Research Task: A Visual Diary (Revisited)

For my first task of this unit, I had to find a collection of imagery to use as a collection of work that inspire me, something I want to work towards and a place I can revisit for future work. I did this on MilaNote, a website made for mood-boarding, this website keeps the board open and I can keep adding more imagery to it- and let's other view it with a link. This is what it looks like currently, as I find more things as I go about my day I can add to it.

https://app.milanote.com/1R5sLl16bjGx6t?p=BJtZH7zZVIl

As I reflect on what these illustrations means in terms of my own art journey, I wanted to think about what level I wanted to achieve/reach and what I find out what I want to lean into more than others. Something I am more drawn to is the narrative illustrations, I love the idea of telling a story with my art; I especially love designing characters for story-telling, something I have explored a lot in my own personal time.

I picked out a few painting styles (far top left) that I could only dream of being able to achieve, the brush-strokes being loose but detailed and the colours popping whilst being natural in it's settings. Even if I wasn't able to achieve that skill level, if I can get that feeling into painting form with better detail than my work now then I'll be happy.

Looking deeper into style, I love detailed linework and I haven't been able to really achieve that in my artworks; I like the impressionist style of Joaquín Sorolla but I also like the details and linework of Kim Jung Gi's work.

Lately, I am very drawn to fantasy genre of artwork because of the games I've been playing and more recently my hobby of hosting D&D. The fantastical genre has made me want to explore a variety of different creatures/characters with a variety of different personalities, and even more outer-wordly story.

Developing as an illustrator as I look at my own work in comparison to my visual diary, there are a fair few things I need to improve on and look towards doing. One of those include studying anatomy-- and properly sitting down and studying it, taking time to learn everything about the body so that I can create proper proportions and include greater details in my figures.

Another thing I need to improve on is perspective, I need to study perspective more and study landscapes, once I've mastered that I can create compelling scenes/panels of comics, better illustrations with interesting background. I want to be able to make the focus and the background flow together, coming together to create a whole illustration.

Something personally I need to do is slow down, I am known for rushing ahead-- and in doing so I lose out all the details that I had in my sketches and then the illustrations feel flat, boring and empty.

What I feel like this visual diary shows about me as a person/artist, is that I still haven't thought about what area of illustration I want to go into- of the fact that I want to go into everything. I hope that this visual diary shows that I like to be shown something meaningful and deep, and for it to show my a story that another artist wanted to tell. (Also that I want to keep improving my skill level to be better).

Delving deeper into what I've said previously is, I love to be taken to another place with art, and comic/graphic novels do that; I love to see how an artist portray their characters and in their own style. Not just in the final product, I love to see the exploration of characters being created for a story such as creating concept art for video games, movies and tv shows; seeing how their personalities and lore are shown through a simple character appearance is amazing to me.

Reflecting towards the painting side of the visual diary and the lesser narrative side (even though every piece of art has a inner narrative), I love to see choices made of the colour and brush-strokes and how an artist has decided to show a view/subject and do it in a way that can change the mood of the painting itself.

Reflection of research task

This research task was very fun to do, it allowed me to take a reminder of what my goals are and what inspires me. I really need to improve on my work so this also helped me reevaluate what I need to do to get better in my art, and what my style could be by taking a glimpse at what excites me.

I have another visual diary with me everyday, that being my sketchbook as I try and draw what's around me everyday and what excites me-- and I also love to collect artbooks which is a great form of visual diary for me.

With what to expect in this upcoming unit, I am excited to see how much progress I make with my art, I'm going to print this mood-board and pin it to my wall to remind me what I am working towards.