You can learn too, so hush!

The final works that I have created, so far, for the portrait piece.

Butterflies - Anxiety, but the blue one represents the hope of getting better.

Black - When you’re brain is full of nothing and it’s hard to get yourself to do anything.

Creature - You have another little being in your brain, putting you down, and telling you to do things you don’t want to.

Thursday

I spent this day painting as it was just something I wanted to do, and I needed it as a release for some personal issues, but I made the pieces link in with mental health/illness as I have a couple of briefs at the moment that the pieces could fall in to.

Using a reference of a porcelain figure someone created, I painted a profile of a face with acrylics. Once it had been made, I decided to cut out the eye area and the top half of the page around the head shape. I was then able to make other pieces of work on separate pieces of paper to create the rest of the image - the eye and the top area - to fill in the overall image - adding eyes or other illustrations in the eye area, and filling in different things that could be ‘inside the person’s mind’ at the top of the page.

I played with various ideas, trying to represent mental illnesses in different ways that various people could related to.

Friday

This wasn't a very productive day for personal reasons, but I spent some of the day talking to people about FMP ideas, as the idea of making a comic didn’t seem appealing to me, and I don’t think it is the type of art I’d like to go in to.

Targets

-          Start work on the illustrations for my Creative Enterprise book.

-          Research depression and death in art.

Thursday

To begin the day, we had a presentation on the Quadridian, or the art of using found objects.

I spent the next part of the morning working on ideas for Britain Now – looking at statistics about mental health in Britain, now, as the theme is society and I think it’s something that everyone needs to know more about and I want to show people why this is. While looking at the information I was finding, I was thinking about what information would make a good illustration, or set of illustrations.

In the afternoon, I looked at silent book ideas again, such as what theme I could set it around – mental health, dreams, depression, fairytales, etc.

When talking to my teacher about FMP ideas in our individual tutorial time, it was suggested to me to look into a small project I had done last year as an afternoon brief – the idea was a small comic strip showing my day to day fight with the monster of ‘depression’. This has given me the idea to look more into personifying mental health, but also to look overall at mental health and illness in art and illustration.

 Friday

I spent the morning working more on the FMP idea and doing more research, such as looking into artists who show mental health in their work, or people who have tried personifying them as monsters or characters.

In the afternoon, I started planning the book layout for my creative enterprise, working out what sort of information I could add into it and roughly where I would put each piece of information in a way that it would flow together and wouldn’t look like it is jumping back and forth from one bit of information, to something else completely unrelated.

I took a break from this when I thought I had it all roughly laid out, and looked at the film/cinema exhibition brief, and started looking at Ghibli films – specifically trying to find one film to match to each of the main seven archetypes in movies, as I would like to create an illustrative piece combining the chosen seven. If I cannot find one to match each archetype, I might look instead at just the heroines in them and find something else to link some of them together for an illustration.

Targets

-          Finish creative enterprise proposal.

-          Finish looking at Ghibli movie archetypes.

Thursday

We started the day by critiquing our week long Ephemeral projects. For mine, I had looked at ephemeral work that doesn’t last for a long time, before looking at art with ephemeral themes within, a lot of which had butterflies in. I looked at pain in art as well, such as scarification, or creating art on top of scars, as, although they are not ephemeral art in themselves, the pain that caused the scars is – it juxtaposes ephemeral elements with long-lasting art.

After that, it was more working on my FMP idea, as well as starting to brainstorm and research ideas for competitions that I intend to take part in.

Throughout the afternoon, we all had small group tutorials with our year groups, just to reflect on what we are doing and how we are getting on with our ideas.

 Friday

I’d lost motivation by this day as I was starting to rethink my visual novel idea for my FMP, as I just wasn’t keen on it anymore – it would be a lot of work for one person in just a few months, with other work on top of it, and I decided I want to create a visual novel, but in my own time, without rushing it, and forming my own little group to help work on it.

In the afternoon, I talked to Richard about ways of ‘getting out there’ more as an illustrator and getting known online more – a lot of which I already know, although I was given some new websites to check out such as 99Designs.

Targets:

-          Work on a simpler art style to use for illustration competitions/work/web-comic ideas to get out there more.

-          Rethink what I want to do and come up with a new idea for next week.

Thursday

We started the day with a small talk about Ephemerality and art. We also critiqued out landscape works from the previous week, for which I looked into various types of landscape artwork, as well as looking at the movie ‘Pixels’ that mixes video games into real life, and tried some of my own experiments with Tetris blocks in place of buildings, with my final piece being a drawing on a photographic background.

In the afternoon, I looked into what sort of stories I could use for my FMP idea. I looked into urban legends, especially Japanese ones as they are particularly creepy/scary and I find them more interesting than the ones I grew up with over here, such as the killer in the backseat, and the killer with a hook for a hand, etc.

 Friday

I looked into what stories I could use for a little bit longer. Urban legends were definitely on the top of my idea list, so I was looking at some with interesting and creepy creatures. I then continued my research into visual novels, such as finding programs that I could use to make them, and more information about what they actually are.

In the afternoon, I worked on my ideas for my creative enterprise book idea, and deciding on some factors for it – or trying to while not understanding completely what I was meant to be doing until the end of the day.

 Targets:

-          Show more development in my work.

-          Ask more when I need help, sooner rather than later.

Landscape task: COMPLETE!

Thursday

The first thing we did in this session was look at a presentation on Landscape art and view examples of different types in various styles and mediums.

After this, we got given a task to create our own collage landscapes. We were asked to create a landscape, using an older landscape piece of art, and adding in something modern from today, for example, mine was a landscape with nuclear power station coolers standing to the side of the landscape and wrecking the view.

We looked at a few competitions, such as the Rushkin Prize, and John Moores Painting Prize to take part in, in the near future.

The Rushkin Prize is ‘Recording Britain Now’ and the theme this year is ‘Society’, which I already have an idea of what I might do for after spending the afternoon considering ideas – looking into depression and suicide in the UK, and the stigma around them, particularly in this country in particular for this task.

The other, John Moores Painting Prize, is more open to ideas and is more about the concept behind your piece, and the idea you use, rather than the finished piece.

After lunch, I thought about the ‘Society’ idea, as well as started to have a think about the week-long landscape task we were given – research, experiment and realise an idea involving landscapes, somehow in your own style.

 Friday

We started with a presentation about what we are going to be doing over the next term, and how the sessions are likely to play out.

I started looking into the skills I have for my FMP next year – as I want to look at illustration and video games, etc, I obviously need to know how to draw, and the sort of things people are interested in at the moment. As I am currently thinking of making some kind of visual novel, I looked online for software that would allow me to create one, and hopefully wouldn’t take too much complex coding as it is not something I’ve done before, so I am lacking in the coding knowledge.