unravel purely as you flip through the different pages. I think that in the end I achieved what I wanted to do and I...

My character for my folded format narrative was Mansa Musa, a 12th century King who ruled over the Mali empire, and was also the richest man to have ever lived. designing his character was particularly hard since because he lived so long ago there aren't any photographs of him for reference, only artist depictions. Even though there are artist references out there they are extremely far and few between which again means I had very little to go on. Before seeing these depictions I had a rather different idea of what Mansa may of looked like as you can see by my initial impression sketches. My first design for Mansa Musa came from looking at these references and you can see that initial sketch below. This sketch tried to take into consideration clothes that he may have been wearing based on environmental factors like being in humid environments such as deserts and cities in Africa. The next iteration aimed to simplify this design so that his character was easier to replicate or redra...

 This exercise was surprisingly fun to do. In this task we would create a range of blobs using ink and paint and then use a pen to draw onto those blobs to create characters.  This task yielded some really interesting results and I think I would revisit this task in the future either as a warm up exercise or even if I was trying to create a new original character. My favourite outcome from the three sheets is the frog like character, I like how organic he was to create but also I like the sinister look of him.

This project for me was my least favourite, I personally didn't really understand what the expected results for this project were and with every lecturer I asked about what was expected, I was given a completely different answer. My final understanding for this project was to use the pages given to transform them in a way that relates to the words on the page.  I looked at a bunch of different ideas for this but admittedly I was rather disappointed with anything that I came up with and I believe this lack of enthusiasm, and deflation for this project led to poor outcomes. I contemplated re-doing this project however I couldn't find the motivation to bring myself to do it, as I would have been able to do for the other projects.  These were the outcomes for the project and honestly I think that I definitely could have done something better, not just in execution but also in the idea generation process.

 I wanted to say that although I finished the panels for this project and successfully told a narrative I did not manage to construct the final box. For this project I wanted to tell the narrative of a cherry blossom that begins bare but begins to bloom before eventually leading to scenes of blossom petals flowing through the air. For me personally this was a challenge as the medium for this was collage, something which I generally don't use in my work. If I were to do this one day project again I would be interested to try and create these scenes using digital collaging techniques.

 For this project we were tasked with illustrating a representation of what valentines day meant to us. For me I think valentines represents a lot of what is wrong with the modern dating scene, and this idea that we should take one day out of the year to show appreciation of our significant others but also sort of glorifies loving someone else when a lot of us don't really know how to love ourselves. At first I thumbnailed some fairly simple, basic concepts, stuff that you might expect to see on a valentines day card, but I was fairly unhappy with these concepts so I came up with a concept that I really liked. The concept I set my sights on was this idea that I could spell valentines with iconography whilst also showing off the tragedy and issues I have with valentines. I decided to add the dark cherub to the iconography because I believe it subverts the expectation of the cherub bestowing true love upon those that it hits with its arrow. I was happy with the way the piece came out...

      For this project I toyed around with a few different ideas, all with different tones but in the end I chose to go with a more abstract idea that the moon ages with its different phases. The main reason I went with this idea is because these phases of the moon although people refer to them as crescent, half, and full, in certain astrological societies/beliefs they are called mother, maiden and crone, leaning into the idea that the moon as it goes through these different phases, actually ages. I myself was rather happy with the outcome of this project, as it was my first big shot at digital art and through this project I learned how to use different brushes to create unique textures and tones. I would say that this was one of the more interesting routes I could've approached this project with, and isn't so on the nose.