Exercise 1: Creative Visualisation

Brief

Following on from project 1, and referring to your portfolio assignment and reflection on your ‘golden thread’, consider who you want to talk to.

You could make sketches or thumbnails of each of the following questions and connect them with flowing lines as in the illustration above, or you could create a comics page with each question represented in each panel. Ask yourself:

1. What am I talking about or trying to say?

2. Who am I trying to say it to?

3. Who do I want to speak to now?

4. Which illustrators are already talking to the audience you want to reach?

5. What media platforms do they use to reach the audience?

6. Where does your audience usually get their news/information from?

7. What style of language is used, in word and visual form?

Respond to these questions in your learning log. These responses could also form the basis for part of your Critical Review ‘Patchwork Text’, and there is a ‘prompt’ in this project before Assignment 2.

Writing up answers

Sketching

Process

For this exercise, I used watercolour and ink pen to create the comic, then once I was happy with the overall design I went into Procreate and added text and brightened up the image slightly. I also added a layer over the top of pink to make the whole piece feel more consistent. I wanted to use a limited colour palette as per feedback from my tutor, and used this exercise as a trial to experiment with the minimal palette.

Below is the piece before bordering and lettering.

Final Piece

Evaluation

For this exercise I had to explore several questions and I had the choice do capture them with sketches, thumbnails or even a comic. I decided on doing a comic as that better translates through my brain, the questions themselves got me thinking about how I want to target with my art and how I can reach out to them-- by understanding how my favourite illustrators/artists reach out to their audience.

When it came to doing this piece, I was immediately drawn to doing it in a style of an interview, which in the end panel, made it look a little like a movie interview as intended. I also knew that I wanted to take what my tutor suggested to do into this piece of work, learning a bit of values and experiment with a limited palette.

I don't mind how it looks, it's very vibrant and drawing the faces doing different expressions or angles was a really good challenge.

I do think that maybe experimenting with gouache might be good route to go down on, watercolour is good but it does sometimes leave uneven areas, though that could be the paper too. Using acrylic like I have previous is also good but I do find challenges keeping the acrylic paint wet, I have experimented using a wet palette but I felt like it was more waste with paper towels; and I have seen a lot on the internet of the environmental impacts of acrylic paint. So maybe gouache might be a good route to go down on...