Working in Photoshop with analog drawings really gave my work a quality I have not achieved in the past. My work is visually much more striking than if I just presented it with no digital manipulation. This gave me confidence in making a book of just nice imagery to begin with, I was thinking this would be enough. My compositional skills and occasional use of depth and perception has made me more critical of why I am doing things, getting me to think of ways my process of working can become better and sometimes easier. For example working with the lasso tool to digitally highlight areas of colour was very simple and easy for me to do however on it's own would not work that well aesthetically. When repeated and combined with highly detailed analog work, the simplicity is balanced out by the labour that went into my sketchbook.
One of my biggest realisations in this project was my drawing process. By making use of different types of media I am able to solve problems as I go along, I can layer things up and hide other things. I can spend ages on a drawing but that is because I am finding ways to improve or fix the problem areas. It nearly always starts off kind of bad and the rest is just me trying to rectify the problem. In the drawing below I constantly made changes to the line work and the shapes on the faces with new pieces of paper and masking tape, or simply just redrawing a line. It has resulted in a series of faces that detail the journey of my image making. I realised after finishing the image that there needed to be an area highlighted on the cheek, so I ripped a layer of paper, I didn't like the shape of his forehead so I stuck paper over it and started it again. These areas of fixing and reworking the image have become part of the general aesthetic in my work, something that was picked up on in my final crit.
A big problem for me with this project was decision making. I think I need to stick some things out until I can appreciate the processes I used to resolve issues I come up against or at least make them work for an audience, rather than move on and do work entirely for myself. Wanting to make a book of just nice drawings of Rjukan was a mistake in that I completely forgot about the initial purpose set out by my brief, it had to be seen by other people and if it lacked any real substance then it would not resonate with them on a deeper level other than 'looking nice' which catches attention but then what else is there to look for? I am pleased I had just enough time to try and fix some of these issues although not completely. If I had realised my mistake and listened to advice given in crits then my book would have been a lot better. In future I will definitely use crits as an opportunity to take a step back and face the problems with my work, whereas during this project I was very passive and undervalued opinions given to me.
I am very pleased with the overall level of quality to my work that I think has taken a step up from my previous attempts at final pieces. A lot of my planning went into aesthetics and despite the negative impact this had on the message, I ended up with a better way of working and a more distinct line between what areas of my work are developmental and final. I would previously sometimes try to blur those lines which in some ways added a sense of character to my work but also created doubts and questions in my mind as to what my work is for - the purpose. I am definitely going to continue combining digital and analog processes. I have become really excited thinking about the possibilities my new skills could bring, I am thinking a lot about texture and line and how these are transferred from paper to screen, I need to buy a scanner.
In future I will take the time to listen to people's opinions more carefully and plan more thoroughly based on those opinions, which will help tackle my problem of choosing easier routes and just skimming the surface of ideas without fully exploring their potential, in this case it was a narrative. My drawing is somewhat limited by the sketchbooks that I work in, and this is definitely something that needs to change. I am going to make sure I start to work outside of the safety net that my books give me and transfer the same processes I have always used but onto loose paper, I will have more space and less limitations, this will definitely improve my practice. I am going to keep up to date with my blog, something I didn't keep on top of this time around, little and often is key and is something I have already been told many times. I suppose it comes down to listening properly and realising a problem doesn't just go away with time, you have to face it as soon as it arises otherwise anything you do is in danger of going off on a tangent that can be difficult to rectify.
I want to try new things digitally, learning the basics in Photoshop has made learning other tools like Illustrator and video editing software like After Effects seem less daunting. I have been seriously limiting my progress up until starting my degree course, hopefully I will continue to improve using what I have learnt and everything I still have to learn.
No comments:
Post a Comment