Visual Narratives Evaluation

Evaluation 

1.  What skills have you developed through this brief and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

I have developed a range of skills over the course of this project. Something that I have particularly developed is my understanding of colours and textures and how they can 'add' to the piece. These new skills have directly informed my final outcome. Another thing is my development of hand-drawn type; this was something that I enjoyed anyway but this project has shown me that hand-drawn type and illustration can go 'hand in hand' and also make the work more interesting and exciting at times. I have also developed more practical skills; in screen printing and bookbinding but more especially the latter as the binding I tried was new to me. 

2. What approaches to/methods of image making have you developed and how have they informed your concept development process?

My method of image making in the early stages is very quick thumbnails and scamps. I have found this to be the best way of working for me to just get ideas on the paper and not worry about the aesthetics of the image. This helps me to visualise my ideas and concepts quickly and effectively make quick decisions. Another approach that I took was researching into how to achieve certain things on photoshop (e.g. colour overlay) and also looking at other illustrators- especially ones who had books with narrative in. 

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?

A strength of mine is that I am always keen to progress and move my work forward. To develop this and capitalise on this, I will continue to be informed by journals, blogs and general research into illustrators. 

Another strength which follows on from the previous is that I take calculated risks. For example, choosing to create a fully screen printed book that is 2 colours and has some nice drawings in that also work with texture is a bit of a risk due to the time limit. However I planned for this and knew I would need to work hard to get the work done; I did. 

Planning things. Before the Christmas break I set myself the task of completing all my drawings by the end of the holiday (I completed 14/16 which wasn't too bad), I then went on to plan my next few weeks by working out almost hour by hour where I could do my work and where I couldn't and where I needed to go to workshops etc. To capitalise on this I feel that continuing to plan and keep track of time will be a great skill to develop as getting my time management to become extremely effective will help me out a lot when I become a proper illustrator and have to work to very strict/sometimes short deadlines. 

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?

A weakness of mine is that I right from the beginning of the research, I will be thinking about the final product. This means that I sometimes get too concerned with the end outcome than my idea generation. This has some strengths to it as well; the subconscious thinking helps to produce a broad understanding and raise questions that may soon need answering (e.g. will that texture that I have started to use even come through the screen when printing or is it too fine detail?)

5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

1. Think about the composition of the image more

2. Be constantly evaluating the image asking myself 'how can I make this better?'- This will help me to produce my best possible image and mean that I don't just settle for the images that don't work well, instead I will work on them until I am happy with them. 

3. Research my process- if I had of researched colour overlay on screen printing I would of known that I could not get the exact colours that I originally anticipated. This forward planning will just make it easier in the long run.

4. Try different techniques/materials/brushes- working on photoshop has become my 'default' way of working. Capitalising on this by trying out new textures and brushes on Photoshop to slightly change my approach will add a lot to my work.

5. Work with more narrative/more narrative on a singular page- my pages in the book that had more than 1 panel, I feel, worked the best. Adding more panels to a page could progress it a lot.

Final Outcome

Here is my final outcome. I have produced 20 of these 2 colour screen printed books which I am going to sell on my Bigcartel store (www.olivianewsome.bigcartel.com). Im going to sell these fairly cheaply just because i'm not an established illustrator yet and it will be good for 'getting my name out'. 

I am fairly pleased with these books. Binding them proved a challenge as I had never done french fold binding before. I also forgot to cater for the size of the inside pages as I made my inside page the same size as all the other pages. Resultantly I had to cut down my inside pages along the spine and bind very tightly so that the cover fitted perfectly. 

 

 

 

Peer Feedback

Here is the peer feedback I got from Friday's crit. I'm really pleased with the feedback that I received.  Many people called my book 'charming' which I am super pleased about and someone even said it looks like a nobrow book. Nice.

Another thing that many people commented on was the colours. Though this was something that I was dissatisfied about as I couldn't get the colours that I originally wanted, this has proved to work for my good due to the amount of positive feedback I received on the colour.

I am glad that drawing the general atmosphere and a loose narrative seems to of been communicated to the audience as this was my 'goal' for my project.

Composition- Figure, object, landscape.

Here is my response to this weeks task on the composition of an image. Composition is very important to an image, i have tried my best to consider it here. 

They were ok responses to the mini brief, I really like the brush work on the first 2 pieces. I especially like that water on the second image.

Figure:

Object:

Landscape:

Progress Surgery Feedback

Here is the feedback from my progress tutorial. This was really good for putting things into perspective regarding my project. It has helped me to know what to work on and also the things that are going well that I should capitalise on. From this tutorial I now know that I need to work more on my blog and produce a back-up digital copy of my book.

Beginning to Screenprint

Today I have begun to print my book. I have printed out the positives and exposed them onto a large screen.

To speed up the process, I am doing the blue colour all on one piece of paper, then cutting the paper later, then layering over the pink/red. So far it's going really well. A problem with this process is the waiting time; the length of this process is due to waiting for screens to dry, to be exposed, for the printing bed to be available etc. 

Another problem that I experienced was that I could not get the colours that I wanted; the pink/red that was in my digital files that would be overlaid could not have any other colours in other than process colours (magenta, yellow and cyan). Resultantly, the colour that substituted my digital colour was a mixture of mostly magenta with 20% yellow and a touch of cyan. 

3D craft & lens- mutant superpower

Here is my image that i made to show my mutant/superpower. I chose to show me having the superpower of being 2 places at once by setting up my camera onto a long exposure. I really like the result, i surprised myself by achieving something as cool as this without using any editing software. I'd of liked it to have a bit more humour in this by including more random objects or wearing something a bit more exotic than my usual clothes. 

choosing my binding

french fold binding                               = don't have to worry about alignment and if i go

                                                                wrong the consequences aren't that bad 

Final Outcome-Digital

Here are the final digital files for my book in the correct order. They will be printed and bound together. I am pleased with how they have turned out, they are not the best drawings that I could do but within the time frame I think they are sufficient. I would of liked to of added in some more textures and focused more on the composition of the image. I have kept a loose narrative that we (myself and the crit group) decided would be really good for the book which worked well. I think the first proper page and the last page work very well in portraying the story.

Peer feedback

Here is the peer feedback. Some of this feedback is good, some is not very useful. 

Useful stuff: 

• add more textures to break up composition
• my target of getting the atmosphere across is being communicated ('a slice of life')
• adding another page of sequence would work really well
• i could call it something different- something to bear in mind

Plan For the next 3 weeks

This is my plan for the next 3 weeks. I anticipate that this may be subject to change as things may crop up/take longer/shorter than expected or go wrong. If I spend a lot of hours in the print room and work hard I feel that I will definitely complete the book in the allotted time. 

I am aiming to create 20 copies of the book as the cost to create 20 compared to just 1 will be only very slightly higher. I will then sell them.

Developing Pages

Here is another of my pages, this will be the final page. I have purposely made this very similar to my first page to carry on the sense of narrative.