Connie Ashford | Illustration & Animation

We had such an amazing time in Lisbon, I had so much fun with my group and we really bonded, especially over custard tarts and nice bars. I will admit, I was enjoying myself so much that I probably did not do enough drawings, but I have decided that’s ok because I don’t consider location drawing to be my preferred working method at all. 

There was so many things we did and it was actually really hot (got burnt) so I often found it uncomfortable the thought of sweating in the sun drawing. However, we found the perfect way to get around this when we visited the Museu Coleção Berardo during our day trip to Belem where we saw loads of famous art works all from eras that we had looked at in groups in CHS. We all got chairs so we were able to sit and the room was quiet with air conditioning and it just became a really enjoyable experience and probably the longest duration we all drew for. Afterwards we went to Pasteis De Belem (but they weren’t as good as the ones in the Time Out market) 

Here are some of my drawings:

Another place we visited was the Basílica vista do jardim Guerra Junqueiro. We had been walking all day around the Flea Market and decided to by ourselves a cheap lunch.  After our picnic, we split up and went around the gardens drawing for a couple of hours, I got a bit burnt but it was so worth it for the enjoyment of having such beautiful surroundings. 

This project started not very well for me but has managed to take me to quite a interesting place in my practise. During reading week I really enjoyed sketching whilst listening to the book, but I didn’t really like the research part for some reason. I couldn’t get myself into it and I struggled to pick a theme to focus on, but I realise now I was making it more complicated than it needed to be. The themes I looked at were surrealism and dreams. I think the reason I wasn’t enjoying the research that much was because I assumed it meant that we needed to look at the uniforms, weaponry and political state of American during the Civil war and I was just thought that was a bit dry. But I made it more fun for myself by using weird films about dreams such as ‘Brazil’ and ‘Holy Mountain’ as research examples. 

I got quite into the second week of this three week project when we spent our time doing 12 sketches of scenes from Owl Creek on small sheets on paper trying to make a narrative that reads well. We had a lot of crits for these on our tables spending 10 mins on each person and everybody was really constructive and honest if they didn’t know what an image was saying whilst reading it. This also set me up nicely for week three which was when we started to pick apart what we wanted to focus on and make something of the book. 

I chose ‘The Page’ option two for my adaptation and I think I have definitely made the right decision. I realise I enjoy physically drawings things more than animating because it just comes so much more naturally to me. And also I did some mock up paintings, I have found with this project that I am really trying to utilise different methods to make this much more exciting for the audience and myself. 

This week I found lots of plants and took pictures of them and experimented with them on photoshop:

I have had some really good crits with Paddy, although in the second I realised I have to make an adaptation of the whole book, not just a section because obviously it needs to tell the entire story. So I have a lot of work to do for next week but I have discussed with Paddy how to move forward with the material that I have, and how to create two narratives in one book; one of Peyton’s state of mind, and one of the linear narrative.

Today’s lecture was all about comic books and the sequential art as a particular mode of visual narrative. I really am not keen on manga as a style and have never found any liking towards it but this does not mean I wasn’t interested when Maggie showed us some of the first examples of Manga. I also do respect that comic books have a long history or entertainment for adults and kids and I myself enjoyed reading Dennis the Menace as well as my mums old Tin Tin comics. 

I enjoyed learning about the global like the German broadsheet and Toba Sojo the artist/monk who was I think the first to do Japanese manga. I also did like the comic books that weren’t in a manga style like ‘Aya’ by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie. 

An topic I found myself writing a lot about what a historical moment that happened in the USA in the 1950′s when there was a comic book controversy and people began to burn them. Comics allegedly promote violence, racism and criminality in juveniles according to Frederic Wertham. Crime and horror within comic books was now linked to juvenile delinquency and so a ‘comic code’ had to be introduced which severely impacted what could be represented in comics. 

I was slightly switching off during the section about formatting comics and how the multi frames can affect the reading experience, however I think Maggie is a really great lecturer and so it wasn’t too bad. 

At first when I looked around the room I saw the style of art that was all around and knew it wasn’t going to be my sort of thing, but to be honest I did kind of expect that before I went in. I did really really enjoy the exhibition actually,  definitely the second and last rooms much more than the first one because they were so interactive and futuristic. 

In the second room was a discussion panel that I sat and listened to for ages. The topic of violence in video games really stuck with me. A sociologist talked about a video game that is set in Italy’s biggest mental asylum, a real place with real patients, all women, who were abused and raped by the staff there. In order to convey this message accurately in the video game, graphic imagery is required. I think this is a very fair point to make, there are often video games that have unnecessary violence purely for fantasy and desire, however a video that is based off of true events needs violence to justify experiences.

 On the contrary I wonder why video games are the media outlet used to describe true events as harrowing as one like this. It seems kind of unnecessary, although saying this i don’t know the ins and outs of how one would play the game, I don’t know whether you are able to kill characters or whether they are just in the background and you are on some kind of mission. 

What I do know is that video games are a rapidly growing media that is not yet considered a true art form globally and therefore I am open to deciding whether it is appropriate to tell a story like this or not.  

Another really important topic covered in this exhIbition was these three categories: 

I could’ve gone through a whole room on these three topics it was a shame they only had small sections on it. But some very inspiring and well articulated people have summarised what the video games industry is truly missing.

Another interesting quote I read was about a Trans woman who during her difficult transitioning period turned to video games and found them to be an outlet during hard times. I think for a lot of folk video games can be an escapism and the fantasy world that enter is suddenly a consuming experience which therefore makes it such a huge market, it’s addictive. 

I found today’s seminar to be really useful when we were shown artists during the briefing. I’ve always liked the fact that the tutors make sure to find artists who are more than just illustrators and work in ways that are different to us so that we can simply just apply their principles or approaches. Leanne Shapton was my favourite one they talked about, she made swimming pool studies relating to her experience of doing competitive swimming across the world growing up. I really like how the studies look altogether because on their own they are fairly basic but collectively they look quite abstract.

Also Ed Ruscha, ‘Every building on the sunset strip’ was really cool and made me wonder what a version of this done along Hastings seafront would look like. Probably much less aesthetically pleasing and a bit more shit hole vibes. 

We have been working on this project ‘Everyday connections’ for three weeks now and so it feels like I am getting more comfortable and used to sequencing photographs in a way. At first it seems kind of dull, but then you force yourself to keep finding new ways to make connections and you scratch beneath that surface layer of disinterest and start creating all these interesting weird narratives that probably wouldn’t make sense to any audience other than yourself. The photographs I had for this session were more exciting to me than my last lot and I found some really exciting connections:

I also have lots of photographs of aeroplanes that I forgot to print out but I am going to have them as a collection because I think they look really great together:

This week I have done a huge amount of drawings. Maybe not a huge amount but it does feel like it when you haven’t done that in a while. Laura on the Tuesday was really nice, I didn’t realise she was the woman who made the refugee booklet that I loved from last years degree show. Anyway, here are some of my drawings from Tuesday:

I am quite keen on the Asian doll drawings that I did later on in our gallery visit because I had warmed up quite a bit by this point and so was much looser with my strokes. I loved the section of continental toys rather than British ones and found them to be more fascinating. The theatre set up was very grand and the drawings I tried of two of the characters could do with a little more scale as well as attention to detail.

At the Welcome Collection I went straight to Medicine Now to look at the large body sculpture because I remember seeing it as a child and thinking it was actually real until my mum told me it was made by an artist. I think using the coloured pencils to sketch the body was appropriate because I was able to capture details like the blue veins on the legs as well as leave more messy layered tones for the skins complexion. I went on to photoshop to try and render some of the colours because I think there’s a lack of vibrancy.  

I saturated this image loads and also turned up the blue and pink tones because the skin tone when I squinted was mostly red and blue blotchy and so i wanted to exaggerate this. I also think it makes the drawing look kind of grotesque which to be honest represents the initial feeling you get looking at the sculpture. I also inverted the image just to imagine how this would have looked on black paper with colours, but I think because the sculpture was surrounded by white light it made it look more stark and therefore the tones were highlighted harshly. Although in saying this, inverting it does suit the scientific nature of this exhibition in that it looks like an X-ray scan which in turn has made my pencil marks look more internal and bodily. 

In today’s seminar we were continuing from last week looking at how to make a narrative from photographs, starting with looking at a selection of artists, two of which I thought were great. The first Elizabeth Price:

and the second Allan J. Pakula:

I liked hearing Elizabeth Price talk about the process of linking three concepts together (ecclesiastical architecture, synchronised dances of singers and a woman waving her hand out a window caught in the Woolworth fire) and how she got to the idea of marrying the three focusing on hands. I also like how Price has used words to enhance the meaning of her film an help link the three. Often people use unnecessary text in film an photography to give off an aesthetic that I think is hard to pull off.

Watching Allan J. Pakula’s film was strange because of the rhythm of his film and the way the pace picked up at these photographs flashed up on the screen. The concept of having a film within in a film is really really cool and I was imagining I was being indoctrinated to be a killer while I was watching it because the words were manipulative and intoxicating. 

Then when we looked at our own photographs, here are mine:

I found so many pairs that worked and didn’t work and it was so interesting to see how Ben changed and rearranged mine, some were similar but slightly different and others were compositionally nothing that I would’ve thought of. I loved looking at Ben’s photographs too he had such a nice mixture of people and portraits and also texture an colour and so i found myself creating endless options right up until paddy said to stop. When me and Ben collaborate together we chose mostly his photographs and one of mine that we thought worked well as a narrative and was actually a symbolic representation of Donald Trump’s infamous words “Grab em’ by the pussy” 

Today’s lecture was so unexpectedly interesting. For some reason I dismissed the essay question for this lecture as dry and probably not my thing but now I am seriously considering it. There were some really interesting points made and I have a lot of material that would be so useful for my essay. 

Gestalt Psychology was fascinating and something I could imagine researching more into. It’s about how our brain fills in the gaps when looking at images. Johnson looked at jagged lines and smooth lines an described the way in which they make the human body feel something. Jagged lines are harsh, agitated, and intense. We feel in our body the gentleness of a smoothly curving line. As the lecturer said, there is a reason why warning signs are always triangular and a circle makes us feel calm. 

One of the most interesting points raised today was to do with the Eurocentric perceptions of how knowledge was gained. The Europeans were fed knowledge from the East, which was where discoveries were mostly happening. Although when the knowledge was passed over, the Europeans reimagined it, i.e making discoveries during the Renaissance period, their knowledge nonetheless couldn’t develop without great contribution of knowledge from the Middle East.

A depressing but unsurprising point raised was the fact that women were never fully credited. Henrietta Moriarty, Sarah Bowdich and Olivia Tonge were all scientific researchers, book writers, explorers and much more and yet all of them were considered only as skilful drawers, rather than practicing scientific researchers. 

For this next project, ‘Everyday Connections’ we will be exploring the connections that can be made between photographic images. To infer narrative ideas between two objects that have complex associative meanings being united to become a sequential set of images, uniting through a commonality.

Hans Eijkelboom’s ‘Street Wear’ series is so wonderful and such a funny idea, it must have taken years to combine these images but it’s a timeless idea that he will be able to continue for the rest of his life. It is also a useful indication of how fashion trends have remained over the years.

I thought for this project about my time in Foundation when we were set a project very similar and I remember finding it really dull and yet somehow I continued to take pictures over the course of the year. Subconsciously it trained me into taking pictures of weird things that caught my eye on my way to and from the college. I even made a folder for them because I thought they may come in handy for something one day, I wonder if i could recycle some of these for this project or is that cheating?

But I have already started taking pictures and my favourite ones are from my walk in Richmond Park the other day; Look at the Super Moon!

When Maggie talked about the fact that there are in fact about 33 sense that exist within us, I was reminded of this series on iPlayer all about senses that I listened to a while ago, so I’m posting it here incase I want to come back to it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02lx9t7

An interesting fact we learnt was that bees have ‘Magnetoreception’ which is as I understand is to do with their ability to navigate through the detection of a magnetic field. I don’t know why I want to reiterate this on my blog but I just think bees are so great. 

Perhaps the most interesting part of today’s lecture for me was the section on ocularcentrism and the historical hierachy within it. Sight has always been considered the highest sense, the most superior. But this is interesting because close to two thirds of the world’s blind are women. And because of this, it has always been gendered, i.e senses of touch an taste have always been associated with females and therefore secondary to the male centric sense of sight. As well as this, there is a metaphorical racialization traingle whereby the black man sits at the bottom and the white man sits at the top, as always.

Just found the lecture notes and posting here for future essay reference:

It’s so important to make art as accessible as possible, especially for those who are pushed out of the art world and therefore struggle to engage with it in the way. My flat mate showed me this artist who had an exhibition on in her home town of Lichtenstein. His name is Yuri Albert and he made an exhibition which “contrasts the language of art with the languages of blind or deaf people or also the terminology of sailors and stenographers in order to analyse the individual semiotic systems and the system of art as a whole, their comprehensibility and accessibility.” He made this exhibition to showcase the exclusivity within the art world, making it incomprehensible to someone with use of sight and sound, therefore flipping the norms. I think this is such a great idea, for once something is made with the intention of making life harder for the other person.  

I enjoyed the section about the ethics of journalism and what it takes to be truthful because it just goes to show that barely any modern day newspapers seem to be doing this. Particularly the section on accountability, not enough corporate companies don’t apologise enough if they do something wrong. 

Context is also so important when considering journalism as cropping a story can completely change the the narrative. More and more people it seems are awakening to the medias ability to warp and twist contexts. “News is never a mere recording... but a synthetic, value-ridden account which carries within it dominant assumptions and ideas of the society in which it was produced” Rebecca Chan 

15-28th November, play the scene animation project

This project has been such a whirlwind of stress, but in the end I enjoyed it which seems to be the case with most things on this course. I get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start and then by the end i have come out the other side of it with an animation. The reason i was worried is because I have spent so little time on photoshop for editing that i didn’t have a clue about animation. Phoebe did give a tutorial however I did something wrong in it and had to start again and ended up getting a bit lost and asking for Ben’s help.

When the first 6 frames were due i spent the whole of Wednesday worrying so much about how i was going to pull together the drawings in time. To help, i drew out each frame to get an idea of the full narrative and then i planned to scan these in and use the magic wand tool. But that all seemed too complicated and in the end i asked Natalie if she could help me, which she did a good job of doing considering this was her first animation too. I decided to just draw digitally because although i didn’t like the style of it hugely it was the best option to chose because it allowed me to focus on improving my photoshop knowledge (which i was more concerned with at this point)

The original idea was to have a character walk into the barber shop ready for a haircut and while the barber leaves the room and gremlin sneaks up on it and cuts its hair off and then they fight. But I strayed from this a little and simplified it by not having the barber as a third character.

We were told that photoshop is certainly not the best for audio and I could tell even as a novice that this was the case. I decided to put my own audio into the video rather than importing sounds because i thought it was more inventive and fun. However, because the video played so fast and the actions were so quick i couldn’t keep up with the actions and so it doesn’t link very well, but oh well.

Today was the last session we had with Jane, which I was very sad about. Jane has been so great at getting us to use a different part of our brain and brought an appreciation for good story telling that I haven’t had since year 12 English. Today we all sat and heard  hearing everybody read their stories which i thoroughly enjoyed, particularly Grace, Parkers and Victorias, all of whom write so well i am envious. I shared the job with Molly so as to make the whole task easier and more fun. I don’t usually enjoy creative writing as i always struggled with making them gripping and not sounding like an amateur a level student. But once Molly and I had come up with the concept of ours, we were on a bit of a roll and i surprised myself with how quickly I could write something up. The story I chose for us was quite dark but i think interesting nonetheless. Although the beginning seems like a classic story of an old man and his wife dying, i think the ending does catch you off guard. Here’s the original document as well as a voice recoding of me reading out the story as we didn’t have time to perform it in front of everyone today.  

Album cover by Klaus Voormann 

I’m not sure if this album necessarily tells a story, however i want to write about it because it has always been my favourite album cover. My mum had this album from her Beatles fan days and so i was little when i first saw this, but i remember thinking the drawings were so cool, the way the artist used mixed media and all in black and white too was so impressive to my nine year old self. I think it’s fair to say that this is a contribution to my love of illustration. The simplicity of the line drawings is so understated compared to the level of detail in their hair, it reminds me of Picasso’s line drawings. Compositionally this is also engaging because the angles of each members face as well as the crowded collage in the middle draws the eye up then down, it’s clever. 

Lemi Ghariokwu

The artist i think is also worth mentioning is Lemi Ghariokwu, a visual artist who worked very closely with the Nigerian Afrobeat star Fela Kuti. Ghariokwu made 29 of Kuti’s 56 album covers. “My art eventually acted as a supplement to the music, because I represented Fela’s thoughts from a different perspective, I became like a witness to what he was saying,” 

“These images are crammed onto the page, packed in and explosive. This was an aesthetic he developed after Kuti convinced him to try smoking weed.” They all remind me of a comic book where the contents are crammed into a one panel narrative. All of them manage to have a story that makes a political statement. 

The album below, called Beasts of No Nation (1989) is a political collage where Ghariokwu has depicted the state leaders as devils. In fact Nigerias current leader is on this cover, Muhammadu Buhari. This album cover was made when Kuti was in jail, but his brother had contacted Ghariokwu to listen to the new song and he came up with drawings. Ghariokwu says General Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon are shown in the cover art but Margaret Thatcher, P.W. Botha and Reagan are the most prominent. 

Jane Hankin has an exuberant and engaging way of talking, she was so loud and vibrant when she introduced herself that i was a bit scared for what we were going to be getting ourselves into. But after hearing her talk about her love of writers like Chekov and the importance of good story telling i was gripped. 

On Tuesday, Ben Newman, a Hastings artist, gave us a good tip on how to simplify a busy drawing by condensing it into shapes. Our task this week was to use our characters from reading week to create a one panel narrative that includes lots of characters and tells a story. Which i’ve learnt is much harder than you’d expect. Using focal points marked out by geometric shapes was a useful tool because you add all the details later and let the ideas build from the shapes marked out. I quite enjoyed the simplicity of the task because it made the process less overwhelming. 

On Wednesday I started drawing straight away on an A1 sheet instead of mapping out which was so stupid because i drew my people way too small and detailed, i don’t know why i did that? It defeated the process on Monday, i need to be less impatient. Then on Thursday I had a crit with James Jessiman who graduated from Kingston and then went on to do an MA in fine art at the Royal College of art and it was so helpful. All the advice he gave to not only me but everyone else was genuinely useful and constructive, even if I went last and had the least amount of time, i still fell like i got a lot out of it. I was pleased that he liked my narrative of the bonfire procession and he’d heard of Jack in the Green because he questioned a lot of other peoples. These are some things he said:

> Work bigger and then downscale

> Refer back to the original brief of urban tribes because it’s important not to get carried away and lose focus on what you’re being asked to do. It has to be clear

> Make sure all the people are staring at the same thing, make it clear that the parade at the bonfire is the focal point

> Don’t burden yourself with this, you should make it enjoyable, even if it means changing the subject of your narrative

Over the weekend I was working on my A1 piece and it surprised me how time consuming colouring in is. I was pleased with my outcome though. 

Our crit on Tuesday went well, i enjoyed seeing what everyone else had done even if some were so brilliant it was disheartening. However, i think the subject of mine came across well because everyone knew what was happening in the picture. However some criticism i got was that the wonky perspective is nice, but if i am doing that, make it more of a thing, either go all out or make it realistic otherwise it can look messy. Does the colour take away from the costumes in the parade? People don’t really know where to start and i think the busyness of it distracts from the original point which is that there is a procession. During my drawing process i got distracted thinking of different narratives to put in that could be funny which was really fun, but in the end, drew you away from the focal point.

> very entertaining to look at, although the top half needs finishing

> don’t colour for the sake of colouring

> think about the scale and the foreground vs background

> how can you show the time of day more- shadows? grey background

> why is everyone floating?

When i got home, i changed the colour of the street and made it grey to match the pavement and i think it looks much better, because Nick was right when he said it looks like everyone is floating in poo.

During reading week i visited home and took advantage of the strange tradition of bonfire night that we have in East Sussex. I chose to look at the parade at Battle bonfire for my ‘urban tribe’ although ironically it’s an event that marks the iconic gunpowder plot led by Guy Fawkes. I chose this because of the different groups that parade the streets wear some very unusual outfits to signify their town and no one really understands why but just accepts it nonetheless. I am sad i couldn’t attend Hastings bonfire because every year they burn a weird effigy and in the past we’ve had Katie Price, David Cameron and even the devil. Although Hastings has some unique traditions, I am very glad to have grown up with all these pagan festivals that anyone out of East Sussex wouldn’t understand, and so i thought it would be good to look at a subject close to my heart.

At Battle bonfire, there were red smoke bombs going off, loud fire crackers, fire sticks, loud fireworks and huge crowd of people, so to say the least i picked a challenge. Because of the heard of people packed like sardinesa long the highstreet, my friends and i chose to go into the pub while we waited for the procession, and so i drew a couple of characters in there.

Thing is, Battle bonfire is an occasion i used to go to every year as a youngster to meet up with friends and so this evening became a bit of a reunion for me which meant it left little time to draw things. I took lots of videos and pictures and tried to sketch out a layout in the pub but after a bit of drawing i felt like i was being anti social and so i just dropped the crayon and had a catch up with some of my oldest friends.